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Friday, January 14, 2005
A King Celebration Concert
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A King Celebration Concert.” The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with the Glee Clubs of Morehouse and Spelman colleges. Thursday at Morehouse’s King International Chapel.
The concert will be broadcast on the King Holiday on WSJP-FM (88.1) at 9 a.m. and on WABE-FM (90.1) at 8 p.m.
Concert Review
The ASO’s “A King Celebration Concert,” a musical tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., is a unique event in America: a major orchestra playing serious African-American and civil rights-related repertoire in honor of the music-loving hero.
At Morehouse College’s King International Chapel, the ASO concert attracts a splendidly diverse audience — in terms of race, age, economics. Taped by National Public Radio and broadcast on the King Holiday, the show also typically provides the ASO with its largest listening audience all year.
Now in its 13th year, the event Thursday began, as these things must, with a slew of self-aggrandizing speeches. Leaders from the ASO, NPR, Morehouse and Spelman colleges, the Atlanta city council — I might have left a few out — all took a turn at the podium, lest anyone forget their contribution to this noble and selfless cause. Although these sorts of opening acts can smother the mood of a show before it starts, the audience was good-natured. We humored these people with polite applause.
Then affable NPR host Fred Child got the recorders rolling, introduced conductor Robert Spano, and the music started. First up was a rarity: the overture to Scott Joplin’s long-lost 1910 opera, “Treemonisha.”
Joplin embedded the New World sounds of ragtime and the tunes from old spirituals in a European framework. As orchestrated (in 1972) by T.J. Anderson, the music had the swooning character of a Liszt tone poem. Mysteriously, the music’s character seems to come with a ghostly air, like looking at a photograph so faded the forms are clear but the faces are barely recognizable.
Leonard Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony is an under-rated, youthful work from 1942. Here the composer borrows musical vocabulary from Shostakovich and the New Deal Americana of Copland. One suspects the music’s world-weariness is borrowed, too, although in Spano’s intense reading, the gravitas seemed genuine. Theresa Hamm-Smith, a light lyric soprano, delivered the Hebrew texts in the final movement.
William Grant Still’s “Afro-American Symphony,” of 1930, prefigures Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” — the saucy muted trumpet, the bluesy call-and-response, the snappy dance-rhythm melodies — all wrapped in tidy classical symphonic form. The zippy, I-got-rhythm scherzo is a treat. It’s all agreeable music in an American vernacular, without much emotion.
Next came the most weirdly interesting piece I’ve heard in a long time: Frederick C. Tillis’ “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,” music that was commissioned in 1985 for the ASO and the Morehouse and Spelman glee clubs, who sang it again Thursday.
Radio host Child called it “a free set of variations.” The orchestra begins with edgy and angular sounds, then the chorus jumps in from the opposite direction, like they’re singing the spiritual as a perky campfire song. Then the orchestra goes alone again, darker and more Ivesian; then the happy-happy chorus, singing with a do-gooder’s sense of can-do. Creepy orchestra, ready to commit violence. Cheery chorus. Back and forth. A fugue breaks out to unify them, somewhat, and it streaks to the finish line. This was a piece that raised far more questions than it was prepared to answer.
For the concert’s grand finale, Coretta Scott King came on stage to read the text of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” She then slipped away and the orchestra and glee clubs took up the music directly. In Roland Carter’s arrangement, it sounded low-brass heavy, bombastic and Victorian, like choral music by Vaughan Williams. This one piece covered most of the bases of the concert — King in spirit and, via his wife, in body; diverse musical traditions; and a competitive desire to shout the loudest in honor of the King legacy.
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Essential Theatre’s ‘Miss Macbeth’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “Miss Macbeth.” Through Jan. 23
Atlanta writer Karen Wurl delivers a doozy of a backstage farce in "Miss Macbeth," in which thespian motives and manners are ridiculed with comic brio.
As college professor Susan (Sarah Falkenburg) tells her class about her glory days in a German experimentalist production of "Macbeth," the play unspools as a sequence of flashbacks in which the unsuspecting young actress finds herself involved in a series of bloody mishaps.
Seems that Susan was originally cast as Lady Macduff in the famous Werner Hagen's legendary production --- until her perverted boyfriend Robert (Jeff Feldman) announces that he wants to sleep with the actress playing the vixenish and controlling Lady M.
Before Susan can say, "Out, out, damned spot," she's entrapped in a hysterical turn of events including intentional and unintentional stabbings, ghostly visitations and broadly comic "Noises Off"-style shenanigans.
Director David Crowe keeps the 12-member cast suspended in a state of ridiculousness throughout the hourlong one-act, the winner of Essential Theatre's annual playwriting award for a Georgia writer. And Wurl gets great comedic payoff in the persons of Werner (Michael Shikany) and his assistant Claudia (Johanna Linden).
Since Werner barely speaks English, Claudia, in black leather pants and quirky frames, must translate. When their "Macbeth" makes headlines, she handles the news photographer with the timing of a fashion model: click.
As always, Feldman is deliciously evil. And Falkenburg, who's rarely offstage, is terrific as the wonderfully rattled, poker-faced supporting-player-turned-star.
Peter Hardy's Essential Theatre, which pops up once a year to do a festival of new plays, is staging the Atlanta premiere of Sam Shepard's "The Late Henry Moss" and Lee Blessing's "Going to St. Ives" in repertory with "Miss Macbeth."
"Miss Macbeth" probably deserves a stronger supporting cast and a slight trim. But in the presence of such tall company as Shepard and Blessing, Wurl holds her own. With its delirious pace, campy shtick and fake blood, "Miss Macbeth" is a delightful laugh-bath.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday and Wednesday; 3 p.m. Jan. 22; 7 p.m. Jan. 23. $15-$20. Part of 2005 Essential Theatre Festival, 7 Stages, Back Stage, 1105 Euclid Ave. N.E., Atlanta. 404-523-7647. Tickets: www.7stages.org. Info: www.essentialtheatre.com
