REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Spotlight Series

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
January 22-February 17, 2021
by Michael J. Moran

 

The third concert in the HSO’s monthly virtual “Spotlight Series” of 60-minute performances by HSO ensembles and guests recorded at Hartford area venues is now available on-demand at the orchestra’s web site through February 17, 2021, at 5:00 pm. 

Jeffrey Krieger

 

Entitled “Music for Cello Quartet,” it included five pieces by Corrette, Albinoni, Ravel, Gruetzmacher, and Piazzolla and was filmed in a colorfully lit recording studio at Parkville Sounds in Hartford. The four HSO cellists featured are: Principal cello Jeffrey Krieger; Assistant Principal cello Jia Cao; and cello section members Cara Cheung and Peter Zay. The full ensemble performs every piece. 

 

The diverse program opened with a charming and elegant account of eighteenth-century French composer Michel Corrette’s three-movement “Le Phenix” Concerto. Next came an impassioned reading of seventeenth-century Italian composer Tomaso Albinoni’s more familiar “Adagio,” which, as Cheung noted, has turned up in film soundtracks from “Flashdance” and “Gallipoli” to “Manchester by the Sea.”

 

The concert’s centerpiece was also its unlikeliest selection – an arrangement by British cellist James Barralet of Maurice Ravel’s 1928 orchestral showpiece “Bolero.” While not replicating the famous snare drum part, the cello can produce a range of percussive sounds, and this quartet bowed, plucked, and tapped their way through the single crescendo theme with lively enthusiasm and surprising sonic variety. New harmonies even emerged from time to time that are not heard in the original version.      

 

This was followed by a stately reading of the “Consecration Hymn” by nineteenth-century German cellist (the only one among these five composers) Friedrich Gruetzmacher, to whom Zay traced a personal connection through several generations of teachers. The program ended in a blaze of energy with Argentinian tango master Astor Piazzolla’s exuberant 1974 “Libertango.”

 

The Parkville acoustics were appropriately warm and rich. It was refreshing to see the musicians comfortably dressed in casual attire, and the personal stories they told about their relationships with the cello while introducing the music through Covid masks they wore throughout the concert helpfully bridged some of the distance they must feel from their traditionally live audience. HSO Board Vice Chair Diane Whitney brought additional warmth in her brief welcome and closing remarks.

REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Masterworks In-Depth

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
January 15-20, 2021
by Michael J. Moran

The fourth program in the HSO’s monthly “Masterworks In-Depth” series of virtual conversations about music they would have played at Covid-cancelled concerts this season will be available on the HSO web site through Wednesday, January 20, at 5:00 pm. Led by HSO Music Director Carolyn Kuan, this 69-minute webinar focused on two of three pieces originally scheduled.

This month’s concert would have highlighted African-American music. While Kuan omitted so-called “dean of African-American composers” William Grant Still’s orchestral rhapsody “Darker America,” the time she gained was well spent on his lesser-known contemporary, Florence Price. The first African-American woman whose music was performed by a major orchestra (the Chicago Symphony in 1933), her “Concerto in One Movement” was to be performed by rising young pianist Michelle Cann, with guest conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, founding director of the Philadelphia-based Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra. Kuan’s Zoom conversations with both African-American musicians were enlightening and inspiring.

But Kuan began with a video performance clip from the second movement (whose main theme is also known as “Going Home”) of Dvorak’s “New World” symphony, the concert’s featured work. Appointed in 1892 by American arts patron Jeannette Thurber as head of her National Conservatory of Music in New York, Dvorak reflected the spirit of African-American music in this masterpiece and championed it as the basis of a distinctly American style of classical music.

 
Segments Kuan showed next from the documentary “Caged Bird” made it clear that although the Arkansas-born Price was a musical “child prodigy,” a lack of career opportunities led her into what Johnson called the kind of “forced entrepreneurship that arises from disenfranchisement, a profoundly American experience.” A video clip of Cann performing a Price sonata movement confirmed what Kuan called the composer’s “unique voice,” which radiated, in Cann’s words, “so much heart and soul.”
 
The conversation also clarified what a difference mentors and role models have made in the careers of all three women, all the way from Brahms mentoring Dvorak, to Thurber’s acceptance of women and African-Americans at her conservatory, to the impact on ten-year-old Cann of seeing African-American conductor Thomas Wilkins on the podium, to the life-changing advice of her (and Kuan’s) mentor Marin Alsop that Johnson should start her own ensemble.

REVIEW: Playhouse on Park (Streaming), All Is Calm

Playhouse on Park, West Hartford, CT

www.playhouseonpark.org

from Dec. 17, 2020 – Jan. 3, 2021

by Shera Cohen

For one exceptional week in the midst of WWI in Europe, with soldiers up to their knees in the
trenches sinking in the mud, surrounded by countless numbers of rats, shells firing in an unsteady rhythm, life was as calm as it could possibly be on Christmas Day, 1914. “All Is Calm” depicted a true story, or at the very least historical fiction. The theme took a smidgen of history out of the textbooks to show the audience how one moment in time could be insignificant or monumental depending on life’s circumstances. This was called, “The Christmas Truce.”

Playhouse Theatre Group, a division of Playhouse on Park, had intended to mount the play on the Playhouse stage in West Hartford. Covid-19 and many of the roadblocks that came with the disease, forced major direction changes, remarkedly puzzled together and alleviated by director Sasha Bratt. Stage or no stage, the play must go on, utilizing outdoor sections of forestry as the sole scenery, never forgetting social distancing between the actors.

The week before Christmas, 1914, the war literally halted. It is not easy to classify “All Is Calm” as a play, although that was the initial intent. “All Is Calm” seemed to fit into its own niche as theatre. It could be considered a play with music [not a musical], or music with a play wrapped around it. Another label might be an extraordinary documentary. Audience members will likely experience far more of this performing arts classification in the future as the post-Covid years go by.

Three actors portrayed as many as 10 roles each. British and German accents intermixed, and at no better time did the sounds and words of “Oh, Tannenbaum” illustrate the perfect example that whether on the “good side” or the “bad side” of war, all men were equal; just doing their jobs and oftentimes not knowing why. Good vs. bad was of little matter on this particular eve and day. Life was by no means a picnic, but a picnic it would be on December 25, 1914.

One might suppose that the playwright’s sparse dialogue subtracted from the play’s affect. In fact, the opposite held true, adding to the milieu of the actual events and the story on the stage. Playhouse’s actors/singers gave life, in the midst of war, to Peter Rothstein’s work, portraying at its core, strength of character, wonder, confusion, and camaraderie.

REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Spotlight Series

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT
www.hartfordsymphony.org
December 11-January 10, 2021
by Michael J. Moran

The second concert in the HSO’s monthly virtual “Spotlight Series” of 60-minute performances
by HSO ensembles and guests recorded at Hartford area venues is now available on-demand at the orchestra’s web site through January 10, 2021, at 5:00 pm. Entitled “Music for Strings and Organ,” it included four pieces by Corelli, Bach, Golijov, and Mendelssohn and was recorded amid festive seasonal décor at Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church, founded in 1864. 

Ten HSO musicians were featured: Concertmaster Leonid Sigal; Associate Concertmaster Lisa Rautenberg; Assistant Concertmaster Sooyeon Kim; Assistant Principal second violin Jaroslav Lis; Principal viola Michael Wheeler; Assistant Principal viola Aekyung Kim; Principal cello Jeffrey Krieger; Assistant Principal cello Gia Cao; Assistant Principal bass Robert Groff; and organist Edward Clark.
 
The program opened with the whole ensemble in a sprightly account of Arcangelo Corelli’s most famous composition - the eighth of his twelve Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, dating from the 1680s, better known as his “Christmas Concerto.” Its unusual structure of six short movements builds toward a slow pastoral finale, which was played with affecting tenderness. This was followed by Clark’s elegant performances on portable organ of two keyboard preludes written around 1717 by Johann Sebastian Bach.
 
In his 2000 string quartet “Tenebrae” Argentine-Israeli composer Osvaldo Golijov depicted both political unrest he witnessed in Israel that year and the wonder his five-year-old son felt on seeing the earth from space a week later at the New York planetarium. Sigal, Rautenberg, Wheeler, and Krieger brilliantly rendered the haunting serenity of the long opening and closing sections of this 15-minute single movement, as well as the brief central turmoil which separates them. The program closed with a stirring version by all the string players except Groff of the opening “Allegro moderato ma con fuoco” movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 octet, written at the remarkable age of sixteen.  
 
Though the octet’s last three movements were missing, including the iconic “Scherzo,” the warm church acoustics ideally flattered this ensemble. Spoken introductions by different members of the group through Covid masks worn throughout the concert helpfully bridged some of the distance still remaining from their audience.
 

REVIEW: Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Masterworks In-Depth

Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Hartford, CT

www.hartfordsymphony.org

December 4-9, 2020

by Michael J. Moran

 

The third program in the HSO’s monthly “Masterworks In-Depth” series of virtual conversations about music they would have played this season at concerts cancelled by the Covid pandemic will be available on the HSO web site through Wednesday, December 9, at 5:00 pm. Led by HSO Music Director Carolyn Kuan, this 65-minute webinar focused on two of three pieces originally scheduled. 

 

This month’s concert was to feature some of her favorite music from Act I of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” including the battle of gingerbread soldiers and mice. Kuan noted that while the complete ballet wasn’t widely performed until half a century after its 1892 premiere, the familiar orchestral suite derived largely from Act II and published six months earlier was instantly popular. Recalling that she conducted the full score for New York City Ballet, she showed colorful video clips from their production, which morphed cleverly into a concert performance by the Rotterdam Philharmonic under an animated Yannick Nezet-Seguin.  

 

Speaking with Kuan via Zoom, German-born choreographer Miro Magloire, who founded New York-based New Chamber Ballet in 2004, marveled that Tchaikovsky “wasn’t happy with” his music for “The Nutcracker,” whose creative ‘rhythms and harmonies” Magloire finds “endlessly fascinating.” Discussing how he found his “voice” in dance, he stressed that since choreography is “an orally transmitted art form,” his work is always collaborative with both dancers and live musicians. 

Italian-born pianist Alessio Bax, who would have performed Grieg’s piano concerto with the HSO this month, next told Kuan via Zoom that his career started with a “small electric keyboard” he received at age seven from his parents. He echoed Rachmaninoff’s description of Grieg’s as a “perfect romantic concerto,” with “not a note wasted.” Bax also expressed his pleasure in playing chamber music with friends like violinist Joshua Bell, whom he partnered at the Bushnell last January.  

Kuan never mentioned Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture “The Tempest,” based on Shakespeare’s play, which the HSO had programmed this month and which she elsewhere called “even more dramatic, noble, and beautiful than his famous Romeo and Juliet.” But a delightful video clip of Bax and his wife, pianist Lucille Chung, playing his arrangement for piano four-hands of Piazzolla’s “Libertango” offered lively compensation.

Preview: Playhouse on Park, All is Calm: the Christmas Truce of 1914.

Playhouse on Park’s 12th Main Stage Season will continue with Peter Rothstein’s "All is Calm: the Christmas Truce of 1914." This production will be available to stream at home beginning December 16, 2020 through January 3, 2021. There will also be in person screenings at Cinestudio in Hartford, CT on December 18 and 19, 2020.

It’s a remarkable true story of World War One and relives an astounding moment in history; in a
silence amid the combat, a soldier steps into no man’s land singing “Silent Night.” Thus begins an extraordinary night of camaraderie between the Allied troops and German soldiers. They lay down their arms to celebrate the holiday, share food and drink, play soccer, and sing carols. This dramatic retelling weaves together firsthand accounts of World War I soldiers with patriotic tunes, trench songs, and Christmas carols. Musical arrangements by Erick Lichte and Timothy C. Takach. Directed by Sasha Brätt, with music direction by Benjamin Rauch.

This play was originally scheduled to be produced by Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. live at Playhouse on Park. As a result of guidelines put forth by Governor Ned Lamont and out of concern for the safety of our staff, cast, and crew, the play was filmed outdoors without the presence of a live audience. All involved in the making of the film of this play were required to adhere to an extensive safety plan.

Stream-at-home tickets are $20 per stream plus an additional $3 service charge. Online orders are subject to an additional $1.50 processing fee. In person and phone orders do not have the additional $1.50 fee. All fees are passed on directly to the companies that charge us for their services. You will be able to access the film from December 16th - January 3rd only. For more information on streaming, or to purchase tickets, visit www.PlayhouseOnPark.org. 

In person screenings at Cinestudio in Hartford: Tickets are $20, reserved seating. Screenings will be held on Friday, December 18th at 7:30pm and Saturday, December 19th at 2:30pm and 7:30pm. Tickets must be purchased through Cinestudio. You may either purchase them online at www.cinestudio.org or in person the day of the screening.

REVIEW: TheaterWorks, (Virtual) "Christmas On The Rocks"

TheaterWorks, Hartford, CT
www.theaterworkshartford.org
through December 31, 2020
by Jarice Hanson
 
As the iconic Jerry Herman song says, “We need a little Christmas this year.” Thanks to TheaterWorks in Hartford, audiences can stream a top notch production of what has become a holiday tradition. For eight years TheaterWorks has produced “Christmas On The Rocks,” a laugh-out-loud comedy for adults that reminds us of the Holiday Specials we knew as children. Six of the seven short segments feature two actors—the featured “character” and the bartender in a run-down tavern on Christmas Eve. In the last segment—well, you just have to see this, because it’s the bow that wraps the whole package! 
 
This year’s "Rocks" was recorded for home streaming with a special creative twist.  The performers include last year’s cast as well as both ‘men’ from previous seasons - so audiences are treated to the talents of Jenn Harris, Randy Harrison, Matthew Wilkas and Harry Bouvy, with Ted Lange joining virtually from the West Coast as the Voice of the Bartender. The stream is recorded from the perspective of the bartender, and the creative set by Michael Schweikardt and costumes by Alejo Vietti pop on your television or computer screen. Director Rob Ruggeiro, who conceived of the original play, leaves his creative fingerprints all over this year’s virtual production and has come up with an adaptation for the screen that works beautifully.
 
While “Christmas On The Rocks” is, in itself, a fresh take on holiday fare (along with a few cocktails to set the mood) the wonderfully creative plays by John Cariani, Jeffrey Hatcher, Jacque Lamarre, Theresa Rebeck and Edwin Sanchez weave a spell of nostalgia, humor, pathos, and memories of holidays past. While in the physical theater audiences might react in part to the interaction of the actors, material, and audience responses—this production leaves room for the laughs and still provides the emotion to warm your heart. It’s as fulfilling as a good jolt of spiked egg nogg and it packs the same wallop. 
 
While many theaters are experimenting with reaching their audiences with virtual programming, TheaterWorks has deftly delved into exploring the medium of video and the distribution form of streaming with exceptional success. They keep the joy and creativity of theater alive and remind us that a good story, well told by people who understand how to communicate with audiences, will keep theater alive until we can share space in an actual venue again. This year, perhaps giving the gift of theater and laughter to your friends and family by way of buying them a ticket to attend “Christmas On The Rocks” can be a way of sharing this Christmas with those you love.