Manon Cleary’s Loving Tribute at the Arts Club

March 13, 2013

Washington lost one of its leading artists a year ago when figurative painter Manon Cleary succumbed to the lung disease she had contracted from many years of teaching in improperly ventilated studios. Her husband F. Steven Kijek memorialized his love for her and shed light on her artistry in an Evening with Extraordinary Artist series at the Arts Club Feb. 27. Kijek spoke of the classical precision gleaned through her study of Caravaggio and went on to chronicle the various stages of her work through slide and film. As he tackles five trunks of untouched archives, he hopes to bring Manon’s art to a higher level of recognition, which will require “time, money and connections.” [gallery ids="119486,119462,119469,119476,119479" nav="thumbs"]

Kuwait National Day


The 52nd Anniversary of the National Day of the State of Kuwait was elegantly celebrated at the Four Seasons Hotel Feb. 20. The prominence of Ambassador and Mrs. Salem Al Sabah was reflected in the presence of many familiar Washington leaders in the always lengthy receiving line. Much important business is conducted after office hours and this was abundantly apparent as guests exchanged greetings while sampling the exquisite international buffet. Global delights included Peking duck, chicken and beef Shawarma, lobster ravioli, crab cakes mini cheese cakes and a chocolate fountain. Departing guests received a chocolate and nut confection to savor the evening.

Muslim Women’s Association


Mrs. Fügen Tan, wife of the Ambassador of Turkey, and Rosa Tai Djalal, president of the Muslim Women’s Association and wife of the Ambassador of Indonesia, hosted members and guests at the Embassy of Turkey Feb. 28. Several members took advantage of an optional guided tour to view “The Sultan’s Garden: The Blossoming of Ottoman Art” at the nearby Textile Museum before attending a late morning screening of “Süleiman the Magnificent,” followed by luncheon. Program chair Gamila Karjawally has the daunting responsibility of planning monthly embassy events as MWA, founded in 1960, fundraises for educational scholarships for Muslim women. Other events include the annual Muslim Women’s Bazaar and Ramadan Iftar dinners. [gallery ids="119445,119437,119466,119460,119472,119453" nav="thumbs"]

Irish Flautist James Galway Comes to the Kennedy Center


James Galway is a world traveler and a world citizen. He’s been all over and played and taught and talked about the flute in concert halls, schools, universities, and venues world-wide, but if you’re talking to him on the phone and if the name doesn’t give you a hint, you will recognize the lilt in the phone, that musical, growly accent, right away.

Galway is Irish, Belfast born, and he’s a talker, a knight, often referred to in just about anything you might find on him in the great wide internet world of communication and information as “the living legend of the flute.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” he says on the phone speaking from Dallas where he’s spending three days as part of his Legacy Tour, a musical tour and series of concerts, (often accompanied by his wife Lady Jeanne Galway, who is also a flautist of note), which mixes his vast repertoire of classical music with Celtic and Irish music, educational talk and master classes. He’s a knight, but he doesn’t stand or talk like he is. He doesn’t seem the kind of mind who needs a lot of patting on the back, or formalities.

To be sure, the tour is about his own legacy as a flautist, which is to say, he and Jean Claude Rampal before him, have done an enormous amount to spread the gospel of the flute, which is often relegated to the kind of instrument commonplace in Irish households and played on porches by just about anybody.

“It’s how I learned and came in contact with the flute, and fell in love with it, true,” he says, “but that’s not the whole story.”
It’s entirely appropriate and filled with a little touch of serendipity that Sir Galway is doing one of his Legacy Tour concerts (with his wife Lady Jeanne Galway and pianist Michael McHale) at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society in the shank of the afternoon at 4 p.m. Right after the Washington St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“Yes, that’s kind of nice isn’t it,” he said. “We’ve included a section that’s going to be Celtic in nature with traditional Irish folk songs and music.”

Appropriate to the day are the folk tunes, but appropriate to the Sir Galway’s legacy will be the major part of the concert, which includes works by Doppler (“Rigoletto Fantasie for Two Flutes” with Lady Jane Galway); Mozart (Flute Quartet in D Major”), Bizet/Borne (“Carmen Fantasy” arranged by Galway), and Debussy’s famous and popular “Clair de Lune”

In addition, he’ll be conducting a master class on the flute with local flute students at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington on Monday, March 18.

“The master classes, to me, the talking, the teaching is almost as important as performing,” Galway said. “It’s how you open people up to the music, the instrument itself. “

“My dad, my family, they all played,” he said. “It’s true, the flute seems such a common place instruments that everyone will pick one up and play one, if they could.”

But Galway got lucky and was one of those people who carried his ability with and love for the instrument to studies in London and Paris before embarking on a professional career with Sadlers Wells & Royal Covent Garden Operas, the BBC, Royal Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, and became solo flautist with the Berlin Philharmonic which was conducted by Herbert Von Karajan.

When he broke out as a soloist, it was a breakthrough in a big way and the end result has been a legend indeed, a career that has been 30 million albums sold, and a recording list that seems to stretch beyond the horizon. “When you realize what you can do with the flute—beside just play it—in terms of all the kinds of music, when I knew that, I was on my way, that’s what I was going to do,” he said.

It’s a real passion. You can hear it in his voice. If Rampal popularized the music of the flute into areas not usually associated with it, Galway moves it further with his education effort with new compositions which he has done or commissioned other composers to do. So, there’s Bach and Mozart and Handel on the flute and jazz, and new music, bending genders and cross pollination, something that’s happening quite a bit in the contemporary classical music scene, where he is more than a knight, but a king.
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A Diva and a Don Start Things Off in a Rich Washington Opera Season

March 12, 2013

Opera singers are identified by voice—as in soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass, tenor and so on, as if it’s part of their birth name—as in Soprano Patricia Racette and Soprano Angela Meade. That’s one thing both singers have in common.
Another is that Racette and Meade will open the Washington National Opera spring season—Racette beginning Saturday, May 2 in the title role of Puccini’s romantic early master work “Manon Lescaut”, Meade in the title role of Bellini’s hallmark bel canto work “Norma” beginning March 9.

One other touchstone—besides the fact that both women are shining stars in the opera firmament—is that neither knew early on that opera stardom, an opera singer’s life, would be their destiny as is more common in the world of classical music, where prodigies are the norm, not the exception.

“I think, early on, I had my heart set on becoming a cabaret or jazz singer, doing the Great American Songbook works, that kind of thing,” Racette, who grew up in New Hampshire, said. “Then along came this teacher in college, who heard me, and said, nope, you are an opera singer and that was that. I cried for a couple of days and then I set on my path.”

Meade, who is known an uncommonly beautiful natural voice, did not clearly know what she wanted to do or what gifts she had until in her late teens, growing up in Centralia, Washington State, another teacher at Centralia College, told her pretty much the same thing. “You’re an opera singer, I was told, and my immediate reaction was ‘What does that mean?’”
Obviously, both women found out what it meant and albeit possibly considered late bloomers, found their way to stardom, through different routes, paths and roles. Racette is a familiar presence as a star, with a thick resume of star turns, most notably her highly praised turn in “Madame Butterfly”. She is known for her acting ability, and the emotional clarity and detail she brings to her performances. “I think acting—the emotions, the character—are equally if not more important than voice and technique. I don’t like when technique is solely emphasis, I want to know how audiences feel, I want to make them feel. Certainly you can’t have one without the other.”

Both will find challenges and its expected fulfillment in the roles they’re taking on for the WNO spring season. “With Manon Lescaut, it’s a tricky thing,” Racette said. “The music is beautiful, but the part is a little dangerous because on the surface she’s in that line of courtesan types—Violetta in ‘La Traviata’ is a shining example, but there are others. Manon is young. She doesn’t quite know what she wants. She’s obviously attracted to the young, romantic student Des Grieux, but she’s also forced by her situation to live in the house of the much older and rich Geronte, who providers her with a lavish life style. She can be thoughtless and a little bit of a young girl interested in fine things, the material world. She is in the end a tragic heroine, and you have to make the audience see and hear that she has substance, and deep feelings of love.”
This is a first portrayal of Manon for Racette, who’s had her share of tragic as well as strong female characters in her repertoire, Mimi in “La Boheme”, Nedda in “Pagliacci”, Ellen Orford in “Peter Grimes” and the title role in “Madama Butterfly”, Violetta in “La Traviata”, She was last seen and very much heard in a powerful, passionately brave performance as “Tosca” at the Washington National Opera where she navigated the bel canto storms adeptly. At the WNO she also appeared in “Iphigenie at Taurid”, “Peter Grimes” and “Jenuva”.

Meade’s appearance as “Norma” has been highly anticipated by audiences, but it’s also a role she has wanted to perform, in terms of a challenge, in terms of the fact that “Norma” is a kind of check point when it comes to the great bel canto roles, one of which—“Anna Bolena” which she has already conquered. “I’ve done a concert version but not a production,” Meade said, “Ever since, I’ve just been dying to do the role. It’s just such a challenge and such a complicated role. There’s a lot of anger and fury here—this is a high priestess in ancient Britain who’s had a long love affair with the Roman ruler, had children with him and then he basically leaves her for a younger woman. There is a point there, yes, she resembles Medea, although maybe not quite so bad.”

There are some big shadows in the history of “Norma”, as there were in “Bolena”, Callas and Sutherland among them, speaking of high priestesses of a different sort. “You know, you can’t go into something comparing yourself to others. You’re aware of all that, but you have to do the best that you do, bring to it your own gifts and abilities.”

Meade’s rise—once she did indeed realize that she was and would be an opera singer has been nothing less than meteoric, although not necessarily typical. She entered auditions—“I always tell people who are going through this, sing something they haven’t heard before,” she said. She made her professional debut only five years ago by entering over 50 singing and vocal competitions and winning them all, the last ending with the best result. She sang on the Metropolitan Opera stage for the first time as one of the finalists (and winner) of the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and was invited to join the cast of “Ernani” as a backup. When soprano Sondra Rodvanosky became ill, Meade stepped into the role in her actual debut at the Met and was critically well received. That was some five years ago, and ever since, Meade’s ascent has been swift with critical praise, major roles like “Il Trovatore”, another “Ernani”, and “Anna Bolena” , as well as a concert version of “Norma.”

“Your life changes, that’s certain,” she said. “I haven’t sung in Europe that much, although I’ve done a few things, and there’s still so much ahead of you,” she said. “And your days and nights are always filled up. It was hard to get used to at first, there’s not much time for a kind of real life.” She and her boyfriend, who is also a singer and whom she met in Ireland last year, live in New York. “He’s a singer also, and you have to find that balance trying to spend time together with professional concerns.” She recently added the Beverly Sills Award and the Richard Tucker award to a long list of honors. More importantly, she recently went to Centralia and performed a benefit concert at Centralia College to establish a music scholarship in honor of her late mother Deborah. “That was coming home again, and you miss that a lot sometimes,” she said.

The New Yorker called her “astounding” and another critic said she could be the next great Verdi soprano. But listening to her, you hear the voice of a clear-headed, pragmatic young American woman, no frills, serious and getting accustomed to her rising fame.

Racette has been a star for some time, one of the great voices and great performers of the opera world. She’s appeared in most of the great roles, and most of the great venues—La Scala, the Opera National de Paris, the English National Opera, the Vienna Staatsoper and of course at the Met where her performances of “Madama Butterfly” and “Peter Grimes were seen in HD in movie theaters across the world as part of “The Met: Live in HD”

She has also taken as serious interest in new work, works by contemporary composers which then encourages by her presence and participation. She originated the role of Leslie Crosbie in the world premiere of “The Letter” by Paul Moravec at the Santa Fe Opera and sung the part of Robert Alden in Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy, also in Santa Fe. “We have to rejuvenate the form with new works,” she said. “You can’t just sing the same roles over and over and over.”
Several years ago, in an interview with Opera News, came out about her relationship with her partner, mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton. The two, who met in 1998, have since married in 2005. “We both share the same world, which makes things that much better. I think it was time to talk about that, and I did. “

As to her early dream of becoming a jazz and cabaret singer—well, you might want to check out her CD on GPR records called “Diva on Detour”, in which she tackles Billie Holliday, Stephen Sondheim and Broadway tunes with a rangy, gifted, sometimes earthy voice in the service of American songs, jazz and a little bluesy lilt.

Listening to Racette, you hear a voice that dives into music and moves forward with it, she sees opera, her own voice, and other musical forms as a creative mix that’s never static, alive to the possibility of the new, full of dreams undreamt as well as fulfilled, on a detour, moving straight ahead.

For details on dates, times, tickets and casts of “Manon Lescot” and “Norma” visit the Washington National Opera’s webpage](http://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=ONOSA).
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Van Cliburn: Musical Ambassador Extraordinary

March 4, 2013

At a time when the new teen music sounds of rock and roll had emerged with its own king in Elvis Presley, the classical music world produced the equivalency of a rock star in the person of pianist Van Cliburn.

The king of rock and roll did it with such songs as “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” which solidified his march to rock royalty. Van Cliburn, a curly-haired performer from Texas, did it in 1958 by sweeping to a gold medal in the Soviet Union-sponsored Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, playing Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 flawlessly and with feeling.

The victory turned a shy guy from Kilgore, Texas, who had already made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 20, into an international star at a time when the cold war was raging mightily—this was the time of Sputnik—and the Soviet Union wanted to compete with the U.S. on all fronts, including the cultural one. But stories have it that even Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev approved of the victory, asking the judges if Van Cliburn (full name Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn”) was the best. Getting an affirmative answer, Khrushchev reportedly said, “Then, give it to him.”

The victory at the age of 23 for Van Cliburn made him not only a famous American but a national hero. He made the cover of Time Magazine where he was portrayed in a white shirt and tie, emotionally sitting at the piano, his hair a thick bundle of curls. On the cover, he was described as “The Texan Who Conquered Moscow.” And he did—the people of Moscow revered him every bit as the Americans lining the streets in a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

Cliburn was in many ways described as a natural when it came to the piano and the great music of the romantics. He played the Tchaikovsky concerto if not as often as Elvis sang his greatest hits, certainly for the same reason. The concerto was his greatest hit—a recording, the first album of classic music ever recorded that sold a million copies, which put him, popularity-wise in the Elvis amen corner. His triumph in Moscow was his greatest moment.

Music writers and others—including Cliburn himself— would probably agree that he never achieved such a height again. Although he enjoyed a big recording career and performed in most of the greatest concert halls of the world to great acclaim, the quality of his playing and the music eventually declined, to the point that he withdrew from the concert stage in the mid 1970s.

Yet he never withdrew from helping to popularize classical music among young people and in the schools, both here and abroad. He led an active social life, became rich, and moved to Forth Worth, Texas, where he died this week of bone cancer. Periodically, he would make forays into concerts , always playing the Concerto. He would continue to receive honors, and made it a point to note that he had played for every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2001, and President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 2010.

While the cheering never quite stopped, it never quite sounded as loud as 55 years ago. It’s fair to guess that Cliburn understood this without rancor. While he continued to perform at recitals and concerts periodically, it was not in the spirit of that other king, trying desperately to regain his mojo in Las Vegas.

The King may still be a profitable cottage industry in the record business and at Graceland. These days and today, however, Van Cliburn is deservedly remembered as a historic figure in the world of classical music and in the world, period. He was 78. [gallery ids="101184,143159,143154" nav="thumbs"]

Performing Arts Calendar

February 28, 2013

STILL HERE,?BUT NOT FOR LONG
Here are our selections of some eclectic, shouldn’t-miss offerings now at local theaters, which will be ending their runs in March.

Metamorphoses
I hear the word amazing all the time—but here’s something that’s truly amazing—the amazing writer-director and visionary interpreter of classic stories Mary Zimmerman’s take?on ancient myths and stories based on Ovid’s classic text. You’ll laugh, weep, be astounded and moved by this production, and maybe get wet as the production is set in and around the perimeter of a large pool full of churning, emotional water and terrific actors acting out scenes from ancient myths. No intermission, at Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater through March 17.
Also at Arena Stage, and entirely different and contemporary is the applauded new play “Good People” by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire which won Best Play honors from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in its Broadway run. The production stars Johanna Day as a single mother in South Boston struggling to make ends meet, and includes Andrew Long as her long-lost boyfriend. Through March 10.

Spring Awakening
A Broadway hit musical about feverish young students in love and lust in 19th Century Germany has a rock beat, and its thumb on adolescence angst of both current and past kinds and seems a perfect play to start the Olney Theatre Center’s new 75th Anniversary season. Olney Theater artistic director Jason Loewith calls the play “effervescent, thrilling, artistically rigorous, emotionally charged and designed like nothing I’ve seen at Olney Theatre Center be- fore.” Steve Cosson directs through March 10.

The House of the Spirits
Based on the novel by famed Chilean writer Isabel Allende and directed by Jose Zayas is?a generational play in Spanish with English subtitles at the Gala Hispanic Theatre through March 10 at the National Center For the Latino Performing Arts in the Tivoli Theater in Columbia Heights.

The Convert
A powerful play about subjugation, colonialism and cultural identity and loss by the terrific young playwright Danai Gurira at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre is studied, emotionally and electrically charged, and features a powerhouse performance Nancy Moricette as a young woman struggling between competing cultures and religious beliefs. Through March 10.

Hughie
Eugene O’Neill’s late-life study of a man named “Erie” Smith searching for new meanings in his life stars Richard Schiff of “West Wing” fame in the title role and is directed?by Broadway veteran Doug Hughes through March 17 by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Lansburgh Theatre.

Henry V
William Shakespeare’s rip-roaring, grand play about power, war and politics in action as a young English king invades France. Star- ring Zach Appelman as Henry V and directed by Robert Richmond, it’s been extended at the Folger Theatre through March 10.

The ______ With the Hat
continues at the Studio Theatre, a red-hot production of Adly Guirgis’s profane, dangerous new play directed by Serge Seiden with?a top-notch cast of characters trying to make sense of their often rage-filled lives.
There’s still a chance to get a double-dose of David Mamet—the classic kind in the Round House Theatre production of “Glen- garry Glen Ross” through March 3, where you can soak up the lives of competing, desperate real estate agents, and in
“Race” at Theater J, the current controversy conscious incarnation of Mamet in a play about murder and race through 17.

Shakespeare’s R&J
In which four young students discover a forbidden copy of “Romeo and Juliet” and act it out is Signature Theatre’s first-ever in-the- round production. Directed by Joe Calarco, it runs through March 3.

Coming Up Later This Spring
Shakespeare at the Folger Theatre
Robert Richmond will direct the Folger Theatre’s production of “Twelfth Night”, one of the Bard’s most popular romantic comedies April 30-June 9. Notwithstanding the play, there’s also Shakespeare’s annual birthday celebration at the Folger Shakespeare Library April 21
The Return of “Fannie and Alexander”
“Fannie And Alexander” was probably the sunniest, most optimistic and warm movie ever made by the late and renowned director Ingmar Bergman (of “Persona”, “The Magician”,?“The Virgin Spring” and “Cries and Whispers” fame. Now it’s become a play and a part of the expansive multi-arts Nordic Cool Festival throughout the Kennedy Center through March 17. “Fannie and Alexander” reappears as a production of the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm directed by Stefan Larsson in the Eisenhower Theatre March 7-9.
Hello Dolly!
We’re having a little Thorntown Wilder?run at Ford’s Theater. “Hello, Dolly”, the super-sized hit Broadway musical courtesy?of composer Jerry Herman—and based on Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker”—will appear as a co-production with Signature Theater, with Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer, who staged a magnificent “Meet John Doe” here— taking the helm. Broadway veteran Nancy Opel stars as Dolly Levi, with Ed Gero as half-a-mil- lionaire Horace Vandergelder. March 15-May 18.?
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Concert Calendar


Wolf Trap
Helen Reddy, March 7 & 8?
Catie Curtis, March 28?
John Eaton, March 30?
A Prairie Home Companion, May 24, 25
Looking Towards Summer?
Bill Cosby, June 15?
The Temptations & The Four Tops, June 27
NSO @ Wolf Trap

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts?
Bobby McFerrin, May 13
S&R Foundation Overtures Concert Series: Ori Kam, viola,?Mar. 21
NSO Pops: Trey Anastasio / Steven Reineke, conductor?May 22
An Evening with Patti LaBelle, March 25
S&R Foundation at Evermay
Tamaki Kawakubo, Violin and Ori Kam, Viola, March 26
Yu Kosuge, Piano, April 1?
Soichi and Kaori Muraji, Guitar, May 24
Overtures Chamber Music Project: Tamaki Kawakubo and Friends, May 29

The Birchmere
Leon Redbone, March 10
George Thorogood, March 12

The Hamilton Live
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, March 3
The Rebirth Brass Band, March 6
Allen Toussaint, March 15?
The Bad Plus, April 10?
Toots and The Maytals, May 22

Strathmore
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, March 20
Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell and Richard Thompson Electric Trio, March 29
Diana Krall, April 10
Gladys Knight, April 25 & 26
Bela Fleck and The Marcus Roberts Trio, May 10

Also Coming Soon
Sweetlife Festival 2013, May 11
DC Jazz Fest, June 5-16
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Simone Dinnerstein: Precise Aim at Bach’s ‘Variations’


Listening to Simone Dinnerstein talk about her life and her music– as well as Johann Sebastian Bach, her relationship with contemporary music and collaboration with Tift Merritt–is a little like listening to her play “The Goldberg Variations.” There’s something soothing and precisely clear in how she replies to questions, explains and speaks. When you listen to Bach’s “Variations,” time seems to pass swiftly but with a valuable motion.

“The Goldberg Variations” is a composition that for classical pianists is a kind of mountain top work. It sits there waiting like a Lear or a Hamlet for actors. It’s challenging, profound, difficult, like much of Bach’s work.

“It is very soothing,” she said. “And difficult. And I came to it late, I suppose. And doing it, and making the recording the way I did at a time in my life where you wouldn’t expect it, it changed everything. So many people have done it, and I spent a lot of time listening to Glenn Gould, who is famous for playing the “Variations.” And I’ve heard a harpist play the music and a jazz musician. And I knew mine would be mine–different.”

Dinnerstein, who plays “The Goldberg Variations” presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at the Music Center at Strathmore on Sunday, Feb. 24, 7 p.m., talks about the piece in ways that reflect her place in life which seems a little odd, given that one often thinks of classical musicians as living in a rarefied world of concert halls in Berlin or New York, filled with gowns and tuxedos. Dinnerstein certainly lives in that world, although she finally arrived in it after some years of struggling to gain a foothold there, but she also lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jeremy Greensmith, an elementary school teacher at P.S. 321, and her son Adrian. Brooklyn is where she grew up with her parents the painter Simon Dimmerstein and Rachel Dinnerstein.

While performing in small venues and without the high profile she has now, she decided to take on the “Variations” about the time she became pregnant. “My husband thought I was nuts,” she said. She famously self-financed a recording, an achingly, wonderfully beautiful work on Telarc records which in a complicated but startling way skyrocketed to become the top classical recording of 2007. This was followed by “Bach: A Strange Beauty,” a live performance with the Kammerorchester Staatskapelle Berlin, which explores different aspects of Bach’s music; it includes two keyboard concerti and solo works. That CD also hit No. 1 on the Billboard classical music charts and was called “a stunning recital, engineered with tactile precision” by Grammaphone.

“Bach is remarkable because although he was very much a man of his time, his music sounds modern, contemporary, as if he were speaking to us across time,” she said. “Bach’s music seems to me to come from the ground up into the sky. He certainly speaks and spoke to me.”

Now, Dinnerstein is touring, and often, all over the world, noted for the intensity in her performances. She has become what the New Yorker Magazine called “The pianists’ pianist of Generation X.”

If you watch some of the videos available on the internet, including her own site, of her playing, you certainly see that emotional depth of feeling. But there’s also a kind of bearable lightness of being in her deftness—playing the “Variations” certainly makes you notice that one hand surely knows what the other is doing.

Dinnerstein has played in what may be called her pre-Goldberg years in small venues, universities and churches. Her familial life brings her in touch with herself in ways that many performers don’t seem to experience. In conversation, she can sound both ethereal and very grounded. She has the performance chops and the Julliard training, but there’s another quality of the life fully lived outside and away from the piano which informs her performance. It is her willingness to stretch boundaries. She grew up listening to the Beatles and Dylan as well as Gould.

She believes in collaboration, of crossing boundaries and genres. “I think sometimes going to a concert is a kind of remembered experience, restricted,” she said. “I want to change some of the boundaries of that.” Accordingly in a new program, she’s combined elements of classical music with cabaret, spoken poetry, improvisation and narration, a program she debuted last year in the West Village club, Le Poisson Rouge. She has also performed at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra which was part of her BSO debut.

In Brooklyn, she founded Neighborhood Classics, a series hosted by the New York Public School System. It launched at P.S. 321 where her son attended and where her husband teaches.

This month, will mark the release of a new album called “Night” on which Dinnerstein collaborated with the singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, with original songs by Merritt, Brad Mehldau and Patty Griffin as well as classical selections. Merritt, a highly eclectic performer who defies category, nevertheless is often thrown in with folk and country music, neither of which entirely defines her. They met after working together last year at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

(Simone Dinnerstein’s Feb. 24 concert at Strathmore will have no intermission and no late seating.)

Wooly Mammoth’s ‘The Convert’: Culture Clash and Mixed Loyalties


When it comes to “The Convert,” a breadth- and breath-taking play about the clash and loss of culture by Danai Gurira, it’s hard to say who was more courageous in this undertaking. Is it Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s artistic director Howard Shalwitz for taking on this three-hour-with-two-intermissions play about the seemingly long-ago (1895) and very distant colonization of what is now Zimbabwe in southern Africa or playwright Gurira for her ambitious, respectful and emotionally detailed play?

But then Woolly Mammoth and Shalwitz are known for their risk-taking enterprises. It is not entirely a surprise to find “The Convert” there or Gurira’s work, either. Two of the works of the playwright, who was born in the United States and grew up in Zimbabwe, have already been staged at Woolly—the searing “In the Continuum” about two women with AIDs in which she acted and for which she won a Helen Hayes and Obie Award and “Eclipsed” about the captive women surrounding an African warlord.

Still, “The Convert” is no small undertaking. In exploring with heartfelt intelligence the effects of British conquest on tribal and native culture, Gurira has chosen to leave any British or white presence out of the play, except as topics and points of at turns conversation, arguments, anger, rage and frustration. The British are never present but ever-present as the English, the masters, the whites, the white man or tribal slang words for blacks trying to be white.

The characters in “The Convert” are all from Rhodesian tribes of the period, the Ndebele and Shona, and they’re all dealing with questions of identity, conquest, allegiance to the old and curiosity about the new, especially Christianity, and , in particular here, Catholicism. You have Chilford, a young would-be-priest who now runs a Catholic church, trying to convert his friends and acquaintances, educated, devout and vehemently contemptuous of the old ways that include ancestor worship. His housekeeper Mai Tamba brings her niece Jekesai into his care, to keep her from an avaricious uncle who wants to marry the young girl of to a rich man in exchange for goats.

When we first see her, Jekesai is half naked, thoroughly a village girl. She has a presence that only grows through the course of the play—she takes to “conversion” with all the passion of a newbie, loving Jesus, converting others.

She is surrounded not only by Chilford, who wants to become a real priest with a parish of his own, and whom she continuously addresses as “Mastah,” but also by his friends Chancellor, a businessman and dandy who’s taken up the white man’s way with Wildean flair, and his fiancée, the unbuttoned, smart, and ill-named Prudence, who speaks the King’s English better than the king. There is also Tamba, a friend from Jekesai’s bridal days. Jekesai seems often to be straddling a line. She seems to love the sermon-based theology, the possibility of a better future and for sure not having to marry old men with goats, but she misses her mother, her childhood, the reassuring and ghostly presence of ancestors.

The playwright takes her time with all these persons. She unravels them before they unravel under the tension of a devastating uprising where loyalties are tested and violence descends on their lives—and the roles of master and servant, the British and the whites, are revealed for what they are.

The audience is pulled every which way—and I don’t think just skin color will sway you towards love or resentment or passion for individual character. Clearly, Gurira has invested her heart and mind in Ester and just as clearly Nancy Moricette as Ester has invested a magnetic force into her acting—she commands the stage even when others are marching across it, or when she’s not present. She’s the tipping point in this play: where she goes the play goes and in Moricette you have a formidable talent.

Not that Dawn Ursula doesn’t give Moricette a run for her money as Prudence. Ursula brings Shavian spark to her role, a bitter sarcasm invades her lines. She’s beautiful, but for her it’s not enough to subsist on her beauty or charm, because she lives not only in a man’s world, but in a white man’s world on top of that. You see also that the women dominate the play, Starla Benford as Mai Tamba precipitates the action with her pleading, her fussiness, her thinly disguised contempt for the religion she pretends to embrace. The men—especially Alvin Keith as the often snarling and effete Chancellor shows his contempt not only for the rulers, but the ruled, and women in general giving new meaning to conflict in a character that’s often also immensely appealing.

You might have hoped that this play would be not quite so extreme in length, but it’s hard to figure what you could drop or throw out. The situation bears some explaining, given that Cecil Rhodes—unless you’re a history buff—is hardly a household name any more. Nor are the baleful stories of tribal subjugations of the South African region by the British and the Boers a part of everyday conversation.

You don’t have to know a lot of history here—some helps—but you do have to be able to recognize a powerful beating human heart in the character of Jekesai.

“The Convert” runs at the Woolly Mammoth through March 10.