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Thursday, March 24, 2005
‘Petrouchka’ and more from ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Conductor Charles Dutoit brings the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to its peak of performance. He does this more convincingly, more thoroughly, than all other conductors I’ve heard in Symphony Hall in more than four seasons of weekly listening.
The Swiss maestro, former chief of the Montreal Symphony, has a two-week ASO residency. Last weekend, with illuminating results, he led the orchestra and chorus in Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust.”
He did it again Thursday, this time with a balanced program connecting three famously perfect pieces of music, each flawless in its own way, each holding a connection to carnivals — those joyous street fairs that, curtain pulled back, reveal all sorts of wonderfully sinister characters.
Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”) began the evening. A showpiece of sumptuous Technicolor orchestrations, Spanish rhythms and tightly controlled burlesque, the music under Dutoit’s baton sounded rather louche and breathy. This made it even more fun to hear than usual. The interpretation was fully realized by the musicians, even if their coordination wasn’t yet tight.
In Mozart’s late Symphony No. 39, Dutoit drew a gorgeous shimmer from the violins that one doesn’t often hear. He highlighted the minuet’s merry-go-round section such that it seemed to prefigure Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrouchka,” the work that closed the concert.
No program scenario was needed for Dutoit’s clearly delineated, theatrical and weighty reading of “Petrouchka,” in the composer’s 1947 revision, where a trio of marionettes comes to life and falls into a sordid (and tragic) love triangle.
When we first met the floppy, hapless hero — a low, moist honk on the contrabassoon, played by Juan de Gomar — the audience laughed. Through music alone, they got the picture. Flutist Christina Smith twittered and pirouetted as Petrouchka’s love object, the Ballerina. Pianist Peter Marshall, trumpet player Christopher Martin and a half dozen others enlivened the scene with supple, well-turned phrasing. In short, the musicians here were playing at their musical best.
The ASO players say that Dutoit rehearses them more efficiently than most of his conductorial colleagues. With a keen ear and no wasted motions, he can thus go deeper into the score with fewer loose ends. He gets the technical details aligned with his musical ideas, a powerful combination.
This week and last, the ASO seemed more relaxed, more alert and — the musicians’ highest compliment — working harder than ever to please him. In addition to his musical gifts, Dutoit gets credit as a master of group psychology. It’s exactly what the ASO needs at this stage of its march toward top-tier status. Can we bring Dutoit, or other senior maestros, back soon?
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
Wilson’s ‘Piano Lesson’ at Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 THEATER REVIEW: “The Piano Lesson.” Through April 24.
August Wilson has said that his play “The Piano Lesson” was inspired by Romare Bearden’s 1983 collage of the same name. Painting drama from a palette of super-saturated colors, Wilson is himself a collagist —- and a jazz improviser.
His characters riff and repeat. His supernatural visitations explode with unexplained energy and electricity. And his stories are just as likely to end in violent crescendos as they are in uplifting grace notes.
All this is manifest in Theatre in the Square’s production of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, which coincides with a Bearden exhibit at the High Museum that happens to include “Piano Lesson.” Director Gary Yates and his well-tuned ensemble deliver a funny and provocative production that meditates on issues that have haunted and complicated the lives of African-Americans since slavery.
This ’30s installment of Wilson’s decade-by-decade chronicle of the black experience is essentially about the tug of war between Berniece Charles (Carol Mitchell-Leon) and her brother Boy Willie (Geoffrey D. Williams), who wants to sell the family’s heirloom piano so he can buy a farm.
But Berniece, who is both strident and lovelorn, is not about to let him hoist the instrument out of her uncle’s Pittsburgh home, where Boy Willie has landed with his friend Lymon (Neal Hazard) and a truckload of watermelons. After all, their ancestors were traded for the piano. Their father was killed in a botched attempt to steal it back. And their grieving mother “rubbed it and polished it and bled over it.”
Complicating matters further is the fact that the ghost of slave master Sutter has come to reclaim the piano, too. In Rochelle Barker’s marvelously detailed, sepia-toned set, picture frames suddenly turn askance, lights flicker, and the Charles family threatens to implode.
As in every Wilson play, visitors drop in and out of the picture, to great comic effect.
There’s straight-man Doaker (Rob Cleveland), the family’s uncle and cook, and Avery (LaParee Young), the preacher who’s smitten with Berniece. (Or maybe he just wants to get his hands on that piano.) There’s fast-talking peddler Winning Boy (J. Michael), who unloads his wares on dimwitted Lymon. And there’s Boy Willie’s floozy friend, Grace (Crystal Dickinson), who’s none too thrilled that the only furniture at their disposal is a couch.
Making his stage debut, Michael, who doubles as music director, pulls the comedic punches as adroitly as he bangs the piano. Though sometimes louder than necessary, Williams is an appropriately obnoxious Boy Willie.
But it’s Mitchell-Leon who musters a powerhouse performance as the story’s moral pillar. When Berniece’s brother threatens to sell the family legacy and symbol of its suffering, her pride and strength erupt in a maelstrom of rage and fury, and she whips him with a kitchen rag.
At nearly three hours, “The Piano Lesson” is long-winded, and you must pay careful attention to understand the family’s complex history. Though some of the ghostly special effects felt a little clunky on opening night, the play ultimately finds the musicality and rhythm of Wilson’s poetry. Soaked in blues and splashed with red-hot passion, “The Piano Lesson” is a powerful, painterly song of a play.
THE VERDICT: Well-tuned.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays- Saturdays; 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays (no 7 p.m. show April 24). Also, 11 a.m. April 13 and 20; 2:30 p.m. April 7. Through April 24. $18-$32. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369. www.theatreinthesquare.com.
