Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • May 3, 2012

There are certain images that come to mind when you think of classical music, and pianist Till Fellner, a rising star in the world of classical music performers, embodies quite a few of those if you’ve ever seen him perform.

The last time Washington saw Fellner, who is being presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at the Kennedy Center Oct. 1, he played at the Austrian Embassy as part of Jerome Barry’s Embassy Series Season, which was also the concluding program in Fellner’s ambitious project to perform the complete 32-part cycle of Beethoven sonatas.

Played on a Sunday afternoon before a sold-out but intimate audience, the Embassy Series program was a coming together of artist, music and audience, and a rather romantic display of the culture of classical music. It came with all the practiced history and rituals one would hope for, from the hollering of “Bravo!” to the flying of tailcoats.

An occasion like this has its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, when music was played in front of kings and members of the courts. It was played by candlelight and under chandeliers, in churches and the drawing rooms of aristocracy. The audiences are no longer quite so elite or powerful, but certain manners, mannerisms and behavioral traditions still persist. Just like the tradition remains that important cast members take curtain calls in between acts at an opera, so there are certain expectations at a concert or recital. After all, the music of the classical Forefathers—in this case Beethoven—is being played.

Fellner is Viennese and European to the core, but he is also a citizen of the world by dint of the global explosion of interest and competition in classical music. He understands and appreciates the seriousness of what he does. “The music is all that matters,” he said in a brief international telephone conversation, where he was taking in the evening tide in the old city of Vienna. “You are in service to the music, it’s the most important thing there is. And on such occasions, there are certain ways of doing things. There’s a respect that is due to the music, from myself playing it to the best of my abilities and understanding, and from the audience in terms of listening.”

You don’t get grand gestures from Fellner, no thumping on the keys with over emphasized drama, no hair or headshaking that one might get from musicians who play the keys to elicit applause. Fellner, although tall and almost boyishly handsome at age 38, will not try to seduce an audience with body language. Rather, he tries to ford the defenses of the heart with perfect performances and worship the music with his playing.

The airy embassy spaces, sunlit and bright, were an ideal setting. Fellner walked up to the shiny black piano with a quick and friendly nod, resplendent in tuxedo and tails, sat at the piano—arranging the tails just so—and began to play to the kind of communal silence that sometimes catches you off guard.

“I believe,” he said, in precise and fluent English, “that there are certain traditions to be followed, and that it is a part of the music, the occasion. There’s a certain formality and I like that, but it doesn’t interfere with feelings and emotions.”

Fellner carries with him the life of a concert pianist, and with it a mountain of ever-growing challenges. He lives in a world that seems to be at a contradictory phase—there are more and more classical musicians being trained all over the world, especially in Asia, while at the same time interest in classical music, while not in any sort of dramatic decline, still seems pointed to a closed world made up of the affording class.

But bridges are being built in the music industry, often with real artists on the forefront, who fuse their talents with giants from the world of pop music. But Fellner isn’t one of them—at least not yet. “I like some popular music,” he said. “Some of the artists are very good. But on the whole, I’m not that interested in rock music and things like that, nor do I have any desire to play it. There are plenty of challenges in playing the music that already exists—every pianist, violinist and so on takes on projects that are difficult and challenging. And the Sonatas was one of mine.”

Still, Fellner understands that the classical repertoire—Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Wagner, to name a few—needs to be replenished and added to, and he’s not stuck in the past in that sense.
“There’s actually a lot of new composers and new classical music being written, and I also like playing the works of the 20th century composers. There is a different sort of challenge in the new.”

Fellner’s program at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Oct. 1 is a kind of indicator of direction: the richness of the past and the potential for the future. There are Haydn, Schumann, and Liszt, and there is also 19-year-old classical music sensation Kit Armstrong.

“Kit is a prodigy. As a performer, as a composer, he’s just amazing,” Fellner said. “I’m playing ‘Half of One, Six Dozens of the Other,’ which he wrote for me in 2010.”

Fellner has been praised all over world and received raves like this from the London Observer: “Fellner confirmed his standing among the foremost keyboard virtuosi of the day; exact, limpid and feather-fingered, he exquisitely conveyed the sense of yearning haunting the andante and cruised effortlessly through the teasing syncopations of the closing allegro of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18.”
He will treat Armstrong’s music like he treats a Beethoven sonata, as if in the interpretive position of high priest.

Till Fellner will be performing at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 1, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society. For more information visit Kennedy-Center.org

Mary Bird •

Having lost her mother Pat to late diagnosed lung cancer, Andrea Stern Ferris was determined to find a cure for the nation’s number-one cancer killer. She now serves as president and chairman of LUNGevity Foundation, the largest national lung cancer research non-profit, which celebrated the opening of its D.C. office at a spectacular Sept. 16 gala at the Mellon Auditorium chaired by Grace Bender. The Stern family totally underwrote the event. Former Rep. Mike Oxley (R-Ohio), a non-smoker and lung cancer survivor, received LUNGevity’s first Face of Hope Award for his advocacy of better research and treatments. Design Cuisine served an elegant repast as auctioneer Lynne Zink and generous bidders enabled the foundation to reach its $1 million goal. [gallery ids="99239,103994,104025,104021,103999,104017,104013,104004,104009" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

“Parade” (now at Ford’s Theatre through Oct. 30) sounds like a musical, it pretends to be a musical, it has fast numbers, soft numbers, ballads and rousing numbers that make you want to tap your feet.
As musicals go, “Parade,” with a book by Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is kind of subversive, so much so that an audience can get tricked into clapping after a rousing song sung by a gifted singer and then almost instantly feel weird for do so.

The number in question is “That’s What He Said,” sung by Kevin McAllister as Jim Conley, an African-American janitor at a pencil factory in Atlanta in 1913. What Conley is singing is his testimony at a trial in which Leo Frank, the northern Jewish factory manager, is being tried on charges that he murdered 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker and dumped her body in the basement. Conley is singing a song, a bald-faced lie of a story in which he says he was witnessed to the aftermath of the murder and helped Frank dispose of the body. He sings “That’s What He Said” in friendly, furious fashion, it’s almost a vaudeville tune that gets people going, makes you want to dance, in fact.

Of course, that’s not what you should want to do. You should be appalled, shocked, torn and bewildered by your own feelings, the natural inclination to clap for a show-stopping number at war with the horrible lie being told that will help railroad Frank to the end of a rope.

More important, this is a true thing, a horrible event in post-Civil War southern history that was already replete with regular lynching and murders of blacks during Jim Crow days. Frank, a northerner from Brooklyn, had married a southern Jewish woman named Lucille and moved down South to manage the factory. Mary Phagan was killed on Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, which included parades and picnics, a holiday memorial celebrating Confederate valor and the loss of the old South.

“Parade,” which had a run on Broadway under the auspices of producer Harold Prince no less, won a couple of Tonys but not much acclaim. It should get some here, where the story and theme resonate mightily. It’s also been deemed the centerpiece of the programming for the Lincoln Legacy Project and is a co-production with Theater J.

It’s also an often powerful, gut-wrenching hybrid theatrical evening. Unsettling and disjointed, a sharp, thoughtful and creatively staged and performed piece that has some of the aspirations of both a serious opera and the kind of conscience-hitting plays that came from Arthur Miller. But it’s also not exactly what it seems to be, which is a musical. You sometimes think that Uhry and Brown are using the genre to get audiences to interact with the material in unaccustomed ways, the better to make an impact.

History tells us—and it’s no secret to tell the results—that in the end, Frank was convicted on almost totally fabricated, suborned lies and testimony by the victim’s friends, by the janitor and the Franks’ maid, among others, to satisfy the still bitter devotion to the Glorious Cause, a lasting hatred of northerners and blacks by the local Ku Klux Klan, supported by the establishment including a rabid newspaper publisher and author whose next book was going to offer up reasons why Jesus was not a Jew.

The approach doesn’t always work. The casual use of non-traditional casting in having African-American actors be members of crowds celebrating the Confederacy seems somehow altogether wrong, for instance. The music is often stirring, or, in quieter pieces with Frank and his wife, lovely and touching. Then again, songs pop up like period pieces from the times, and then again, you get a piece like “A Rumblin and a Rollin’,” which opens the second act, sung by black servants at a party with almost teeth-bared bitterness, a song that nicely is a bookend to a young Civil War-era soldier singing “The Old Red Hills of Home” setting off for war.

In a large cast, some of whom double and triple up, Euan Morton and Jenny Fellner stand out as Leo and Lucille Frank, who, singing and acting, manage to give a full portrait of a married couple. Often at a distance from each other in the early going they reveal their boundless love for each other in crisis. Will Gartshore is downright scary as an extremist politician and newspaper owner, steely and merciless. Stephen Schmidt as governor, John Slaton and Hugh Dorsey as a solicitor general with political ambitions, effectively define men dealing with their consciences: Slaton finds his; Dorsey misplaces it.

In the end, Slaton, after reviewing trial transcripts, commuted Frank’s death sentence to life, costing him his political future. A mob of KKK types broke into jail and hauled Frank out and lynched him. Frank’s murderers were not brought to justice and Mary Phagan’s killer was never found. Frank was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986, showing again, as if we didn’t know, that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.

“Parade” is, I think, a complicated, nuanced work, and the production does it justice and honor. It is not a history lesson, or even a heavy-handed dose of moral lesson. It’s a powerful hybrid that uses the musical theater form as a way of reminding us in disturbing, moving, complicated ways, of how we live today, how far we’ve come, and how issues of tolerance, race, ethnicity, and just plain expressions of out-and-out irrational hatred remain with us. [gallery ids="99240,104014,104018" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

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As geniuses tend to be, Edgar Degas was a compulsive revisionist. Returning to his canvases again and again, often over the course of decades, the artist left behind a wealth of visual pathways into his process upon his death in 1917. As geniuses tend to be, Degas was also a bit of a contradiction. He was a founding member of the Impressionist movement, though he vehemently rejected the label and his association with it.

Degas was a champion of an artistic revolution that moved painting beyond the gratifying of patrons and into the realm of true artistic exploration, paving the way for the explosion of cubism, abstract expressionism and beyond. He fought among critic circles for the collective reputation and legitimacy of himself and his colleagues—Monet, Renoir and Delacroix to name a few—and produced among his most acclaimed works in this time (roughly 1870s – 1880s). Yet he called himself a “realist” and rejected comparisons among his contemporaries. “What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters,” he said.

But within each individual work, Degas managed to embody the monumental nature of artistic practice; he achieved a harmony and perfection of nature through practice, observation, trial, revision and an ever-scrutinizing eye.

His methodical, repetitive practice is frequently compared to the subject of his recurring painterly infatuation, the ballet dancer. While the spontaneity of his compositions may seem frozen precipitously in time—his ballerinas in imperfect repose between moments of rehearsal, turning out, warming up, preoccupied with nothing beyond their physical composition—the delicate beauty of these moments turn out to be nothing less than the result of countless studies and immeasurable, tedious compositional revisions. This relentless strive toward an ephemeral balance, delicate as the air floating about the plane of the canvas, is illuminated remarkably in the Phillips Collection’s current retrospective of his ballet paintings, focused around his seminal work, ‘Dancers at the Barre.’

“No art is less spontaneous than mine,” Degas once said. It would seem fitting then that he was focused so irrevocably on professional dancers. The effusive, explosive nature of a pirouette, for instance, must be fluid and natural within the movement of the dance, but that graceful fluidity is something that only comes with obsessive, endless practice and repetition. And Degas painted not the climax of the twirl, but the tenuous moments leading up to it—the revision, the edits, the scrutiny of practice. And he painted it within its own terms.

Upon entering the third floor of the Phillips Collection, which has devoted the entire level to the exhibition, you immediately come upon the ‘Dancers at the Barre’ painting, the two ballerinas stretching side by side in their matching blue practice skirts. On the other walls of the room hang two other studies of the same scene, one nearly identical in composition, and one of the central model posing nude in the same stance.

Throughout the exhibition, the Phillips chose to highlight Degas’ variation and repetition, even exhibiting infrared and x-ray photos of a number of the artist’s paintings to show them in their various stages of completion, exposing the way he moved and positioned his subjects about the canvas as well as their own axis—the adjustment of a leg, the arch of a back, the direction of a subject’s hair.

There is also a large showcase of the connections made to Degas within the ballet in recent years, focused around a video of acclaimed choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s 2004 production of ‘Swan Lake’ at the Pennsylvania Ballet, which conceived its costumes and sets reminiscent of the nineteenth century Paris Opera as depicted by Degas.

But the crowning achievement of this exhibition is exactly what it should be: the collection of the artist’s works brought together for this stunning exhibit. The beauty and wonder of Degas is heroically and intimately displayed, showcasing his most acclaimed paintings alongside his sketches, prints, charcoal drawings and enticingly tactile sculptures. It is an exhibit that shows us the complete portrait of not just the subjects, but of the artist.

“Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk,” said Degas. “Why shouldn’t painting be too?” This is an exhibit for those of us who want to experience the full conversation, and long to fall into a fierce, satisfying discussion with Degas in his own time.

Degas’s Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint, will be at The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, through Jan. 8, 2012. For more information visit PhillipsCollection.org. [gallery ids="100309,107971" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Love Ball supporting the work of the Montgomery Country Humane Society, an event “for everyone who loves animals,” was held at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda on Nov. 13. Clearly many people fit that description. They were accompanied by canines on their best party manners, many garbed in festive attire—elegant doggie coats, tutus and other fabulous creations. Nary a bark was heard at the seated dinner hosted by Holly Morris of FOX 5 Morning News with special guests Aly Jacobs of MIX 107.3, 9 NEWS NOW at Noon anchor JC Hayward and Angie Goff of WUSA9 TV. As one speaker refreshingly noted, “protecting our animal friends crosses all political lines. [gallery ids="99555,104564,104595,104569,104591,104574,104587,104579,104583" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

On Oct. 14, Denise Medved, founder of the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show, and Peter Smith, Executive Chef and Proprietor of PS 7 Restaurant, hosted a media preview reception for the upcoming Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show. The Nov. 5-6 event will feature Jacques Pepin, Paula Deen, Giada De Laurentiis and Guy Fieri plus legendary Jacques Pepin. PS 7 staged a “cocktail throwdown” between mixologists ?Gina Chersevani and Owen Thomas. The preview was not only tasty but guests left with a major goody bag that included products from Pasta Valente, AlicitaSalsa of Great Falls, VA, and Peanut Butter & Co. [gallery ids="100362,110138,110117,110134,110130,110122,110126" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The 27-year old Helen Hayes Awards have been transformed into theatreWashington, the only organization dedicated solely to promoting, representing and supporting all segments of Washington’s professional theatre community. On Oct. 28, the 2011 Helen’s Star was presented to theatre patron and donor Jaylee Mead, who Washingtonian magazine credited for helping make “the Washington-area theatre-building boom possible.” In his introductory remarks, Board Chairman Victor Shargai said “tonight we metaphorically raise the curtain on theatreWashington.” Sebastian Clark of Doyle New York led a live auction that included escapes to Nevis, Thailand, Canada, Peru and two premium house seats for Book of Mormon on Broadway. [gallery ids="100364,110137,110168,110164,110142,110160,110156,110147,110152" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Walking up the grand staircase of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and into the rotunda, a noose tied at the end of a twenty-foot rope hangs from the middle of the domed ceiling. It floats heavily about ten feet off the ground. Circling the noose are nine wooden chairs on which Klan masks sit upright, their hollow eyes facing the rope as if in worship. The next things you see in the gallery, taking up the enormous wall at the entrance to the “30 Americans” exhibit, are the words “SAY IT LOUD.” You can feel James Brown belting into the microphone and you finish the lyrics quietly to yourself:

I’m black and I’m proud.

Brown recorded that song in 1968. There were still documented lynchings in the U.S. in 1968.

Like this juxtaposition, “30 Americans” offers an unrestrained and uncompromising dialogue on what it means to be black and American, exposing the racial, societal and cultural demons in us all, and forcing us to confront those things we spend our lives trying to ignore.

I am not a cultural historian, and I cannot pretend to understand the society or struggles of black America across the last century on any more than a literary level. So in order to discuss this show with any honesty or integrity, I have to strip away my third-party neutrality, my anonymous journalistic voice, and face it as a human being. I am a young white male. The baggage I carry into this show is that of ambiguous, quiet guilt, self-imposed ignorance and displaced confusion. I cannot help feeling a little self-congratulatory—and subsequently low—to be partaking in this act of cross-cultural dialogue, this academic diplomacy in exploring the art and sensibilities of another culture that is actually sort of my own culture. Was it going to isolate my whiteness? Are the stereotypes my own social filtering, or am I seeing them because the artist intended to show them outright? Coming into this exhibition, however, I felt connected with so much of this work.

The affectations and fetishized materials used by artists throughout the exhibition—shea butter, wax, cotton, soap, plastic rhinestones—the symbols and references to slavery, sharecropping and lynch mobs, the societal pigeonholes of basketball and hip-hop, were all things I fundamentally recognized. The often excessive glitz and grime of the work found me experiencing a world of which I have always lived just outside. I found unusual comfort in my kinship with the material, in understanding the ironies, injustices and tribulations of black America better than I realized. That was a short-lived and rather diluted epiphany.

Zora Neale Hurston, the seminal African American folklorist and anthropologist, wrote on the subject of understanding African American culture:

[African American culture is] particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioners, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing…

A self-portrait by Xaviera Simmons shows the artist with her brown skin colored coal black and sitting naked before her camera in an overgrown wheat field with a righteous afro. In the opposing image, Simmons stands in the field, wrapped in a trench coat as black as her darkened skin. The images are a surge of carnal and spiritual defiance, pointing to the stigma of African heritage and its increasingly dramatic, often misguided interpretations. We may see her and we may judge her on the surface, but that doesn’t mean we understand anything about her. We have not been let in.

Hank Willis Thomas exposes the trappings of African American youth culture with pop-poster-like images you might see tacked onto the wall of a college dorm room, but with a dark and troubled conscience. ‘Basketball and Chain’ depicts the lower half of two young black men in basketball jerseys jumping high into the air, a basketball chained to their leg. In another image, a Nike brand-shaped scar is etched into the shaved head of a young black man. It is not difficult to intellectualize the paralyzing societal delusions of urban teenagers striving for athletic fortune without other foreseeable options, but the struggle is not in seeing it. The struggle is in living with it or being able to change it.

Men stand poised between self-righteousness and preemptive submission in the paintings of Barkley L. Hendricks. A freestanding wall made of raw cotton and wax reaches almost to the ceiling. The cryptic symbology of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the divine, tragic beauty of Kehinde Wiley’s monumental 25-foot portrait, ‘Sleep,’ both have the power to unhinge your jaw in wonder and contemplation: what does it feel like to be black and American?

The difficulty in dealing with such deeply rooted, socially inflammatory subject matter is that it can tend toward the overwrought, and vehemence often gets in the way of true significance, running the risk of beating its audience over the head with its message. But “30 Americans” handles itself with grace and perspective, facilitating an open, honest conversation with its audience.

But the depths of what I may never understand linger in the back of my throat. I get the references to blaxploitation films. I am left sad and weak by the images of malnourished slaves and lynch victims. I empathize with the innumerable injustices the African American people have faced, and I admire “30 Americans” for providing a lens into the contemporary manifestations of these displaced feelings and issues. But the subtexts might forever elude me: what does it mean to be black and American today?

For some, this show is the embodiment of ambiguous race and class confusions neglected in our daily lives. For African Americans of my generation, I imagine “30 Americans” is a conversation across generations of families who have been dismantled and disassembled, and who put themselves back together through their stories, their art and the resilience of their spirit. “30 Americans” begins to explore what it would take to really exist in a post-racial society. It would seem that the answer is to understand—not shy away from—our distinctions.

“30 Americans,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is on display through Feb. 12, 2012. For more information visit [Corcoran.org.](http://www.corcoran.com/)