Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

The performing arts—all of them-are all about music, movements and moments that add up to magic.
In our second fall prevue, we offer selective looks at the offerings on our varied stages, and venues in the realm of opera, dance, music of all sorts, as well as a rich series of spoken word events, discussions, talks, readings in prose and poetry.

Sondra Radvanovsky, the great American soprano, talks about her title role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena”, which opens the Washington Opera season, followed by Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”.

Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre talks about the company’s season opener, just in time for Halloween, of “Dracula”. We’ll look at the annual Dance Velocity events, and upcoming offerings from the Washington Peforming Arts Society, and we’ll have a sampling of Washington’s musical offerings, from the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, to the Embassy Series, to the star-studded concert celebrating America’s legendary folk and people’s music man Woody Guthrie. We’ll talk about the various voices on stage, including David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz and Frank Rich and Billy Collins at the Music Center at Strathmore, and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Threthewey at the Library of Congress, giving her inaugural reading.

The picture, we think, ends up being a mosaic of the richness of Washington’s cultural offerings in the performance arts, and in the visual arts.

Click here for the following article on performance: Radvanovsky Takes on the Star-crossed ‘Anna Bolena’

Click here for the following article on performance: A Diva and a Don Start Things Off in a Rich Washington Opera Season

Click here for the following article on performance:Dance, Dance, Dance

Click here for the following article on performance: Music, Music, Music and More Music

Click here for the following article on performance: Readings and Conversations, from Strathmore to Folger
[gallery ids="100961,130757" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Washington Area Concierge Association (WACA) held its 20th Annual Charity Gala “Sunglasses at Night” at the Hamilton on Aug. 26. Black and white sunglasses courtesy of the National Aquarium awaited guests. The evening featured a silent auction with plenty of hotel and restaurant temptations. Radio personality Tommy McFly emceed and introduced Arlington native Amy Wilcox and her Nashville band. WACA is donating the evening’s proceeds to The John B. Campbell Hospitality Scholarship, Les Clefs d’Or and Les Clefs d’Or Foundation and The Capital Area Food Bank. [gallery ids="100957,130738,130731,130703,130726,130720,130712" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Well, we’ll be doing the songs I’ve done over the years, from the beginning until now. We’ll mix it up a little, but they’ll be songs people know, “ Emmylou Harris said in a phone interview about her upcoming August 15 concert at Wolf Trap in a matched set with singer-song writer John Prine, another enduring voice.

The songs—could be the matchless “Boulder to Birmingham,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him” or songs from her last and perhaps most intimate album, “Hard Bargains,” for which Harris wrote almost all of the songs. Could be something like “Pancho and Lefty” or the achingly familiar “One of These Days.” Lots to choose from in a 40-year-career.

Her voice over the phone is matter-of-fact elusive, due to a weak connection, but the accumulated stuff is pretty clear—it’s hard to imagine Emmylou Harris being anything else than the singer she is, or at least that’s the way she sees it. “I’m not sure I could have done anything else,” she says. “This is what I do, who I am. It’s complicated, sometimes, but I’ve been doing this all my life and will be doing it all my life.”

When you hear her sing—in a concert at venues as different as the Music Center at Strathmore or Wolf Trap— the presence and voice is clear as undiluted spring water, flowing. You can hear her life in the songs, the changes, the losses, the adding on of different kinds of music so that whatever she does, there’s always surprises, or things that have never gone away.

“I try to keep things simple when I write,” she says, and it sounds both true and a little too modest. Singing her own songs, or that of others, you hear the spirit of something grainy, pure dirt and wood American, a little cowboy, a lot of unrefined, raw country, the purity of folk with touches of rock and rockabilly, bluegrass and—when she’s of a mind—corner-piano, Broadway, break-your-heart brassy ballads. You can catch the looks, changing, over the years from her album covers, the pitch-black long hair, now turned white, the cheekbones. Now at 65, thrice-married with grandchildren, she looks as magnetic as ever. She looks like a good witch, in some ways. The voice is a little changed, according to her.

“Well, I don’t think I can quite hold the high as long as I used to,” she says. “You lose some things, gain some things. It’s what it is. You adjust, you find new ways, new music, and sometimes you can be more direct.” It’s something you could honestly disagree with her about—life has added some rich, tremulous and heart-probing stuff to her voice, upon listening.

“You know, you always reflect, think of who you were and what’s happened, it informs what you do,” she says. “I can look back when I started out, I was a product of the ‘60s, you know, folk singers and rock, and that stuff. You’d hear country music and sort of treat it with contempt. We didn’t get it, you know.”

With her parents living in the Washington suburbs, Harris famously sang at the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle, now defunct and re-arranged into a different place. “It was a different time,” she said. “I lived a few blocks from the place.”

Her attitude, and quite a few other things, changed when she met Gram Parsons in D.C. He was the legendary and charismatic leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers who was starting a solo act and looking for a girl singer, and that would be Emmylou Harris. The Parsons-Harris relationship is the stuff of musical legend in some ways—people talk about not in the rumor sort of way, but in the sense that Parsons—as close friend, mentor and inspiration helped her emerge with all her gifts firing. “He had a huge impact on me, he inspired me, he educated me about country music, its roots and what it could be, in its basic unadorned ways.”

Parsons died of an accidental drug overdose in 1973, and the shock of that, the hole in her heart, you suspect, is still there. “Sure, he’s with me, he changed my life, and it was a hard, hard loss,” Harris says. He’s in the early “Boulder to Birmingham” and in the song she wrote for “Hard Bargains,” “The Road” as in : “I can still remember every song you played/long ago when we were younger and we rocked the night away.”
“Hard Bargains” also features a song called “Big Black Dog,” which is an outcrop of another passion of hers: the love of dogs, rescuing dogs, being with dogs. Harris runs Bonaparte’s Retreat, a non-profit rescue operation which she runs out of her home Nashville. The “Big Black Dog” in question and music is one Bella, a mix “of just about every breed you can a think of,” who travels with her when she tours in her bus.”

“I can’t believe I never did that before,” she says about traveling with a dog. “It is, I don’t know, such a gift, the companionship of a dog. It’s soothing, full of love.”

She seems to have a gift for easy and long friendships, a natural affinity for musical collaboration. Look her up, and you’ll find almost everybody that’s ever picked up a guitar and banjo, pounded on drums or sung songs for a living in Nashville listed in the “worked with” category.

Harris—while her life has surely been dramatic—isn’t the type of person that get’s talked or whispered, or yacked about a lot about as a star, or god-forgive-them, super-star. She’s the kind of singer-songwriter-performer you remember just a little after the last note is gone as well as years later.

John Prine and Emmylou Harris, Aug. 15, Wolf Trap, Filene Center, Vienna, Va. — www.WolfTrap.org.

Mary Bird •

The Washington Area Concierge Association honored its superstars with the presentation of the Silver Plume Awards July 29. The event, which was co-sponsored by Where magazine and the Occidental Restaurant, began with cocktails on the restaurant’s terrace before guests proceeded inside to enjoy a feast highlighted by filet mignon and a jumbo lump crab cake. Luis Colmenares, head concierge at the Hotel Monaco and current WACA president, graciously accepted his award as “Concierge of the Year.” [gallery ids="100936,129906,129853,129899,129861,129892,129870,129886,129878" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

On July 30, hairstylist Luigi Parasmo and plastic surgeon Dr. Ayman Hakki of Luxxery Medical Boutique hosted their first annual “Botox & Locks” event at the Luigi Parasmo Salon, which opened this April on Wisconsin Avenue. The beauty gurus partnered for a night of glamour offering discount treatments to guests who enjoyed delicious hors d’oeuvres from Lebanese eatery Neyla. Washingtonian’s Kate Bennett, former Miss D.C. Jen Corey and Gilt City D.C.’s Marissa Schneider celebrated with their favorite beauty men who make certain the ladies look their best.
[gallery ids="100937,129907,129895,129903" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Violinist Joshua Bell is no longer the boyish phenomenon of the classical musical world. Now 44 – and still boyishly handsome and charismatic – Bell is a bona fide superstar in his world, which includes a host of other stars, from Yitzhak Perlman to Hilary Hahn.

These days, Bell continues to keep a hectic travel schedule and performing schedule that will include a Nov. 1 performance at the Music Center at Strathmore, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at 8 p.m.

With Sam Haywood on the piano, he’ll be performing works by Schubert (Rondo for Piano in B minor, Op. 70) Strauss (Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat Major, Op. 18), and Prokofiev (Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94).

Bell is by now a familiar visitor to Washington concert halls and performing arts venues, having played often at the Kennedy Center and at the Music Center at Strathmore since it arrived seven years ago.

“Each offers pleasures and challenges for a musician and they do for me,” Bell said in a telephone interview. “Like many musicians, I admire the acoustics and the environment at Strathmore, it creates a kind of intimacy and sound that’s rare. And of course, the Kennedy Center is a very special place for me. Every time I come here, it’s something of a homecoming for me. I was here for the first time at a Kennedy Center Honors when I was only 17, so each occasion, it’s something comfortable and welcoming for me.”

In the middle stages of his career, Bell still likes his challenges, and his tastes remain eclectic. In 2011, he created one of the finest amalgams of classical and pop music ever recorded with “Joshua Bell at home with friends”. Home is a two-floor penthouse in New York that includes a recording studio, and his friends were folks like Sting, Jeremy Denko, Josh Groban, Kristin Chenoweth, Frankie Moreno, Jonathan Gunn, Regina Spector, David Finck, Anoushka Shankar and the late Marvin Hamlisch. The music was rangy from “My Funny Valentine”, to “Look Away”, Spector’s “Left Hand Song”, music from “Porgy and Bess”, to Sergei Rachmoninoff to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and others. The result was bliss.

“I loved doing that, of course, but I don’t think that’s going to be indicative of where I might be going,” he said.

Prior to that he had also participated in a cultural experiment which saw him playing a very expensive violin at a Metro Station during rush hour, performing Brahms, documented in a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post Magazine story. Bell got meager recompense, and was rarely engaged by passers by, few of whom stopped. “Well, it was interesting experiment,” he said.

Lately, he’s taken on a major challenge when he was named the new music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the venerable and conductor-less chamber ensemble founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1958. In response to the announcement, Bell said, “I have felt a particular affection for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields ever since I made my very first concerto recording with them under the baton of Marriner when I was just 18 years old. Since then, the orchestra has come to feel like family to me, as we have shared so many cherished moments together.”

“It’s taking on a major responsibility, it’s a bit of a risk,” he said. “But it lets me explore with the institution and the orchestra certain kinds of music which will be challenging, but it’s also something I’ve thought about for some time now, to explore the symphonic repertoire.”

With Bell, it appears that challenges are about knowing when to take them on. “There are some pieces of music that I haven’t done, because I felt I might not do them justice in terms of recording them.”

Recently, Bell and Jeremy Denk record “French Impressions”, with sonatas by Ravel, Saint-Saens, and Franck, marking the two men’s first recital together and allowing Bell to pay tribute to his mentor Josef Gingold with a recording of Cesar Frank’s “Violin Sonata.”

Bell has been in the heat of the public eye since he was 14, he’s one of those performers who packs a lot of charisma, with a riveting performing style and his oft-mentioned good looks. Truth be told, he doesn’t really think that how he looks matters, even though the classical music business, like many things in our modern times, likes to market musicians who look good on an CD cover. “I personally don’t think that’s important at all,” he said, “You’ve got to remember the great Fritz Kreisler was a very handsome man, women loved him, I’m told, but this is about marketing. It has nothing to do with music or your place in the world.”

Casey obrien • November 1, 2012

Washington, D.C., is home to many ghost stories. From the bloody steps in the Capitol to a commodore haunt- ing the old Navy Yard, the city is ripe with spirits. A culmination of all these stories can be found in “Capitol Hill Haunts,” a new book by Tim Krepp.

Krepp, a licensed tour guide for tours in D.C. and New York, is putting his degree in history from Georgetown University to good use by revealing the stories and places some of the departed call home. Years ago, while giving ghost tours, Krepp realized his interest in ghosts and storytelling.

“I really fell in love with the concept of ghost stories as a way of preserving [them] as urban folklore, as legends, as a nexus between history you can put in textbooks, versus oral traditions.”

Krepp’s favorite story, which can be found in the book, is of the “Phantom Wheelman.” An 1882 streetcar conductor had fatally col- lided with a cyclist and now would find phantom cyclists darting out behind his streetcar. The interesting fact was how the original cyclist was riding the penny-farthings of the era, yet the cyclists seemed to upgrade their bicycles as the times changed.

“It’s a great story, just the imagery of this dark streetcar, after midnight, coming down and seeing this guy on a penny-farthing coming at him,” Krepp said. “But also what it says about today’s conflicts and debates in the city: the use of public space. Who owns the road?”

However, the “Phantom Wheelman” doesn’t get the best reaction when told orally, it needs a visual. Like most ghost stories, there must be something there for the audience to see. Despite this, the overall crowd pleaser is the rarely seen “Demon Cat of the Capitol.”

The Demon Cat roams the lower levels of the Capitol, including the space built to be George Washington’s crypt. At first sight, it appears to be a normal tabby cat, until it fixes its eyes on its victim and then runs towards them getting larger before it lets out a yelp and jumps over the victim’s head into the darkness. Legend has it the Demon Cat shows up before presidential assas- sinations and times of national crisis.

“Capitol Hill Haunts” also shares some less- er-known ghost stories of the nation’s capital. In the section titled “The Watchful Commodore,” the haunting of Captain Thomas Tingey in the Navy Yard is explained. Tingey was in charge of building and developing the yard, and he was the one to give the order to set it on first when the British arrived in D.C. in 1814 during the War of 1812.

It is said Tingey still haunts his old home, Quarters A in the Yard. He was first spotted in 1853 by the daughter of the yard commandant. In 1960, when the new commander, Rear Admiral Thomas H. Robbins moved his family in, his dog sensed a presence. The dog would stare at a chair in the drawing room and bark and growl at it, until his owner addressed the captain, telling him they were “glad to be living in [his] house.”

Tingey has also been spotted staring out the second floor window of Quarters A and walking around the Navy Yard for inspection with his spyglass and sword. The book also mentions Tingey took offense to the 1886 name change of the Yard to the Naval Gun Foundry by letting out “a banshee cry that could be heard for blocks around” at midnight.

Georgetown, of course, is no stranger to ghost stories, one reason, Krepp says, he stayed away when he wrote his book. Now, Krepp has returned and is in the beginning stages of writing his next book on the ghosts of Georgetown.

Though still in the preliminary stages of research, Krepp finds the old Forest Hall, now the Gap on Wisconsin Ave, to be a great story. Previous to being a prison during the Civil War, it was a public hall, hosting debutante balls and minuets. “I have an early 20th century, I want to say 1910, 1920 article describing the ghostly balls that continue to this day.”

One iconic spot Krepp is eager to research more are the infamous Exorcist Steps. “As far as I know, there are no real ghost stories about the steps themselves,” Krepp said. “I think the site was, as far as I know, picked just because it looks haunted.” Though there may be no ghosts lingering on the steps, it is definitely a spooky destination to visit this Halloween, after watch- ing the classic film, “The Exorcist.” ? [gallery ids="102490,120241" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

The 2012 Georgetown Gala, ?Putting on the Glitz,? and put on by the Citizens Association of Georgetown, returned to the Russian Embassy Oct. 26, with vodka, caviar, champagne, a dinner buffet and a live auction ? and, of course, dancing and more dancing, this time to the tunes of Big Ray and the Kool Kats. Hundreds of residents, business leaders and politicians were also there to honor Pamela and Richard Hinds for their work on historic preservation and public safety. Gala co-chairs were Nancy Taylor Bubes, Michele Evans and Patrice Miller. Sponsors included ?community pillars,? Long & Foster, Exclusive Affiliate of Christie?s International, Vornado Realty Trust & Angelo Gordon & Co. on behalf of the Shops at Georgetown Park, along with M.C. Dean, Inc., MRP Realty, Washington Fine Properties (Nancy Taylor Bubes), Western Development Corporation, EagleBank and the Georgetowner.

Unlike last year, Mayor Vincent Gray could not stay for the dancing ? there was a hurricane coming, after all.