Performance

Gary Tischler • April 10, 2013

Joy Zinoman, looking very cool in various shades of black and gray, was sitting on a couch on the second floor of the Studio Theater recently near a window that overlooked a bustling flow of traffic on 14th Street, a bank, numerous shops that hadn’t been there back in the day, all the signs of neighborhood transformation that she and the Studio Theatre had helped shape.

She didn’t dwell on it. She just took it in. Zinoman, who founded of the Studio Theatre in 1978 and was its artistic director until she announced her retirement in 2010, was back. She never really left, of course, since she still teaches here in the Studio Acting Conservatory, but now she is back to direct.

In an interview with the Metro Weekly after her retirement, she was asked if she would direct in the future at the Studio. “If the play is right, and they offer me enough money,” she said.

It looks as if the play is right. “4000 Miles”, by rising young playwright Amy Herzog, who was the subject of a feature profile in Time Magazine’s Culture section recently, is the thing, for sure. “David [artistic director David Muse] asked me if I wanted to direct this play, so I read it, and I was just drawn to it. It’s perfect for me and the Studio. It’s powerful, intimate, and completely unsentimental. It’s a generational play because the main characters are a young man who visits, then stays with his 91-year-old grandmother in Greenwich Village. Amy drew the character from her own grandmother. Then there’s Tana, getting a chance to work with Tana Hicken.”

Hicken, of course, is one of Washington theater’s most consummate, unfailingly excellent actresses, a company member at Arena Stage when it sported arguably the country’s outstanding repertoire company, as well as gracing Washington stages in major and memorable parts for decades.

Zinoman and Hicken last worked together when Zinoman and Studio mounted Athol Fugard’s moving “The Road to Mecca” with Holly Twyford. In the intimate spaces of the Mead Theatre, that production measured up to and perhaps surpassed the original production seen at the Eisenhower Theater many years ago with Fugard himself and Kathy Bates.

“Tana is a joy to work with, it’s like coming home,” Zinoman said. Indeed, talking with Zinoman and watching her as Muse came by to say hello, as well as a costume designer and members of the staff here, there was an air of homecoming. Zinoman had been rehearsing for days already, so it was not like a “look who’s here” kind of thing. Rather, there was a feeling of professional and personal pride that a founder might have, that the place was solid and on sure footing.

“It’s not like you stop in theater. You don’t just retreat,” Zinoman said. “When I announced my retirement, it was with the idea of not so much leaving, but retiring when you’re still doing your best. And I didn’t want to hang around—there’s a great temptation there, you know, to do that, and I didn’t want to do that. So we traveled, a lot. We lived in Italy for a while, and that was getting away from it. You couldn’t accidentally stop by.” She has, of course, a rich family life—she travels with her husband Murray, a retired state department official, they have three grown children with lives of their own, and careers of their own, and she is a very proud grandmother of four grandchildren.

“You cannot imagine how wonderful that is, being a grandmother, I love it,” she said. Mind you, she’s not being gushy here, although she’s entitled, she’s just stating a fact not so matter-of-factly.

“Herzog is phenomenal, it’s a great play for me to be doing,” she said. “I also love teaching here, there’s a continuity to all that.”
Plus, she did “Sounding Beckett”, an unusual production of three short plays by Samuel Beckett with musical composition and performance by the Cygnus Ensemble at the Classic Stage Company in New York. “It was a terrific experience, it was a challenge, and we had Ted, Philip and Holly.” That would be Ted van Griethuysen, Philip Goodwin and Holly Twyford and Zinoman’s informality speaks to her reputation as an actor’s director—and perhaps also a designer’s and theater people’s director.

“I think in terms of the actors, that’s true but I’ve worked with so many really gifted actors—and that’s why working with Tana is so important to me in this production,” she said. This is about the time that a conversation with Zinoman turns into a memory play, a parade of actors, designers, partners in time like Russell Metheny, playwrights and plays because, barring kinescope and videos, that’s what we have of plays, their remembered affects and effects. When “The Slab Boy Trilogy”, a set of three plays rich with British working class characters which she brought to Studio a number of years ago came up in our talk, she smiled. “Oh, Slab Boys, they were wonderful plays,” she said, sounding then like someone remembering the brilliant and fully-formed antics of a favored child.

Actors have a special place here—you can practically recite the parade from memory—Jon Tindle, van Griethuysen, Goodwin, Twyford, Nancy Robinette, Sarah Marshall, June Hansen, Floyd King, just to name a few, and, of course, Tana Hicken.

Hicken sounds surprised at being considered a star in the firmament of Washington actors, although she understands it. “My husband Donald and I have lived in Baltimore for years, and that’s what we consider home.” He heads the Baltimore School for the Arts and is a prominent director and directed his wife in the one-person play “The Belle of Amherst” about Emily Dickinson.
Yet, it’s also true that Washingtonians have been blessed with an accumulated avalance of fine performances from Hicken, working at Arena as part of the repertoire company until it was disbanded, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, at Theater J, at Everyman Theatre, and at Studio.

“It’s always rewarding to be working with Joy,” she said. “And what I love about this play, is that, well, it’s really very funny. I don’t mean to say it’s a comedy, it has serious themes, beautiful writing, but it is also very funny, in spite of its seriousness. I just did a prevue and luckily the audience seems to get it, they laugh. But I’m surrounded by young actors, which makes the play resonate strongly.”

If your mind contained vivid memories of performances in the Washington theater, you’d be surprised to find how often Hicken pops up—in Shakespeare, in Chekhov, as the flinty grandmother (again with Twyford in “Lost in Yonkers”, in a searing, lost performance in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and one recalls for some reason, as the person who sums up and ties together all the improbable, frayed loose threads at the end of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “The Comedy of Errors”. Very funny indeed.

“4000 Miles” is currently playing at the Studio’s Mead Theatre.

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2013

“Nordic Cool,”, the vast, exciting, diverse, and indeed cool international festival of theater, dance, music, visual arts, literature, design, cuisine and film with participation of more than 750 artists celebrating the arts of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands will finish its dazzling run on Sunday night, March 17.

The festival was held at the Kennedy Center which was itself transformed by the festival from Feb. 19 onward. The visuals and art which arrived with the festival literally changed the look of the Kennedy Center day and night, what with a blue northern lights show at night, to begin with.

But I’m going to miss the ship of shirts.

I will miss Trondur Pattursson’s painted glass birds which gave of the romance, the sadness, the danger, the freedom of flight all over the center. The birds—seagulls, the widespread, sometimes orange, blue and red wingspreads of what might have the albatrosses and teals that accompanied sailors to the sea—have flown away again.

I will miss the elks roaming the grass outside the Kennedy Center—not real elk, but wooden sculptures called “Elk Towers”, assayed by Juha Pykalainen from the Aland Island, the elk fitting in nicely with the triumphant outdoor sculpture of “Don Quixote.” The elk will be gone along with the sound of rushing water.

That would be the paneling that accompanies a photographic exhibition centered on waterfalls and the disappearance and shrinking of water resources in the world by the internationally famous artist-environmental activist Ruri from Iceland. “The world’s water supply is shrinking at an alarming rate,” she told us. “It’s not just in my country but everywhere.” She then took us to a series of panels which, when you pulled them out, allowed you to hear the roar of waterfalls and rivers and stream, each with a distinctly different sound, which will be more different still, say, five years from now, and not as loud, until decades from now, the sound might be that of a rivulet.

All over the Kennedy Center, upstairs and downstairs, exhibitions hallmarked the state of contemporary Nordic design—especially the furniture, including a chair with a bears head prominently featured, but also a chair one would take great care to sit on. This is the land of Ikea, after all, as well as Ibsen and Bergman.

Upstairs, a large section was roped off for the use of children, who create anything they wanted with an abundance of Legos. Houses of the future—environmentally cool and practical, it appeared, if sometimes strange to navigate—were on display, near where a wintry fashion show was.

In the Hall of Nations, an installation called “Are We Still Afloat” was immediately dubbed the ship of shirts in that it was created entirely by the use of thousands of donated shirts from the locals—including Kennedy Center staffers—by Kaarina Kaikkonen, a Finnish artist who’s known for her use of found material in her sculptures and installations. The sculpture—which filled the Hall of Nations and created a stir as visitors stopped and searched the decks, so to speak, or had their pictures taken. “The ship is broken,” Kaikkonen told us. “Parts of it are lost.” She then asked me where I might put my shirts, front and outside, or inside. It was an interesting question—there’s no really satisfying answer.

We happened upon Trondur Patursson, the Faroe Islands painter and sculptor who with a large and quite kinetic beard looked like a relative of the ancient mariner—and he turned out to be a veteran seafarer. “They remind me of the seas and my travels and my homeland,” Patursson said of his stained glass birds, many of which seemed, in certain lights and times, to be flying, looking perhaps for him.

Go to the Kennedy Center this weekend—last chance to hear the flapping of colored birds, the rush of water, the billowing of sails made of shirts, elks trudging on grass in a blue light. Last chance to see “Nordic Cool,” which is way cool.

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2013

What was it with Puccini and his women?

We know all about Mimi in “La Boheme” and “Madame Butterfly.” It’s a wonder he didn’t create Violetta, given his affinity for ladies dependent on men, falling in love with the wrong man, or ending up in tragic circumstances.

Manon Lescaut, a very young courtesan-type, seems to have attracted the genius successor to Verdi from the get-go, so much so that he ignored the fact that two operas had already been assayed about Manon, the heroine of a popular 18th-century novel by Abbe Prevost. Giacomo Puccini is said to have called Manon “a heroine I believe in. She can love more than one man. So, there can be more than one opera.”

On the surface of it, you have to wonder: Manon likes glitz, glitter and stuff, the high life, she is young, not exactly a femme fatale or even a practiced courtesan, but what she has is more than enough for Geronte, a wealthy, powerful, and need we say it, much older aristocrat who apparently sees her as a shiny elixir and rejuvenator of the flesh, a damsel he can dress up and own for his pleasure. Manon, who’s pushed on Geronte by her brother Lescaut for his own advancement—has a go at real love with the dashing, sensitive and impassioned young Chevalier des Grieux before she’s spirited away into the wealthy arms and high life of the world of Geronte.

That’s the setup, and you ask what’s to like about Manon. The way she’s embodied by soprano Patricia Racette in the Washington National Opera’s spring-season opener, there’s a lot to like, and even love about “Manon Lescaut,” both the character and the opera. In terms of both propensity of plot and music, this is early Puccini (1893), but it has all the earmarks and tells of his later grand works of genius, which followed “Lescaut—“La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.”

We’ve already seen Racette, a singer with a rich, rangy voice, and in her case just as important, a gift, even a will to embody theatrically the parts she performs, in “Tosca,” but Manon, which she portrays for the first time in her career, is an entirely different challenge. It’s a traditional kind of role in the sense that it leads to wonderful duets (with the very able Bulgarian tenor Kamen Chanev soaring with her in heroic fashion) and arias. Chanev, in “Donna, non vidi mai,” sings with such believable passion that you understand as clear as heartbreak why he’s so smitten, and Racette when she joins him and by herself, gives him something to be smitten about, in spite of Manon’s appetites for baubles and dresses.

Director John Pascoe has staged most of the production in traditional fashion, with sometimes dazzling period costumes and wigs that have of their own. His principal design conceit is giant leaves in which audiences can read pages from the novel—an indication that, if you haven’t read the book, that Abbe Prevost writes in a style perfect for the creation of operas—super-charged poetically and emotionally. It’s a conceit that grounds the production when it needs to be, except on one occasion when we see entirely too much of the book, and not enough of the characters.

The production and the opera centers squarely on Manon and des Grieux, since the brother, ably sung and portrayed by Giorgio Caoduro, isn’t so much an imposing player as an onlooker. Jake Gardner as Geronte is a threatening, shadowing physical presence but doesn’t impress vocally.

In Racette and Chanev, “Manon Lescaut” has a convincing, passionate pair of lovers, ill-matched initially, but hearts entwined desperately, and sadly in the end, when Manon and des Grieux, through a series of revenge-minded events engineered by Geronte, end up in French-held Louisiana, cast out and fled into what appears to be a great desert. From their first meeting, recognition of love to Manon’s tragic end in a strange land, these two rise vocally and emotionally to making you care about the two lovers.

Gary Tischler •

I’m guessing—I could be wrong here—that there’s no video game called “Druids and Romans” or “Gauls and Romans.” Ancient Britain of Gaul under the occupation of Ancient Rome is a tough task for movie makers as well as stage directors who have to cut through the thicket that is Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline.”

It’s tough for opera, too, but that’s exactly where we find ourselves in Vincenzo Bellini’s bell canto mountain of an opera, “Norma,” which has as its main characters the powerful druid high priestess Norma, her (secret) lover and father of her two children, the Roman general Pollione, the young novice priestess Adalgisa, with whom has fallen in love, and the druid Oroveso, who is also Norma’s father.

As a druid—the priest class of the ancient Celts—Norma is a high priestess of the land’s power and its magic. She interprets the will of the gods: Should the druids war against the Romans or sit back and wait? This is a paramount question during this opera, but the biggest question of all is what happens when Norma finds out that she’s essentially being dumped for a younger rival. Things do not end well, as is wont to happen in ancient Britain and in opera.

Perhaps none of that matters too much when you having the rising star soprano Angela Meade, performing and singing the role of Norma and knocking it out of the park, aided and abetted almost on an equal plane by mezzo soprano Dolora Zajick as her rival.

Meade has already done parts of the role and a concert version of “Norma,” the big rock candy mountain of bell canto singing for any star soprano worthy of the name. There have been some great Normas by all accounts, including the legendary Maria Callas. I’m guessing there’s another one that can be added to that list and her initials are A.M.

Meade is known for her technical virtuosity, something I can’t argue with. According to some critics, she isn’t yet the actress that she might be. For all the high notes—the riverboat gambling singing that is the musical equivalent of skipping a pebble on water and making it go forever—what Meade accomplishes in this role is to act with her singing. She loads her voice up not only with impossible amounts of breath and breadth and tone, but also with the most important part of the music—the singing—which is invested with the heart of Norma. This happens whether Meade is singing alone in the horrific scene where she almost “Medeas” her children (“Teneri, Teneri Figli”) or when she’s singing with Zajick in which forgiveness and sisterhood reign in a deliriously delicious duet (“Mira o Norma”, but it could be BFF).

Norma is torn—war against the Romans, revenge against Pollione—and she still has to tell her people that she is the mother of two, fathered by the Roman general.

This sort of thing is difficult to put together, because great music (yes!) or not, great singing (yes!), the action and the characters don’t exist in a vacuum. While the ladies make you care about the ladies, you have to be comfortable in the surroundings in which so much often preposterous things goes on. Director Ann Bogart and designer Neil Patel have opted for a bare-bones, bone-clean primitive look which seems somehow perpetually cold—an angled slab of stage, a wall propped up by what look like long wooden spears, an omni-present moon which the druids worship. It has just enough strangeness to make you realize just how strange that world must have been. The Romans, fixed in their legionnaire uniforms seem out of place in this environment—which seems right—while the locals range from robes to whatever the middle-class druids might wear, while vestal virgin types in shimmering white make patterns on the stage. In this group, Dmitry Belosselskiy as Oroveso resounds with authority. On the other hand, Rafael Davila has a little too much reckless petulance in his voice, but then he is playing a cad.

But as for Meade, certainly, and Zajick as well, I can only echo the gentleman behind me who voiced his pleasure at Meade’s solo and their duets with a resounding “Bravissima!”

The Washington National Opera’s “Norma” runs through March 24 at the Kennedy Center.

Gary Tischler •

Around ten years ago, singer Helen Reddy says she just got tired of performing and needed to move on to other things.

“I was just plain tired,” she said. “Of touring and everything that went with it. I’d done it most of my life from a kid on.” And then, recently, something happened. Reddy realized she missed performing.

“I sang at a birthday thing with my sister,” she said. “And I realized that I missed singing. I missed the audience, and so I thought I wanted to come back.”

Not without some trepidation. At first, Reddy did gigs in California, which had been the base and home for the Australian-born musical superstar of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when she had some of her biggest hits.

Now, she’s coming to Washington, to the Barns at Wolf Trap specifically for two concerts, Thursday and Friday, March 7 and 8, at 8 p.m.

“You know what I really like?” she asked. “It’s that contact with the audience, that back and forth, the emotional tug. It’s not just about nostalgia, or a greatest hits’ kind-of-thing. I have some of my old band mates, and I’ll be doing some of my hits, sure, but also standards, and songs of mine that perhaps aren’t so familiar, but that I love.” “No, no backup singers,” she said, laughing.

In a way, her presence in the states and in Washington has a little bit of serendipity to it—the city is and the country is in the midst of celebrating March as National Women’s History Month. Where would Women’s History Month be without a mention, the very presence of a kind of women’s history anthem, still defiant, still particular and pertinent?

Where would any mention of women’s history be without “I Am Woman”? Reddy’s hard-fought signature and anthem song, released in May 1972, had an up and down journey on the charts before finally making its way to the top of the Billboard charts in December of that year.

Not only did she first record and sing the song, but Reddy is its listed co-writer with songwriter Ray Burton. What happened after all that is something else again: the song resonated with women and the women’s liberation movement to the point that it became a musical flag for the women’s rights and remains so. There are millions of women—and no doubt quite a few men—who know the song by heart and will sing it without being asked. History keeps right on moving and the song moves with it. There are still firsts for women. Witness that the song was heard in the background after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Reddy’s presence in the nation’s capital, when all kinds of historical and commemorative exhibitions, symposiums and marches on women’s rights are being held, seems appropriate. You can bet that the song will be part of her show at the Barns, although not quite in the form you’re used to hearing it. “Yes, I will perform it,” she said. “Of course. It’s a strange thing, that song. I’m so proud of it, but it’s also one of those things, an achievement that’s kind of hard to top. I mean I’m a part of history now. So, that song has a huge importance to me and to others.”

“Woman” is not the only hit song Reddy ever wrote, recorded and sang—she’s had a big and long career, being part of an Australian show biz family, and setting out on a singing career in the United States in the 1960s. Her breakthrough hit was “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the Mary Magdalene ballad from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It was followed by “I am Woman” and a host of other hits, including “Angie Baby,” “Delta Dawn” (the Alex Harvey-penned song also recorded by a teenaged Tanya Tucker and others) and “That’s No Way to Treat a Lady” among many others. Reddy reportedly has sold more than 25 million records worldwide—which is to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, she was huge.

That kind of red-hot heat of fame rarely lasts, but Reddy was to the stage born and toured often and also made forays into the legitimate theater stage, where she appeared as “Shirley Valentine” and in “Anything Goes” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” in addition to appearances in movies and on television.

“I think there’s nothing like that connection between audience and singer,” she said during our interview. “I really love it. I look out there and see members of several generations, people my ages, old fans, to be sure, but also new ones, and women with their teenaged daughters. That’s very emotionally satisfying to me.”

This month, for sure, it will be good to see and hear Helen Reddy at the Barns at Wolf Trap. She is, after all, Helen Reddy, a star who has lived a life from there and back again. The song and its lyrics resonate for women everywhere, but surely for her, too: “Oh yes I am wise/But it’s wisdom born of pain/Yes I’ve paid the price/but look how much I gained/If I have to/I can face anything/I am strong/I am invincible/I am woman.”

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2013

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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Gary Tischler • 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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Gary Tischler • 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"]

Gary Tischler • February 28, 2013

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.)

Gary Tischler •

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.