New Repertoire for the Guitar

by

A preview by Center for the Arts Intern and Music Major Lucia Strother ’11

When you enter Crowell Concert Hall this Friday, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will not be performing traditional guitar repertoire. The vast majority of the pieces the Quartet have chosen to perform were not written for the guitar, much less an ensemble of four guitars.  The only two pieces on the program originally written for guitar were actually written specifically for the Quartet by living composers! The industrious Quartet writes all their own arrangements, and I look forward to hearing their refashioned renditions of beloved pieces written for other instruments.

The Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will play Windy, one of Piazzolla’s beloved Argentinian tangos. Piazzolla was a virtuoso bandoneon player (an accordion-like instrument popular in Argentina) and developed his own style called “Nuevo tango,” which combined the traditional tango with elements from jazz and classical music. His widely popular music has been arranged for all kinds of ensembles and instrumentation, and Yo-Yo Ma’s wildly successful 1997 album Soul of the Tango brought the music of Piazzolla to even wider audiences. It will be interesting to hear such familiar music in an ensemble arrangement that is somewhat unusual and unfamiliar to me.

An equally beloved piece, Debussy’s Petite Suite was written in 1889 for piano, four hands, and rewritten by Henri Busser in 1909 for full orchestra. It was written early in Debussy’s career, and its simple yet expressive melodies contrast much of his other work, which is more impressionistic and harmonically adventurous. The unassuming beauty of the four short movements of this piece appeals to wide audiences, so I look forward to hearing another well-known piece reworked for this unique ensemble.

A thread that runs through Friday’s program is the intersection of folk music and classical tradition. Three Finnish Pieces was written by living composer and accordionist Maria Kalaniemi, who was classically trained but focused her attention on performing and composing music based on Finnish folk music. Three Finnish Pieces will certainly satisfy Wesleyan’s population of world music aficionados.

Additionally, Joaquín Rodrigo’s Cuatro Piezas, originally composed for solo piano, extensively incorporates themes from Spanish folk music. It’s interesting to me that the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet would choose this Rodrigo piece to perform, since he composed so much music for guitar and played such a central role in establishing guitar in classical mainstream repertoire. (Interestingly, his Concierto Andaluz is one of the few pieces actually written for an ensemble of four guitars.)

The program will also feature three Baroque trio sonatas, two by Purcell and one by Corelli, both original arrangements by the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. I am eager to see the Quartet’s interpretation of these pieces. I assume that they will perform them on their modern classical guitars, the dimensions of which weren’t established until the 19th century, but it will be interesting to see whether their other musical choices, especially with regards to voicing, attempt to preserve Baroque performance practice or create an altogether different effect.

Finally, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will also perform two pieces commissioned specifically for them by living composers. A Scottish Fantasy was written in 1996 by David Crittenden, a classical guitarist (formerly a member of the Quartet) and composer based in St. Paul, MN. Additionally, the Quartet will perform Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Ghetto Strings, written in 2001. Roumain is a Haitian-American composer who combines elements of classical music with features from contemporary black popular music. I am excited to hear these two, and I’m sure they’ll be well received since Wesleyan audiences have such a voracious appetite for new music.

Friday, February 18, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$23 general public; $18 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students
Pre-concert talk at 7:15pm by Carver Blanchard, Wesleyan Private Lessons Teacher

Master Class with Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, featuring performance by Wesleyan alum Lu Yang ’10
Daltry Room (Rehearsal Studios 003)
Saturday, February 19, noon
Free admission

Sarah Ruhl: The Interplay Between the Actual and the Magical

by

This Thursday, playwright Sarah Ruhl will pay her first visit to campus for this year’s Outside the Box playwright’s residency. (Past playwrights have included Tony Kushner, Charles Mee, Moises Kaufman and David Henry Hwang.)  As a part of her residency, Ruhl will give a lecture on Thursday evening, visit classes and meet with the cast of the Theater Department’s upcoming performance of her Melancholy Play.

Ruhl, who grew up in Illinois, started her career as a poet and published her first book by the age of 20. Now she writes imaginative and unusual plays that often feature unlikely, dreamlike occurrences. In a 2008 article in The New Yorker, Ruhl said that her characters exist in both “…the real world and also a suspended state.”

Routine activities continue amidst strange developments—in Melancholy Play, for example, one character turns into an almond!—and highlight “the interplay between the actual and the magical.” Amidst its elements of fantasy, Ruhl’s work raises serious questions about human experience and psychology. Melancholy Play presents moments of genuine sorrow. But Ruhl creates these moments while maintaining a witty humor that keeps the tone of the play lighthearted; she explains: “Lightness isn’t stupidity. It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.”

Ken Prestininzi, the director of a 2007 production of Melancholy Play at Brown University (where Ruhl received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in 1997 and 2001) suggests that Ruhl’s upbringing could be responsible for the distinctive tone of her work, pointing out that Ruhl “grew up in the Midwest, where there’s this assumption that you’re supposed to smile, mow your lawn and get on with things. You’re not supposed to stare out the window and think of a line from a poem for a week.”

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Paris-based Compagnie Vincent Mantsoe to Celebrate Story of Khoi-San People at Dance Performances This Weekend

by

This Saturday and Sunday, legendary choreographer Vincent Mantsoe will bring his Paris-based company to the CFA Theater to present two performances of his newest work, SAN. Known for its fusion of traditional South African movement and street dance forms, the company has been praised by the New York Times for a “…sophistication and beauty in the way traditional African dance motifs…are woven together with more sinuous abstract movements.”

SAN celebrates and tells the story of the Khoi-San people, hunter-gatherers and aboriginal inhabitants of the Southern African plains, commonly referred to as Bushmen. Mantsoe writes:

“Restricted from the open land, which has slowly but consistently been converted to farmland or taken into possession for mining, the San have been silenced, fenced out, subjected to hangings intended to break their spirit, and endured the terrors of genocide… SAN asks how, in the face of change, which spreads like wild roots, we can sustain the freedom to express our sense of beauty, emotions and attitudes without shame or guilt of who we are.”

Interestingly, this past Thursday marked a major victory in the Khoi-San’s defense of their rights, when Botswana’s Court of Appeal revoked a 2010 ruling that had denied the Kalahari Bushmen access to water on their own lands. (More information on this legislation is available online here). 

The themes of SAN take on new meaning with this hopeful news, and this weekend’s performances by Compagnie Vincent Mantsoe should be especially moving in light of this important milestone.

Saturday, February 5, 8pm & Sunday, February 6, 3pm
Pre-performance talk by Debra Cash in the CFA Hall at 7:15pm before the Saturday performance
CFA Theater
$21, $18 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students, $8 Wesleyan students

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

A Talk with Jazz Legend Charles LLoyd

by

William Carbone, Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, connected with Charles Lloyd prior to his upcoming tour of New England made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts. Lloyd and his quartet will play at the CFA on January 28th. What follows is a summary of their conversation:

There is a sundry collection of compositions and sounds on the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s latest CD Mirror, yet one sound rings constantly throughout: peace.  Lloyd, a veteran saxophonist, and his much younger band mates—pianist Jason Moran, drummer Eric Harland, bassist Reuben Rogers—waste no notes, uniting their songs and improvisations with an endlessly persevering focus on melody.  In those moments one might expect a burst of fiery showmanship and the thrusting forth of an individual identity, Lloyd and company sink in more deeply, creating space and allowing eighth notes to become quarters, halves, then whole; clearly, their relationship is one of absolute trust.

Hence Lloyd’s reaction when I inquired about who would accompany him on his upcoming Northeast tour: “Is this a trick question?” Unlike many, or even most veteran jazz musicians, Lloyd’s band is a band, and Moran, Harland and Reed are those who we should expect to see.

Lloyd has a condition that makes lengthy phone conversations uncomfortable, but he agreed to speak with me regarding his upcoming tour via email.  Because his biographical informational is readily available already, I chose to ask Lloyd, who holds a Masters degree in music, more about his thoughts on jazz and education, particularly in university settings. His answers were brief, yet they allowed some insight to the inclusive approach that characterizes his work.

Charles Lloyd exploded onto the U.S. jazz scene in the early 1960s, first in collaborations with drummer Chico Hamilton and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Soon after, he shepherded a quartet of newcomers: Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett and Cecil McBee, all of whom are now household names in jazz. They broke boundaries musically with their effortless intermingling of jazz and avant-garde, non-Western and rock music; demographically by engaging the young and spiritually hungry audience of the late ‘60s; economically with the first jazz album to sell one million copies; and geographically when they departed on a non-state–sponsored tour of the Soviet Union.

Though Lloyd’s success was nearly unparalleled in jazz, he soon withdrew.  As he told me in our recent dialog: “I performed at Carnegie Hall when I was in my 20s, as well as the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Claude Nobs [the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival] always likes to say that I was the first international ‘star’ to perform at the Montreux Jazz festival in 1967. By the end of the 60s, I was playing in stadiums and sports arenas, but I got off the bus because I did not like where the business of music was trying to direct me. It had nothing to do with music.”

After stepping off “the bus,” Lloyd retreated to the central California region of Big Sur and for a decade recorded and performed in public only sporadically.  The few recordings he released under his own name during this period reflect both an extension of Lloyd’s inclusive view of music and the spiritual search he was undertaking in the mountains: Geeta (1973) features Lloyd on flutes and saxes accompanied by a combination of Western and Indian musicians performing both Hindu-themed material and a Rolling Stones medley; on Big Sur Tapestry (1979), Lloyd performs Chinese oboe and flutes and is accompanied only by harp. Though his time at Big Sur has often been characterized as an escape from the pressures of popularity, Lloyd also performed and recorded with the Beach Boys during this period.

Gradually, Lloyd reemerged in the 1980s, establishing a connection with the ECM record label that is now in its third decade.  Since then, his work as a leader for the label includes ensembles featuring similarly maverick jazz performers—Billy Higgins, Brad Mehldau, Cedar Walton, John Abercrombie, Geri Allen—who glide comfortably into the borderless explorations of music Lloyd says are intrinsic to his being.

“Most of my childhood was spent on my grandfather’s farm in Mississippi,” notes Lloyd, “so I was steeped in the blues. Phineas Newborn was my earliest mentor. He heard me win an amateur show when I was about nine and got me started with lessons with Irvin Reasson. Later, when I was 11 or 12, he had me join his father’s band. I stand on the shoulders of all who came before me—Howlin’ Wolf, Bobbie Blue Bland, Johnny Ace, Willie Mitchell, Bird [Charlie Parker], Prez [Lester Young] and Lady Day [Billie Holiday], Trane [John Coltrane], Mr. [Coleman] Hawkins—they are all a fiber of my expression. Everything that I am today is the sum of my life’s experience.”

Lloyd holds a Master’s degree in music from the University of Southern California but suggests that the musicians of his generation primarily “learned ‘real time’ with on-the-spot training on the bandstand.” He adds: “We had to bake a cake without the advantage of technology.  Today there are so many options that are just a fingertip away.” Other than a brief stint as a middle school teacher in the late ‘50s, Lloyd has not been a formal educator yet he notes, “I give master classes [at colleges and universities] from time to time, and the students seem hungry for information and direct experience.”

Given his stature and experience, Lloyd could easily settle into a role as an “elder statesman” and run a repertory band with a rotating cast of musicians, yet he has continuously surrounded himself with consummate improvisers who challenge him to reach new heights nonetheless. “I am a student everyday; I have a beginner’s mind,” says Lloyd. “Eric and Jason and Reuben are old souls to me. The chronological age does not impede the flow of the ancient and modern.”

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

Spring Season at the CFA Announced

by

Dear Friends of the CFA,

This spring, when you travel to the CFA, you’ll see the world. Well, some of it, at least. Vincent Mantsoe will bring his Paris-based company to perform a work that features South African dance traditions infused with contemporary street dance forms. California-based companies Viver Brasil and Hālau o Keikiali‘i will bring the music and dance traditions of Bahia and Hawai‘i respectively, and DanceMasters Weekend will feature Guilford’s-own Andrea Miller’s Gallim Dance. The company was a sensation at the Spoleto Festival last June and Miller is the winner of this year’s Emerging Choreographer Award.

Jazz figures prominently on the schedule with a concert by the legendary Charles Lloyd and his quartet in January and Sherrie Maricle’s DIVA, an all-female concert jazz orchestra, in April. Lloyd is best known for his seminal album Forest Flower, and his quartet will also feature Jason Moran, who recently won a MacArthur, on the piano. The Music Department will bring its Gamelan Orchestra together with the Wesleyan Ensemble Singers and University Orchestra to celebrate the music of legendary 20th-century composer Lou Harrison. In February, the Theater Department brings its alumnus Michael Rau ’05 to direct Sarah Ruhl’s contemporary farce Melancholy Play, and the playwright herself will be in residence early in February to meet with the cast and give a public talk.

The Zilkha Gallery will host a major exhibition of sculpture, photographs and video by Professor of Art Jeffrey Schiff. His exhibition, Double Vision, will explore how unconscious projections from America’s colonial origins shape perceptions of its current reality.

Many of our majors are creating original works for their theses, and we encourage you to attend their performances and exhibitions as well. We invite you to meet the next generation of art-makers and participate in their visions.

It’s all here in the heart of Connecticut.

Pamela Tatge
Director, CFA

For complete details, visit the CFA website.

Stravinsky’s “Les Noces” Performed at this Year’s Candlelight Concert

by

The following blog entry  was written by CFA Intern Lucy Strother ’11”

This Saturday at 8:30pm, Angel Gil-Ordoñez will lead the Wesleyan Ensemble Singers in Crowell Concert Hall for the annual Candlelight Concert. The performance will be the culmination of a thrilling and highly challenging project for the choir.

Angel describes the program in greater detail, stating “The Wesleyan Ensemble Singers will perform one of the most exciting vocal pieces of the 20th Century: Les Noces (The Wedding) by Igor Stravinsky. Inspired by Russian wedding and liturgical songs in the folk tradition, the work is written for choral ensemble, four vocal soloists, four pianos, and five percussion players.” This particular instrumentation gives the piece an extraordinarily distinctive and moving sound. The piece was originally written as a ballet, first performed in 1923 by the Ballets Russe.

The concert features the campus acapella group Slavei, as well as teachers and students from the music department and will be a unique opportunity to see a remarkable work performed right here on campus. I congratulate the choir for taking on such a colossal piece!

Candlelight Concert
Saturday, December 4, 8:30pm, 
Crowell Concert Hall, 
Free Admission.

An Interview About the Theater Department’s Production of Shakespeare’s Richard III

by

The following is an interview with seniors Emma Sherr-Ziarko ’11 and Ben Vigus ’11, also known as Bemma Sherr-Vigus, who are performing together as Richard for their senior theses in the upcoming Theater Department production of Richard III, directed by David B. Jaffe. The interview was conducted by Theater Major Sarah Wolfe ’11.

How did the idea to have two people play Richard come about?

Emma: Well, last March we were both thinking about doing acting theses and so we got together, and we were both in Shakespeare class together, with David. And so we got together, and we were like, “Oh what could we do?” And so we came up with this idea.

Ben: And so we went to David, and we kind of, off hand suggested, “Hey David, you should do Richard III, and we should both play Richard!”

B: And he gave us a look.

E: Which I interpreted as he thought we were a little crazy.

B: And I interpreted as kind of shocked and taken aback that we would suggest this, but maybe interested at the same time.

E: And then two months later we got an email from him that said, “I’ve decided, we’re going to do Richard III and you two will play Richard.”

So now, as you’re nearing the end of this process, what has been the best part of playing this role with another actor?

Emma: Particularly with a role of this magnitude, I would say, it allows us to explore the role as more of a dialogue.

Ben: It’s like the conversations that you have with yourself. In the working process it’s actually made a lot of things less intimidating.

How do you each view your individual Richards, and subsequently, how do you view your collective Richard?

Ben: We had conversations early about what we were not going to be. We are not the female and male, anima/animus aspects of Richard, we are not a Fight Club-by “Real” Richard and “Schizophrenic Projection” of Richard. We are two physical beings, who are an embodiment of one character.

E: Right. And it’s interesting because we’ve attempted to approach the role as more honest than one would normally think of Richard. You know, Richard is the scheming, lying, dissembling villain. But we decided to take an approach of what kind of truth is there in what he says and what he does. And so that honesty manifests itself in different ways for us.

B: Because we’re both not reaching for some iconic villainous Richard, we come at it from very different places, grounded in who we are.

Other than the obvious (having two Richards) what makes this production different from the hundreds of other Richard III’s that have happened over the ages?

Ben: Well it’s really cut down.

Emma: A of all.

B: We encountered this play, which is really long. I don’t know how long it is if you actually –

E: I think it’s the second longest play

B/E: Second to Hamlet,

B: And Hamlet’s long.

E: Yeah, I think it’s almost four hours uncut.

B: And that’s too long. So we cut about 40% of the play, and got it down to a run time now of about 2:15.

E: But also, I mean part of what I think is ingenious that David realized from the beginning, was that we’re playing this, we’re doing this play as an ensemble of 10 20-something year olds, and we’re not pretending that we’re 80 years old, or 10 years old. We are these people, we’re these Wesleyan students, playing these parts. We’re not going to be in Elizabethan costumes, thank God.

B: We have an ensemble of 10 actors that are going be able to tell this story. And so we have two actors playing Richard, and then just about everyone else is playing two or three roles. And they swap onstage and you see all of that.

E: Yes.

B: That’s happening.

E: That is happening.

B: Also, we’re taking kind of a non-literal approach to – that sounded pretentious – to –

E: You’ve said more pretentious things.

B: I was talking about aesthetic! It’s really hard to talk about aesthetics without being pretentious! Anyway, the deaths – (without giving too much away) we’re not trying to make it look like people are actually dying on stage. We’re staging things in a little more of a stylized way and using blood to symbolize a death, or suggest it, or evoke the feeling of that death. And Taiko!

E: Taiko!

B: That’s another thing that’s cool about this, that’s one of the first ideas that David had, was that we were going to have taiko, really intense beating drums in the background of the whole production, doing great things.

What’s your favorite line in the show, and who says it?

B: Margaret, of course, has all of her wonderful names that she calls Richard. There’s just a slew of them.

E: “Thou elvish marked abortive rooting hog.” May be my favorite. It’s on my refrigerator.

B: “Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider?” “Foul bunch-backed toad”. “Hell hound”. Richard gets called a lot of bad things… He’s generally unliked.

E: Which is completely undeserved. For me, one of his last lines, “I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die.” Which I think is very Richard to me. Yeah, I’ve done these horrible things, but I will deal with the consequences.

Okay, this is my deep question to end with. What’s the greatest challenge of performing Shakespeare today, in America, and as college students at Wesleyan?

Ben: I think there’s a really strong aversion to Shakespeare. I think it’s hard to make it relevant. And for good reason, it’s just very difficult to know what people mean when they talk, and then to invest in the story if you can’t connect to their basic meaning.

Emma: Yeah, I mean I come from a completely Shakespeare nerd background, which is a problem because I lose perspective of what is understandable and what is useful versus what is beautiful, but the important thing for me is to remember that it’s beautiful text, and it is, I believe, the most beautiful text written in the English language. And if we can use that, and appreciate that, and bring it to a certain level, it can be understood and enjoyed by Wesleyan students, by Americans, and everyone.

Performances take place Thursday and Friday, November 18 and November 19 at 8pm and Saturday, November 20 at 2pm and 8pm in the Theater in the Center for the Arts, Tickets are sold out.

For more information, call the box office at (860) 685-3355 or visit  www.wesleyan.edu/cfa. The play will run for about 2 hours and 15 minutes with intermission, and contains material that may be unsuitable for children.

Eiko and Koma Continue Their “Living” Installation at the Walker Art Center

by

For those of you who were at the opening of Eiko and Koma’s Retrospective Project at the Zilkha Gallery last November, or saw Raven at the CFA this past July, I wanted to write to tell you that the Retrospective continued its journey last week with the opening of their installation, Naked, at the Walker Art Center in the Twin Cities on Tuesday, November 2nd. Naked is a living installation that Eiko and Koma have been working on for the past six months during their residency at the Park Avenue Armory. Eiko and Koma will perform Naked throughout the month of November, six days a week for an unbelievable six hours a day (with only a fifteen minute break)! The piece explores themes of nakedness, desire and the elasticity of time.

This is the first time that Eiko & Koma have created a living installation since Breath at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998. Unlike the single body that was present in Breath, both Eiko & Koma will always be on view during Naked, in much longer exposure and closer proximity to audiences than they have ever allowed themselves.

Eiko and Koma described Naked in an interview with Walker Performing Arts Director Philip Bither:

“By coming back to live and move in a gallery, we hope to collapse the time passed since Breath, a time in which we have lingered as much as we have aged. We are inviting a close look at another one-month period of time in our bodies, saying to our audience: Linger, stay here with your eyes, live and kinetically observe how our bodies move towards death.” –Eiko & Koma on Naked, 2010

For more information, see these links…

A description of the project on Eiko and Koma’s Website

An write-up in Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune

From the Walker Art Center’s Blog

An Interview with Professor Neely Bruce About Pianist Donald Berman and Chopin

by

CFA Intern Lucy Strother interviews Wesleyan professor Neely Bruce for details regarding Donald Berman’s upcoming concert.

This Thursday and Friday, Wesleyan welcomes pianist Donald Berman ’84 back to campus! Berman will hold a master class for piano students on Thursday, and on Friday night, he takes the stage in Crowell Concert Hall with a beautiful piano program, featuring music from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (and the 21st, if you include professor Neely Bruce’s brand new arrangement of the orchestral accompaniment for the Chopin “La ci darem la mano” variations.)  I learned some more details about Berman’s career and his upcoming performance from professor of music and arranger-extraordinaire Neely Bruce.

LS: Is it typical for Berman to combine 18th and 19th century non-American composers like Scarlatti, Schumann and Chopin with 20th century and contemporary American pieces?

NB: Don Berman is a specialist in new and recent music, especially the music of Ives. That being said, he plays the music of the nineteenth century very, very well. I got the idea of inviting him to do this concert when I heard him play the Chopin variations on “La ci darem la mano” last season with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

LS: Is there an overarching connection between the pieces on the program? Why did Don Berman choose this particular program?

NB: The idea of this concert is to show how the music of Chopin is related to that of his contemporaries (especially Schumann) and the influence he had on posterity—which is enormous, by the way. Practically every composer who has written for the piano since Chopin is indebted to his approach to the instrument.

LS: Tell me about your arrangement of the orchestral accompaniment for the “La ci darem la mano” variations. What is your experience with this piece? Did you take any creative liberties with the arrangement?

NB: These variations are Chopin’s first work for piano and orchestra. Robert Schumann, who was a first-rate music critic as well as a composer, reviewed them with a flourish. “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius.” That’s how he greeted his Polish contemporary in print. Both men were nineteen years old when Chopin performed the piece and Schumann reviewed it. My arrangement of “La ci darem la mano” is based on contemporary practice. In the nineteenth century, if one didn’t have an orchestra, or were performing a concerto in an intimate setting, one often arranged the orchestra parts for string quartet. I’m sure this was done for salon performances of these variations in Chopin’s lifetime, but no such arrangement survives. So I have made one. “Creative liberties” are the only way to approach such a project. There is a brief timpani solo in the orchestra original. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to do that.

LS: You were working at Wesleyan when Berman was a student here.  Did you cross paths?

NB: Of course. Don was a wonderful pianist, even as an undergraduate. He was the first winner of the Tishler Competition. He took my class in American piano music. (I haven’t offered it in many years, but used to offer it regularly.) We have stayed in touch over the years.

LS: Anything else that’s notable about Don or the upcoming concert?

NB: Don Berman was the last student of the late John Kirkpatrick, who premiered the Concord Sonata of Charles Ives and edited a great many of the Ives pieces for publication. This gave Don an inside track with lots of unperformed, and even unedited, Ives works. He has two spectacular CDs called The Unknown Ives which are revelatory. I’m delighted that he has chosen to make something special of the relationship of Ives and Chopin. Anyone who has played the music of Ives knows that Ives’s technique was shaped by the technique of Chopin. Don Berman’s recital will show how that works, and how the music of these seemingly so different composers can continue to delight listeners, both as specific pieces of music and through their juxtaposition.

Thanks, Neely! Come to Crowell Friday night to see this amazing pianist that the New York Times described as a “thorough, exciting and persuasive musician!”

Navaratri Festival 2010

by

CFA Intern Lucy Strother talks with Professor B. Balasubrahmaniyan (Balu) about this week’s Navaratri Festival.

Tomorrow kicks off the 34th annual Navaratri Festival, celebrating the music and dance of India here at Wesleyan! Five days of performances (Wednesday, October 27 through Sunday, October 31) will offer audiences a wide range of events: concerts by distinguished musicians, dance showcases, a lecture by Wesleyan professors and a traditional Hindu ceremony. I spoke with Wesleyan professor and Navaratri organizer B. Balasubrahmaniyan (better known as Balu) about some of the upcoming festival highlights.

A unique aspect of Navaratri is its ability to integrate the past and present in its celebration of the rich historical traditions of music and dance in India, along with its promotion of important performers in India’s contemporary arts scene. Thursday night features a concert by sisters Ranjani and Gayatri, both widely acclaimed singers and violinists. Balu expressed his excitement for this concert, saying: “They have reached a very high caliber of musicianship in a short period and they are visiting Wesleyan for the first time.” Their performances are known for vitality and emotion and often incorporate an element of playful sibling rivalry that I am excited to witness in action!

Another highlight of Navaratri is sure to be when internationally renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain performs with sitarist Niladri Kumar Saturday night. Balu emphasized Zakir’s superstar status and his amazing ability to connect Indian music with music of other cultures and genres: “He is a top ranking, international artist and has worked with many Indian and non-Indian performers.” It is so thrilling to get the opportunity to see brilliant, world famous artists like Zakir here on campus.

People interested in taking a more active role in the festivities should attend the Natya Mela Dance Party/Showcase or the Saraswati Puja ceremony. Balu shared with me the meaning of Saraswati Puja, saying that the ceremony is dedicated to “offering our respects to the goddess of knowledge, music, and the arts. Students place their books and musicians place their musical instruments in front of the idol or picture of the goddess and get blessings. Anyone can participate and can bring their instruments and books in order to receive blessings.” This event is recommended for seniors who are writing a thesis…

Not only is Balu a major contributor in organizing and promoting Navaratri, he is also featured as a soloist on the concert line up. David Nelson, mridangam, and K.V.S. Vinay, violin, will join Balu Friday night for a concert that should not be missed!

The Full Lineup:
Colloquium–Weaving Sound and Image: Integrating Bharata Natyam and Carnatic Music,
B. Balasubrahmaniyan and Hari Krishnan
Wednesday, October 27, 4:15pm
CFA Hall 
Free admission
Ranjani and Gayatri: Carnatic Music of South India
Thursday, October 28, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Tickets: $15 A, $12 B, $6 C
B. Balasubrahmaniyan: Vocal Music of South India
Friday, October 29, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Tickets: $12 A, $10 B, $6 C
Natya Mela
(Indian Dance Party/Showcase)
Saturday, October 30, 2pm
World Music Hall
Free Admission
Zakir Hussain and Niladri Kumar
Saturday, October 30 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Tickets: $28, $23 B, $8 C

Saraswati Puja (Hindu Ceremony)
Sunday, October 31, 11am
World Music Hall
Free admission

PRICE KEY: $A General; $B Seniors, Wesleyan Faculty & Staff, Non-Wesleyan Students; $C Wesleyan Students