The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Piano and viola duo Vis-à-Vis gives a FREE concert this Saturday at noon as part of Grace Presents
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By Jacob Stockinger
For a while, the acclaimed FREE community outreach concert series Grace Presents had folded.
But now it is back.
Grace Presents’ new coordinator Yanzel Rivera, who is a graduate student at the UW-Madison Mead-Witter School of Music, has sent the following information to post:
“Grace Presents, which offers free monthly concerts on the Capitol Square, will feature the Vis-À-Vis duo (below) of violist Brandin Kreuder and pianist Craig Jordan.
“The one-hour concert, called “Clarke and Brahms” will take place this Saturday, Jan. 13, at noon at the Grace Episcopal Church, 116 West Washington Avenue, across from the Capitol Square.
The program features: Four Pieces by British composer Frank Bridge, (1879-1941); a Sonata by British composer Rebecca Clarke, (1886-1979, below top); “Un regard dans le vide” or ‘A Look Into the Void” (2017) by American composer Christian Messier (b. 1995, below bottom), who studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin; and the Sonata in F Minor by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS
“Duo Vis-À-Vis aims to bring engaging and explorative chamber music performances to communities across the country and share their love for musical collaboration and expression.
“The duo is comprised of violinist/violist Brandin Kreuder, and pianist, Craig Jordan. Brandin is a native of Burlington, Wisconsin, and a 2016 graduate of Lawrence University and Conservatory (below) who holds a B.A. in Studio Art and a B.M. in Violin Performance.
“Brandin is currently in his second year of his Master of Music degree studying viola with virtuoso violist Jodi Levitz at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami.
“Jordan, from Ames, Iowa, is a junior at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music pursuing his Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance under the teaching of Catherine Kautsky, with an emphasis on Collaborative Piano. He is currently studying this fall semester at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in the Netherlands with Marta Liébana Martínez.
“Since its debut in spring 2016, duo Vis-A-Vis has performed three recital tours in Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, Colorado and Massachusetts. Their recent tour “Reminiscence” brought the duo to their widest variety of performance locations yet. One of these performances also served as the beginning of a new chamber music series hosted by the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, Mass.
(You can hear Duo Vis-à-Vis (below) perform the Violin Sonata by Cesar Franck in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
ABOUT GRACE PRESENTS
Grace Presents features a diverse range of music, including everything from classical and folk to jazz and bluegrass. The performers include nationally recognized musicians and exceptional young talent from Madison and beyond.
The mission is to create a premier concert series that everyone in the Madison community can enjoy. Each month it welcomes a diverse audience to its concerts, including Madison residents, students, farmers’ market shoppers, tourists, and people who are homeless.
The organizers invite audiences to bring a lunch to enjoy inside the church during our concerts.
A celebrated historic landmark established in 1839, Grace Episcopal Church (below top and bottom) is the oldest church in Madison. Known for its grand Gothic architecture and distinctive red doors, the church features hand-carved woodwork, brilliant stained glass windows–including a Tiffany window–and a cathedral organ.
Grace Presents is supported in part by a grant from Dane Arts, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
The series also relies on donations from sponsors and free-will offerings at each concert.
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Classical music: Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble to bring ‘Music of the Reformation’ to four Wisconsin cities, including Madison, Oct. 27–29
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble (below) will perform a late-October series of FREE public concerts in four Wisconsin cities featuring music by composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn and others in a centuries-spanning program titled “Music of the Reformation.”
Performances will take place Friday, Oct. 27, in Appleton; Saturday, Oct. 28, in Delafield and Watertown; and Sunday, Oct. 29, in Madison.
“The hour-long concert program commemorates the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation in Germany in 1517,” said Rodney Holmes, founder and artistic director of the Gargoyle ensemble. “Audiences will hear works embracing the most famous melodies written by Reformation leader Martin Luther (below), who was a composer as well as a religious figure.”
The program includes James Curnow’s contemporary “Rejouissance: Fantasia on ‘Ein feste Burg’ (A Mighty Fortress)” for organ; Heinrich Schütz’s “Three Becker Psalms,” Op. 5, a Baroque work for brass quartet; Bach’s Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her” (“From Heaven above to Earth I come”), BWV 769, for organ; and Otto Nicolai’s early Romantic “Ecclesiastical Festival Overture on the chorale ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,’” Op. 31, arranged for brass and organ by Craig Garner.
Also on the program are: Max Reger’s late Romantic “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” Op. 27, for organ; Randall E. Faust’s contemporary “Fantasy” on the hymn “Von Himmel hoch,” for horn and organ; and Garner’s brass and organ arrangement, “Introduction and Finale,” from Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, “Reformation,” Op. 107.
Performers will include Madison-based organist Jared Stellmacher (below), an award-winning musician heard on the Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble’s critically acclaimed 2015 debut CD “Flourishes, Tales and Symphonies.” He holds a master’s degree in music from Yale University.
Gargoyle brass players will include trumpeters Lev Garbar and Andrew Hunter, horn player Kathryn Swope, trombonist Karen Mari, and artistic director Holmes on tuba.
CONCERT SCHEDULE
Here are the dates, times, and locations of the Gargoyle ensemble’s “Music of the Reformation” concerts, with local contact information. No tickets or reservations are required for these FREE events:
*Friday, Oct. 27, at 7:30 p.m. at Zion Lutheran Church, 912 North Oneida Street, in Appleton, Wis., 54911. www.zionappleton.com/home
Contact: Matthew Walsh, 920-739-3104
*Saturday, Oct. 28, at 3 p.m. at Christ the King Lutheran Church, 1600 North Genesee Street, in Delafield, WI 53018
Contact: Mark Gould, 262-646-2343
*Saturday, Oct. 28, at 6:30 p.m. at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, 204 North Tenth Street, Watertown, WI 53094
Contact: Janis Shackley, 920-261-1663
*Sunday, Oct. 29, at 2 p.m. at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 5701 Raymond Road, Madison, WI 53711
Contact: Jared Stellmacher, 608-271-6633
Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble
“The Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble plays with warmth, elegance, and panache,” said U.S. music magazine Fanfare in a review of the ensemble’s debut CD. “[They] are perfect companions for the music lover in need of calming nourishment.”
The group takes its whimsical name from the stone figures atop gothic buildings at the University of Chicago, where the now-professional ensemble got its start in 1992 as a brass quintet of faculty and students. (You can hear a sample in the YouTube video at the bottom.)
Under its founder and artistic director Rodney Holmes, it has evolved over the decades into an independent organization of classically trained musicians that focuses on commissioning and performing groundbreaking new works and arrangements for brass and pipe organ. You can find more information at gargoylebrass.com.
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Classical music: Award-winning University Opera performs Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” this Friday night, Sunday afternoon and next Tuesday night
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By Jacob Stockinger
The black-and-white poster (below) looks fittingly eerie, spooky and creepy for one of the most famous ghost stories ever written. Look carefully at the blurry outlines of people – or are they spirits? The ambiguity is deliberate.
The poster advertises the opera “The Turn of the Screw,” which was written in 1954 by British composer Benjamin Britten (below, in a 1968 publicity photo by Decca Records taken by Hans Wild) and is based on a famous gothic novella by the 19th-century American writer Henry James. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear an excerpt from the production at the 2007 Glyndebourne Festival.)
The production of Britten’s last chamber opera promises to be exciting, engaging and innovative. That is thanks to the University Opera’s new permanent artistic director David Ronis (below, in a photo by Luke DeLalio), a transplanted New Yorker who recently won national awards for two earlier productions at the UW-Madison when he was the opera company’s guest interim director for two seasons.
Below is a link to the complete story, with links to the awards story and other aspects. It also contains information about the cast and about tickets ($25 for adults, $20 for seniors and $10 for students).
The Ear wants to point out just a few important highlights:
Performances are in Music Hall, at the foot of Bascom Hill, on this Friday at 7:30 p.m., this Sunday at 3 p.m. and next Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m.
After each performance, a talk-back for the audience to ask questions of the cast and the artistic staff will be held.
The running time is two hours with intermission.
The opera will be sung in English, but will also feature supertitles so the audience can easily understand the poetic libretto and follow the story.
The talented and experienced UW-Madison graduate student Kyle Knox (below) will conduct members of the UW Symphony Orchestra. Knox has conducted the UW Symphony and the University Opera many times before, and has also conducted for the Madison Opera and the Middleton Community Orchestra. Some mention him as a serious candidate to succeed his retiring and acclaimed teacher, Professor James Smith.
Here is the link to the full story, with many more details including cast members, on the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music’s website:
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Classical music: Madison Opera’s first-ever “Sweeney Todd” excels in singing and stage work. It also draws striking parallels between Victorian England and contemporary America. The last performance is today at 2:30.
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By Jacob Stockinger
Loyal readers of this blog know very well the name of Mikko Utevsky. The young violist and conductor is a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where he studies with Pro Arte Quartet violist Sally Chisholm and plays in the UW Symphony Orchestra.
Utevsky, who has won awards and impressive reviews for his work in music education since his days at Madison’s East High School, is the founder and conductor of the Madison Area Youth Chamber Orchestra, which will perform its fourth season next summer. He has been named the new Music Director of a local community orchestra, The Studio Orchestra. The ensemble has a website here (www.disso.org).
You can check out his many honors and projects by typing his name into the search engine on this blog site.
Utevsky offered The Ear a guest preview review of this weekend’s three performances of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” by the Madison Opera in the Capitol Theater in the Overture Center.
I immediately took him up on the offer. After all, he is a fine and perceptive writer who, you may recall, blogged for this post when he was on tour two summers ago with the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras (WYSO) tour to Vienna, Prague and Budapest.
Here is the review by Mikko Utevsky (below) with production photos by James Gill:
By Mikko Utevsky
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd!
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 masterpiece of musical theater tells the gruesome legend of Benjamin Barker, now Sweeney Todd, returned to London after unjust imprisonment to take revenge on the judge who wronged him and stole his daughter. With his baker accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, he slaughters unsuspecting Londoners and has their bodies baked into meat pies.
The Madison Opera presents it for the first time this weekend in all its sonic splendor, with a larger orchestra than the typical Broadway band, placed on stage, plus a cast of powerful voices and gifted actors.
The new production, also the directorial debut of UW-Madison theater professor Norma Saldivar (below, in a photo from Madison Magazine), is a triumph of atmosphere. From haunting and evocative lighting (Hideaki Tsutsi) with flashes of red to accompany the many otherwise bloodless murders, to a versatile and visually striking Victorian-industrial set (Joseph Varga), the visual side was appropriately dramatic.
The stark soundscape that makes the piece so successful was the product of crisp, energetic playing from members of the Madison Symphony Orchestra under the baton of John DeMain, who is both the Music Director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Artistic Director of the Madison Opera.
The music featured a prominent organ part that was performed with dramatic flair by UW alumnus composer Scott Gendel and arresting singing from the Madison Opera Chorus that is directed by Anthony Cao. If the choral blocking was somewhat static, it lent additional emphasis to the jerky, mechanistic motions that were used sparingly, but to great effect.
What sets this apart from the 2007 Hollywood film version directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp in the title role, or even from a typical Broadway production, is the singing — even if it was uncharacteristically amplified electronically in tis production.
Sondheim’s score treads the line between opera and musical theater, making unusually great demands on the vocalists. Madison Opera’s cast came through magnificently.
In the leads, Corey Crider (below, as Sweeney Todd) and Meredith Arwady (Mrs. Lovett) both excelled in their Madison Opera debuts.
Arwady’s comic instincts are superb — her duets with Crider (“A Little Priest” and “By the Sea”) were hysterical. (With regard to the former, I confess I have a soft spot for good puns.)
Crider’s powerful baritone modulated through tenderness, rage, bitterness, and insane glee with subtle precision, and he brought no small measure of dramatic flair to the role.
The show has a cast full of tenors, all of whom excelled. Robert Goderich (Adolfo Pirelli) was hilariously over the top in both his character acting and the Italianate tenor writing, which he pulled off with aplomb, and Daniel Shirley’s smooth lyricism as Anthony Hope (bottom right, with Jeni Houser on far left and Michael Etzwiler in the middle) was especially lovely. Thomas Leighton’s solos stood out from the chorus for their particular beauty.
The young Joshua Sanders (below center), a company veteran despite his age, was outstanding in his first major role as Tobias Ragg. From his enthusiastic sales patter in “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” to gentle tenderness in the show-stealing “Not While I’m Around” — heard sung by Neil Patrick Harris in a YouTube video at the bottom — to the deranged mania of the final scene, both his acting skill and immense vocal talent shone throughout the evening.
My attention Friday night was drawn to the social commentary in the show.
Sweeney Todd’s murderous frenzy is overlaid with a critique of the social order in Victorian London — not so distant from that of today: “The history of the world, my sweet/Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat” It is also not far from Bertolt Brecht‘s moralizing in “The Threepenny Opera,” which says “Even saintly folk will act like sinners/Until they’ve had their customary dinners.”
Through the same lens, we see Mrs. Lovett (played played by Meredith Arwady, below) in particular swayed by the social mobility brought on by newfound prosperity: her change of costume in the second act, coupled with fresh wallpaper and a brand-new harmonium in the parlor, suggest that once she becomes one of the ones “who gets to eat,” her priorities align more and more with the upper class she seemed to despise before.
Whether you come for the social critique, the powerful music, the skillful acting, or if you just want a good Gothic thrill, this weekend’s “Sweeney Todd” will deliver.
It joins the long list of Madison Opera’s successes in recent seasons, and you might just consider catching the last show this Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Overture Center’s Capitol Theater.
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