Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

-Most worthwhile efforts have small beginnings, and this is also true for the Embassy Series, the unique musical events put together every year by its director, Jerome Barry, now in its 17th season.

Barry began his series of concerts/receptions at Washington embassies, ambassador’s residences and occasionally cultural centers with a core spirit. Many early offerings were held at European embassies like the Embassy of Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany.

The cultural core of the early concerts was the music of what may be Europe’s greatest cultural contribution to the world—a kind of library of great 18th and 19th century composers from Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, the Strausses, Haydn and others whose compositions amount to the great and lasting saving grace of the German-speaking nations and peoples of the continent.

With them came the pianists, the violinist, the quartets and ensembles and trios, the flautists and cello players, the young as well as the world-renowned to play the works of European geniuses in settings and atmospheres unique to the music. Recitals, solo performances, sonatas, the E-minors and B majors, and all the technical bravura and skills are all important here. They are the missals for the body of European music’s masses and scriptures.

Over time, the Embassy series concerts have expanded into the wide and wider reaches of the world, embracing the rest of Europe, Russia, the Slavic countries, Latin America and the Middle East. With its acceptance came a wider scope of music with different sounds, emphases and instruments, which sprung from the fountain of different cultures and traditions.

But the Series always returns to the great composers, the great wellspring of European music, and even now such concerts are unique in and of themselves.

In that sense, the recent appearance of Till Fellner, the rising-star pianist, at the Embassy of Austria was so illustrative of the performance of classical music that is really classical beyond the music.

Fellner came to Washington to conclude his project of playing the complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas—all 32 of them—on a journey that included New York, Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris and, appropriately, Vienna, where Fellner was born and which is home to a gilded, triumphant musical reputation and aura.

On the Sunday afternoon of his performance before a sold-out audience, Fellner completed the cycle by playing Sonata 30 E major, op. 109, Sonata 31 a flat major, op. 110 and Sonata 32, C minor, op. 111. The numbers, of course, tell you absolutely nothing unless you are an aficionado of Beethoven’s sonatas, or know your way around the little manifestos that describe how a piece will be played as in (for No. 32): Maestoso—Allegro con brio ed appassianata Arrietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile.

This is not meant to be even remotely a critical piece, which, in any case, this writer isn’t qualified to do. But I’m pretty good on history, setting, atmosphere, feeling and response. And I know a super-star when I hear one—here I mean Beethoven—and a budding super star when I see one. The Sonatas Fellner played are works from 1820-1822, and music history suggests that they were meant to be of a piece.

Fellner performs, behaves, and plays like a man dealing with a masterpiece. This is not just a question of technique, but a kind of presence, where the artists become a priest –my fingers to God—who is inspired and inspiring to listen to. All great pieces of art, and perhaps most especially of music, have a religious quality to them even if composed, written and created by agnostics or atheists. They are offerings meant to penetrate the great void and give it density, nuance, glory, suppleness, a kind of knowing. They are like sacrificial smoke rising up in swirls. The Sonatas do that like King Lear’s lament, Rembrandt’s touch of light.

Great musicians, always in their own ways, behave accordingly. There is a ritual involved, and a pact with audience and player. Unlike music and performances from other areas of the world, which have aspects of naked emotion and celebration in them, a kind of intense sociability, concerts like this one require, and always have, a certain embrace of stillness. The object is not to clap your hands, but to sit on them, or to stroke your mustache or listen intently with your eyes and heart. A performance such as this calls to action that part of the brain that can hear a lapse in technique, a missed key, or the buzz of a fly two blocks away.

In a sense, concerts like these are indeed like being in church. It’s smoke and incense and faith and appreciation; apt enough since much of European composition begins with church and ended up there too.

Felnner has the requisites of a star player. He knows it’s not enough to wear a black tuxedo to the chair. You have to spread out the tails in a certain way. You must every now and then, with a shake of the head and a wave of the fingers coming up from the keys, add human drama to the notes. At 39, he maintains those boyish good looks that seem to be built into the genes of future pianists, so that when he bows, it is a polite but not quite humble act.

No need for humility, in any case. Playing the last three sonatas seemed not just a climax to a personal musical journey, but a journey in and of itself where movements soar, tremble, and achieve a grand serenity in the end.

Gary Tischler •

-Even if she hadn’t announced herself, the voice on the phone, a little whispery, a little dramatic, not as strong as in some other years, was still instantly recognizable. “Hello,” the voice says. “This is Tammy Grimes.”

Of course it was. Tammy Grimes, the legend.

She came to Washington for a concert as part of Barbara Cook’s “In the Spotlight Series” on cabaret singers; a category which seems almost whimsically focused to define Grimes. Cabaret singers are by and large original in such a way that they can be compared to no one else.

As she was in the 1980s when we talked to her in the midst of a concert gig at the now defunct Charley’s, a tony, jazzy, New Yorkish night club on K Street in Georgetown, Grimes is in the Duke Ellington mold: beyond category.

And probably by now, so thickly is she held in the affections of New Yorkers and by people who care more than they should about Broadway lore and stories, she’s also probably beyond criticism. She continues, in her mid-seventies, to fiddle around the edges of her creation, that is, her story and herself.

“Well, I’ll be singing songs by Tom Waits, Jimmy Buffett…” she said almost blithely, as if they might be the standard repertoire for a woman who rose to become a Broadway star for decidedly un-Buffett, un-Waits-like material.

But then again, maybe not. If Grimes repeats anything a lot, it is a simple thing. “I like songs that tell stories,” she says to me on the phone, and again to us in the audience of the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The story she tells, of course, is her story, and so a concert like this, and others written about New York, are about her. They are familiar stories, and the songs are pertinent to them; about two ex-husbands, two Tonys (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “Private Lives”), about Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Truman Capote, about loss and love, family and children, theater openings, parts made her own and parts she never got.

Hence, “Moon River.” She tells me the story over the phone, and it’s like we’re just talking. There was the time that, ”Truman Capote–we were friends–said that he’d written “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with me in mind. He saw me as Holly Golightly, and he promised that he would get me the part in the film. And of course, Audrey Hepburn got it.” And on the phone it’s a matter of fact telling, a good story, with no hard feelings or regret in it, because those things happen and Truman is Truman and that sort of thing not said, but implied. On stage, she tells the same story, but here it becomes a no-regrets bridge, a way to launch into her anthem, “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” the Meredith Wilson musical about a particularly defiant survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.

For sure, Grimes is a legend, but it’s hard to say exactly what kind of legend. Noel Coward discovered her after her hearing her sing. he had dinner once with the shy Cole Porter, whose “The Oyster Song” she makes a hugely enjoyable enterprise in performance. “We were both shy, I think,” she said. “We spent the whole dinner not saying a word.”

Imagine that. She has plenty to say, of course, and more to sing. She talks about her ex-husband Christopher Plummer, the grand actor, “a beautiful man.” “He still is and now we get along just fine,” she said. “And we had our beautiful daughter, Amanda. Honey, if you’re listening anywhere, please call home.”

The higher registers of her voice are something of a tremulous adventure now, but the lower range is alive with danger, feeling and unpredictable adventure. She sits most of the time now during her concerts, although she will walk to the mike and grab it forcefully. And she sings “The Pirate Song” from Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera” and kills it. The song has all the vengeful menace that it offers up.

Sometimes you suspect people haven’t always known what to do with Tammy Grimes. She’s made a number of mostly forgettable films and done all sorts of unruly television work including her own brief show.

But it’s Broadway and New York that are the stars in her crown, where the cheering still goes on as it does with the Terrace Theater audience, as well as at the Metropolitan Room. Walter Kerr, a legendary drama critic, flat out said, after seeing her as Molly Brown, “She is a genius.” The question is: what kind of genius?

Listening to her sing-tell Waits’ “Martha,” or Buffett’s “He Went to Paris,” or “You Better Love Me While You May,” you pick up on her strength more than the fragility, and the tremendous loss the death of her husband, the composer/arranger Richard Bell must have been. She doesn’t hide it. She merely swings into “You Gotta Ring Them Bells” or something similarly fist-clenched and forward-moving.

For me, and I suspect for New Yorkers who have heard and seen her at the Metropolitan Room, she’s an urban unicorn, a legend for whom, when they appear, the slate is always clean and the stories always rich.

Grimes is the kind of performer who is a reminder that you don’t go to the theater or the cabaret to forget.
You go to remember. And Tammy Grimes, while she may forget a lyric here or there, has a rich store of memories and music.

She came back with everyone standing up clapping for an encore: “I’m going to sing ‘The Rose.’” I heard her sing that song on a wintry night in Charley’s, snow on the ground. Bad news in the news like today. She pushed up the rose and made you remember.

Gary Tischler •

-Up close, the guys who play the lead roles of Berger and Claude in the dynamic revival of “Hair,” now at the Kennedy Center through November 21, look very much like a couple of contemporary young men: relaxed, casually attractive, youthful males of the 21st Century. Mind you, their phone doesn’t go off and they’re not carrying a laptop, but they could pass.

But they’re a couple of something else’s too. Their names, look, and reason for being here identify them beyond doubt as members of the theater and performance tribe. Still, they’re also in another tribe: the large group of young actors, singers, dancers, performers who bring the emblematic musical of the hippie generation alive with such authenticity that you can’t miss getting a contact high.

Both have names that sound perfect for the theater, B movies, opera or a biker gang. And we’re talking about their real names: Steel Burkhardt, he of the thick, longish, deep black hair who plays the rowdy, can’t-tie-me-down leader of the “Hair” tribe, and Paris Remillard, who plays the sweet, doomed Claude.

21st century guys they are—guys who weren’t even born when “Hair” splashed onto Broadway and stages around the country, revolutionizing yet again the musical theater form and signaling the mainstream arrival of hippies, Aquarians, and the antiestablishment, disaffected, rock-and-rolling, dope-smoking, free-loving, biracial and multi-ethnic generation of young people.

Burkhardt and Remillard are members in good standing of the generation to whom the Internet, Facebook and texting are second nature.

“Sure, it’s very different, but I think most of us have gotten into the show and the characters,” Burkhardt, who was a serious music student at Baldwin Wallace in Ohio, said. “I think sometimes you get more affinity for how they lived than how we live. They had to connect to each other. They didn’t send e-mails, they didn’t hide, and they were out there.”

“You have to have a lot of sympathy for Claude,” Remillard said. “I don’t have any problem understanding him or the rest of the tribe. They lived in a different time, but they’re pretty real to me. And the music is pretty cool.”

Both of them auditioned to be a part of the show, started in the background, and moved on up, eventually garnering the main roles for the tour. “This is about family,” Burkhardt said. “We all share in it. On the road, that’s what we are: family. A big family.”

Both of them understand the dilemma and the urges of their characters. “This was Viet Nam,” Remillard said. “Guys were having to deal with getting drafted, going to Viet Nam, getting killed. They didn’t have a choice. We don’t have a draft today, so I don’t think a lot of guys our age or younger understand what’s involved in something like that.”

“My dad was a marine,” Remillard said. “He understands. And my parents really support me in this. My dad doesn’t necessarily have knee-jerk reactions to things. He said that if there were a draft and I had gotten drafted, he would have helped me get to Canada.”

The two are obvious friends and have an easy banter between each other. Listen to them talk about music, about the special feeling that exists with each and every performance. “I don’t think my folks were part of all that,” Burkhardt said. “But I think they’re sort of hippie wannabees.”

“Do I ever get bored?” Burkhardt says. “Are you kidding me? There’s no way. Every night is like a fresh start, new audience, and new atmosphere. And we get out there a lot, you know, we interact, and it’s pretty spontaneous. You never know what kind of reaction you’re going to get. And then there’s the stuff at the end of the show when people can go on the stage and join in. I’m always surprised how many people do, and how exciting that is. I don’t know, it’s a celebration. And when I get face-to-face with people in the audience, it’s always different.”

Burkhardt is easily the charisma guy of the bunch with his energy, his looks, that bad boy rep of the character. You’d think he gets a lot of attention from fans. “Naw,” he says. “Not at the moment.”

Remillard laughs. “He gets a lot of attention,” he says

There is also the tradition of the show that cast members—some, most, sometimes all—get naked near the conclusion of the first act. “Nobody has to do it,” Remillard said.

“Yeah,” Burkhardt said, “but when we first joined the cast, it was at Lincoln Center and it was supposed to be a limited run, and finally I thought, what the hell, I may never get the chance to do it, so I did it and you know, it was kinda fun. It’s liberating.”

They’ve toured England, and new and local cast members joined the cast, and everybody’s betting when they get naked. And they proceeded to talk about Irish and Scottish male and female performers in a sweetly crass way.

Remillard doesn’t have long hair—he looks a distance from being a hippie—but he has an affinity for Claude and the tribe. “You know, it’s not that far removed. We live differently. We don’t have that kind of personal contact that the people in the show do.”

There’s a bit on YouTube if you Google their names—it’s an informal rendition with audience by the two of them in street clothes, singing “Hair.” They jump, they dance, they run, they shake their HAIR! Like crazy people full of glee, goofin’ but stirring nonetheless.

Glee. There’s a thought. The music of Hair, starring two 21st century guys named Paris and Stone doing Claude and Berger.

Gary Tischler •

-One thing you can say about jazz, even if you don’t know a heck of a lot about jazz: it’s not static.

“You have to move on and keep on becoming who you are as a person, as a musician, and in terms of the kind of music you’re playing,” says Ravi Coltrane, the highly regarded saxophonist who comes with his quartet to the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington, November 20 at 8 p.m.

Coltrane knows a little something about that, which is why he’s been steadily carving out his own sound, his own music. Most recently, he’s signed on with Blue Note Records, with an album coming out next year, a legendary label that celebrated its 70th anniversary last year. To further the connection, in 2008 he became a part of The Blue Not 7, a septet formed specifically for the anniversary celebration.

Lots of lines—personal, musical, and legend, crisscross the life of tenor and soprano sax player Ravi Coltrane.

He has a pretty clear idea of who he is, and isn’t. “I’m not my dad,” he said. “I appreciate and revere my father’s work, but you have to carve your own image, your own style. And sure, there are influences. But I don’t think I came to this because I’m my father’s son.”

He’ll tell you that he didn’t start out being interested in jazz. “I played the flute in school, I was in the band,” he said. “And initially, I was interested in composing film scores, that kind of thing. So I did not come to jazz out of the chute, so to speak.”

And yet, lineage, legend, and the naming of names, working out a kind of apprenticeship in an age where jazz has changed tremendously, play out in a man’s life.

Coltrane, now in his 40s, is, after all, the son of the jazz giant John Coltrane, who also played tenor and soprano saxophone. And the saxophone itself is the instrument of choice of the some of the most dramatic tortured genius-types in jazz history, most prominently Charlie Parker, the late and lamented king of improvisational jazz—the often lyrical free-flying “Bird”.

“I was two when my father died,” Coltrane said. “It’s not like he figures so strongly in personal memory. The difficulty becomes in being your own man while loving my dad’s music. No doubt it’s had some effect.”

The saxophone first appeared in his life as a Christmas gift. It wasn’t exactly a hint, but there it was, and eventually he took it up. “I don’t think it was something that was meant to push me into a certain direction,” he said. For him, it was like finding money in the road. You can pick it up, but you choose how you use it and spend it.

If you look at his bio, the story begins in 1991. His active jazz career begins at age 26, a late start by some standards. But when you’re the son of a legend whose memory is still strong, and whose music is still around, and when you have a mother equally gifted and legendary—the great jazz pianist Alice Coltrane—and when you’re named after Ravi Shankar, the influential Indian Sitar player, there are no doubt some pressures to find your own way.

He did it by paying his dues, playing as a sideman with the likes of McCoy Tyner, Pharaoh Sanders, Kenny Barron, Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke, Branford Marsalis, Geri Allen and others. By 1997, he was ready to go on his own, recording his first album, “Moving Pictures.” He built several groups, but since 2005 he has worked with is quartet, with bassist Drew Gress, pianist Luis Perdomo and drummer E.J. Strickland.

A 2005 concert trip to India to raise HIV awareness seemed almost a homecoming. He eventually met his namesake.

“Jazz has changed,” he says. “The audience is bigger, but also more diverse. There are all kinds of new influences, from Latin to Asian, and jazz has really spread. But the result has been that there are not quite the dominating, influential figures like Monk, Miles, Satchmo, Parker and so on. It’s a whole new world in some ways.”

He’s part of the vanguard of that new world, not the old guard, in spite of all the history that trails behind him, always evolving, moving on ahead, playing his music, expanding its horizons, improvising and energizing.

Gary Tischler •

-That mother-ship construction project people have been noting at the site of the old Arena Stage near the Southwest waterfront is finally set to open its pearly gates to the public. After two and a half years of construction, Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater will have a ribbon cutting ceremony and Homecoming Grand Opening Celebration on Saturday, October 23, lasting almost all day long from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Arena will showcase the celebration at the Mead Center with performances and activities staged in multiple venues. Live theatrical performances, children’s activities and other events will occur in the Fichandler Stage, the Kreeger Theater and the Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle as well as an outdoor stage, a rehearsal hall, the lobby and a classroom.

The celebration will also showcase the Mead’s café, operated by Jose Andres Catering along with Ridgewell’s.

Be on the look for these offerings: slam poetry, the “Glee” Battle of the choirs, jazz bands and a performance by the cast of “Oklahoma,” the musical slated to kick off the new season. Tickets are free but are require for the events. Tickets will be available exclusively online beginning October 8. They may be reserved at www.arenastage.org.

There will also be a Gala Celebration held on October 25th to commemorate the inaugural season. As indicated, the season kicks off with Molly Smith’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” on October 22nd.