• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)
• Theater Jones review
• Dallas Observer review
• Profile of Patrick Kelly (pay wall)

From the start, something looks off with the Undermain Theatre’s revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party from 1958. Pinter’s first, full-length comedy-drama is set in a tatty boardinghouse in a tatty British seaside resort, yet scene designer John Arnone has given the sitting room the biggest, reddest, poppy wallpaper pattern. Hell, it even has sparkles.

The Birthday Party comes from an England that’s pre-swinging London, pre-Beatles. So where are the tea stains, the sad woodwork and the leaky gas heaters? Pinter’s people live in a diminished, style-less period of fried bread for breakfast and elderly gents shuffling to work as deckchair attendants. England was still recovering from the Suez Crisis and a World War II victory that left it exhausted and close to bankrupt. Yet much like Arnone, costume designer Giva Taylor has given most of the characters spiffy, crisply-laundered threads. It’s true of Dallas-area theaters in general: When it comes to period realism, we don’t do “dowdy and dusty” very well, it’s all too … un-Dallas.

But here, it’s more than just everything looking shiny and proper. Actor Marcus Stimac seems to have stepped out of a stylish, French New Wave film from the period. He plays McCann, a sidekick-thug who comes to the boardinghouse, and Stimac — with a profile like a cliff — could easily pass for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dimmer, funnier brother, straight out of Breathless (1960).

Take those details as signs: Director Patrick Kelly has put this Pinter on its toes. This Birthday Party is a real party, a wickedly festive affair, invigorated and invigorating. What Kelly has done is not simply emphasize Pinter’s comic skills — the Dallas Theater Center did that when it revived the play in 1989. This is a knowingly theatrical revival, very aware of its echoes and antecedents, its polished bits of comic business. McCann’s boss, Goldberg — to take just one instance — is played by Bruce DuBose as an old-school music-hall entertainer, all hokey flourishes and ruthless self-interest. We’ve long heard of Pinter’s politics, his shadowy meanings, his hilarious, disturbing way with menace and malaise. We’ve rarely sensed his delight in the theater — as we do in this superlative revival.

Pinter was always an odd fit for Martin Essler’s evocative but clumsy term, “theater of the absurd” (Samuel Beckett never granted the description any accuracy). Pinter’s plays — his early ones, at any rate, like The Birthday Party — couldn’t take place in a less absurd, more solid timeframe: the Cold War, the deflating Empire. And there’s rarely any surreal confusion about what takes place, either. No laws of the universe are broken. Two strangers, McCann and Goldberg, show up at the boardinghouse run by Meg and Petey Boles and they drag away the only lodger, Stanley, a failed pianist.

Perhaps because of the ‘absurdist’ label, perhaps because of the many debates over the years surrounding Pinter’s meanings and politics, perhaps because directors have wanted to counter all that by ‘rooting’ the play in tangible ways (Pinter’s was the era, after all, when the term “kitchen sink realism” was coined), Pinter productions have often been as drear and period-detailed as possible. The Birthday Party and The Caretaker are the great exceptions. When well done, they surmount all that, playing out beautifully in two modes: the suspense thriller and the comedy. In fact, rather than “absurd,” they can seem as hard-boiled and realistic (and taut and funny) as anything by David Mamet (who, the Undermain’s revival makes clear, learned everything he needed to know about hilarious, jackhammering, back-and-forth dialogue from Act 2).

But unlike in Mamet, the destabilizing issue in Pinter is always why? It’s human motives that remains mysterious — as in life. Why have Goldberg and McCann hunted down Stanley? What did he do? If this is a mob hit or some political revenge (the Irish Republican Army?), why does Stanley act like he doesn’t know what’s up? If it is a hit or a bit of secret police wetwork, why do the two men take this roundabout approach, throwing Stanley a celebration, bringing in liquor and playing party games?

Famously, when The Birthday Party played Broadway in 1967, the New York Times ran a letter from a baffled theatergoer who wanted to know exactly who were Stanley and the two men, and were they all normal? Pinter replied, Who are you and are you normal?

In the years since, we seem to have become more tolerant of such abiding uncertainties and of Pinter’s particular blend of non sequiturs, brooding intimidations and deadpan humor. When Goldberg and McCann start grilling Stanley in Act 2, shouting threats at him and asking irrational questions about which numbers are necessary or probable, it points forward to Mamet but also to those riotously logical-illogical Monty Python sketches, gems like the Cheese Shop and the Dead Parrot.

Indeed, at the start, when boardinghouse owner Meg Boles (Mary Lang, above, with Lush as Stanley) enters and cheerfully pesters her husband Petey (T. A. Taylor), asking in her best daft, flutey-matron voice if his breakfast cornflakes are ‘nice,’ one half-expects to see her being played in drag by Terry Jones or John Cleese. For the Theater Center’s 1989 revival, Beverly May turned Meg into a poignant Edith Bunker, laughably out-of-touch but kindhearted. Here, Lang is so appealingly vivacious, her Meg is having such a good time flirting with Stanley and oohing over the new guests, she seems another one of director Kelly’s choices to inject some theatrical winks and liveliness. Lang’s Meg is like a retired stage actress, still eager for attention, looking for a little singing and drama and dress-up. “I was the belle of the ball!” she announces merrily the morning after Stanley’s brutal encounter with McCann and Goldberg. With Beverly May, we thought, Meg’s just clueless, even a bit sad. With Lang, we think, well, she’s in her happy  little solipsistic dreamworld, isn’t she?

Not the worst choice, given Pinter’s sucking undertow of darkness. Again, in this noir-ish world, the most theatrical (and frightening) creature is Bruce DuBose’s Goldberg, who evokes nothing so much as Laurence Olivier’s acidic old stage fraud, Archie Rice in The Entertainer. (Thanks to costumer Taylor, Goldberg is a flashier-dressed Rice, with his dove-grey Homburg and wingtips — apparently, whatever it is he does for a job pays better than Rice’s efforts at squeezing the last penny and sentiment out of vaudeville). Goldberg joins some of DuBose’s funniest, creepiest creations, his bullying, buffoonish monsters, a pantheon that includes Hamm in Endgame, the elderly mob boss in The Dog Problem and the Nazi Gottleb in Peter Barnes’ Laughter!

It’s characteristic of Kelly’s deft direction that he’s assembled such a rich cast (I haven’t even gotten around the Lush’s ratty, frozen panic as Stanley), and he’s made such a find in Stimac (a recent SMU grad). Kelly even manages to work in a classic sight gag I’ve never seen before in the play: Early on, Goldberg insists that McCann smile to fit in better at the boardinghouse, and the stone-faced Stimac’s struggle to look non-threatening is both funny and endearing. It’s as if McCann has never used those muscles before and is not entirely clear what ’smiling’ entails.

Goldberg, the old pro, is essentially teaching him how to act.

• Michael Granberry’s Dallas Morning News column

The inaugural David Dillon Symposium was held over the weekend at the DMA and the Nasher — it was named in honor of the late architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News and was presented by the new David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture at UT-Arlington. The keynote address Thursday was by Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of The New Yorker who’s now on his way to Vanity Fair.

Perhaps the highlight of Goldberger’s speech came when he read passages from Dillon’s droll takedown of Philip Johnson’s Crescent design. It wasn’t a happy response, but Goldberger and the audience enjoyed David’s writing so much, Goldberger happily continued to read from it. The passages perfectly demonstrated one aspect of Dillon’s writing that Goldberger had cited: Even in a witheringly negative review, David gave the impression of disappointment more than scorn, of honestly wishing the building were better, wishing the designer hadn’t embarrassed himself. He didn’t heap abuse; he simply noted the facts of the work, conveying how its sheer scale dispelled any French delicacy or charm, how it may display an appreciation of the mansard roof not often seen in, say, fast food outlets, but it simultaneously neglected any of other design advances of the French chateau, notably the way it dealt with its base. The Crescent just plummets into the ground.

In effect, Dillon’s work provided Goldberger with the perfect example and platform to talk about the state of contemporary architecture criticism, its purpose, its methods, as well as the state of contemporary architecture, period.

The two are obviously related — “if architecture matters, it should go without saying that critics matter,” said Goldberger, although he also noted at length that architecture criticism has never been more au courant — with our visually sophisticated and visually bombarded culture, the widespread awareness of the ’starchitecture’ cult-celebrity phenomenon and the very public financial-political-aesthetic tensions rippling around current endeavors, such as the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the World Trade Center re-design.

Yet because of the upheavals in contemporary print journalism, architecture criticism — of the kind and caliber that David practiced — has never been so absent from daily newspapers and magazines, not in the past forty or fifty years. As Goldberger put it, “Critics are caught between a crisis in journalism and a growing public fascination in all things visual, with no clear sense of which will prevail.”

David was a journalist, meaning his criticism was rooted in reporting and interviews, not theory. He was very aware of design as more than an isolated physical object, an awareness of urban realities and social forces. I never thought the words “D Magazine” and “Tim Rogers” would be spoken with approval by Paul Goldberger, but he cited Rogers’ fine feature on the Museum Tower’s microwaving the Nasher Sculpture Center in the current edition of D as a rare example of this kind of architecture criticism, the kind that went into history and financial background.

So much of what’s encountered today in print is real estate boosterism or online, it’s insider esoterica. Yet perhaps the greatest link between architecture and criticism — the link much of today’s architecture writing fails –  is the fundamental need to engage the public. Yes, that could be said of almost any art form (though I reserve judgment on the revival of court masques). But because of its physical presence in the cityscape, architecture is the one art form that can’t help but engage (or bore or irritate or bedazzle) the public. It has no choice, and as Goldberger pointed out, in the same manner, we have no choice with architecture. We can ignore a film like The Five Year Engagement. We can’t ignore Victory Park, though I’ll continue trying in case it might work.

What began as something of a eulogy for David became something of an elegy for architecture criticism. The internet has blessed us with access to countless new voices and outlets all over the world. It has ‘leveled the playing field,’ Goldberger said. On any particular day, a dogged, talented blogger can outdo a legacy media outlet when it comes to breaking news, putting up video, penning a judgment that catches fire. But Goldberger added, with this level playing field filled with thousands of participants all at once, the question becomes: What game are we playing?

To be fair, Goldberger went on to make a number of wise — and more optimistic, balanced — observations about criticism and contemporary architecture. But I’d like to pause here to drag out a personal but relevant anecdote. My favorite item on David’s desk at the News was a gag gift — I forget from whom, but anyone who was at the News knows what I’m talking about. It was a tiny, plastic, wind-up figure of Godzilla, still in its product packaging. This particular model came with a couple of  little buildings for Godzilla to knock down, and whoever had sent the toy to David had taped over the product’s original name and had written in marker: OFFICIAL ARCHITECTURE CRITIC’S KIT.

After trading pleasantries with David about this item, I pointed out the obvious. The toy mockingly traded on the popular image of the critic as a destructive force, an unproductive source of bitter energy. OK, I said, that’s what you knock down. What does an architecture critic build?

I was thinking of those artists in different fields — George Bernard Shaw in theater, Rem Koolhaas in architecture — who were at once critic and practitioner. I half-expected to hear some fond memory from David about the time he tried his hand at design or even a home remodeling project.

Instead, he replied, ” Well, I hope, an audience.”  A pause. “It’s all I’ve got, really. All any of us have got.”

Which is ultimately what lies behind Goldberger’s concern over the current state of arts journalism.  If we’re all out on that level playing field, who’s in the bleachers or keeping score? Where’s the audience? It’s what the News gave David and what the News sold to advertisers. Where did it go? And have all these blogs and websites and Twitter feeds really replaced what the big-city dailies have lost?

Turn that around and look at it from the audience’s side: If you just moved to, say, Minneapolis, and wanted to learn more about the current architecture in town, why all these buildings went up like they did, what’s coming next, why that one over there is especially odd — where would you turn? If the newspapers and glossy city mag and the alternative weekly don’t provide an intelligent voice, where would you go? And if you found some blogger who seemed to make sense, how would you know he’s not actually in a developer’s pocket?

In other words, this over whelming digital outpouring we’re all swimming in has increased the burden on the reader to learn, investigate, read, research on his own — and who has the time? Easier to go back to tweets.

Once upon a time, a newspaper like the Dallas Morning News gave Dillon a pulpit and a readership — for awhile. It didn’t grant David some permanent stamp of must-read authority. Consider how many critics in influential media outlets you’ve given up reading long ago because they simply didn’t merit the time.  His audience was David’s to lose — or to grow, enlighten, provoke,  inspire. He earned his audience. Every good critic does.

I could not attend the Friday afternoon panel on ‘Criticism Today,’ so I’m dependent here –  God help me — on Michael Granberry’s account (above): During that panel, Tom Fisher from the University of Minnesota contended that the internet is providing “an opportunity to capture a new audience.”

Yes, mos def. But for a critic, a new web reader could be across the planet in Hong Kong. Of what purpose or point would that be if the critic’s focus is Texas architecture? The internet audience is anywhere, but that audience may not be next door in the immediate community that matters. It’s not just that a big-city newspaper delivered so many impressive thousands of readers; it’s that the thousands were all in (roughly) the same place and so had a degree of shared destiny, shared concerns.

For a critic like Goldberger, this may not matter as much; he’s been writing on national-level platforms for so long, the destiny we share with him is in such wide areas as the Art of Architecture and Good Practices and City Life and American Ideals. On this particular Venn diagram, Dallas-Fort Worth certainly appears but only as a relatively small, contested spot. That spot was an entire landscape for David.

Goldberger was not completely comfortable with one audience member’s question about “regional architecture,” whether local varieties still existed, still influenced. His is an understandable wariness. Regionalism is one of those loaded terms that immediately trigger a boosterish response or an argument about defining the term. A quagmire for another symposium.

But I mention it here because, whatever else it is, all architecture is local. More than any other art form, it may have an urbane, universal, even an ages-spanning, historic reach. But ultimately, it exists in a particular space and time. It’s the eyesore the locals have to live with; the people who admire it on TV won’t get hurt if it falls over.  In that sense at least, all architecture is regional, even the sleekest, most impersonal, Miesian work of International Modernism

Which is even more why the architecture criticism David practiced, the architecture criticism once found in the local paper or magazine (or, ahem, radio station) matters. And, of course, it’s why the UT-Arlington center is called the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture.

I should end with saying that, as a colleague who knew David, lunched with him, argued with him and took the 2006 buyout from the News with him, it did my heart good to see a symposium in David’s name. And to hear it open with a talk as thoughtful as Goldberger’s.

It provided some consolation for what we’ve lost.

Image outfront is from Shutterstock.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get back to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

It’s Mayday, which used to be something of a workers’ day, but for our Hollywood-addled purposes, the month marks the beginning of Summer Blockbuster Season. And when it comes to summer box-office action-flick blockbusters, The Matrix may have been the last one (thirteen years ago!) that managed to be visually stunning, hi-tech-spc-fx cool and intellectually provocative, all at the same time.

So how’d it manage that multi-tiered jolt to our pop-cultural synapses? By recombining a lot of not-so-new ideas into one, original punch. Sure, first time out, you caught the John Woo, kung-fu and Alice in Wonderland in-jokes and hommages. But Philip K. Dick? Ghost in the Shell? Doctor Who? Check out this scene-by-scene, sometimes frame-by-frame footnoting of influences.

• TheaterJones review

• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)

• Fort Worth Star-Telegram review

• Mixmaster blog

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:
  

{echoey speaker announcing ]: And some of you will have noticed we are presenting something unique tonight. We’re presenting the opera out in Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.” [cheers, applause continues under]

There were basically two types of people watching The Magic Flute at Cowboys Stadium Saturday. Those who’d never seen an opera, and those who’d never been to Cowboys Stadium. Sometimes, that was the same person.

Elbert Walker: “I’m Elbert Walker. I’m from Austin, Texas.”

Weeks: “Have you ever been to Cowboys Stadium before?”

Walker: “This is my first time.”

Weeks: “Have you ever been to an opera before?”

Walker: “Nope, first time for that, too.”

More than 34,000 people put in requests for the free tickets to see The Magic Flute. Only an estimated 15,000 showed up. There was, after all, a Rangers game next door at the Ballpark in Arlington, and the Mavericks were in the playoffs on television. In fact, during The Magic Flute, some operagoers clustered in the stadium lounges to watch the two games on TV screens.

Saturday’s attendance didn’t break the national record of 32,000 for a single, live stadium simulcast. But Saturday was only the first time the Dallas Opera has presented a stadium simulcast (previous simulcasts were in the Arts District). It took the San Francisco Opera five simulcasts before it set the record of 32,000. And the Cowboys Stadium attendance was considerably scaled up from the Dallas Opera’s original plan for only 7500 tickets to be made available.

Keith Cerny is the Dallas Opera’s general director.

Cerny: “I’m not all that actually focused on the record. This has already enhanced the reputation of the Dallas Opera in the sense that it’s shown that there is a lot of community interest in opera.”

Two years ago, Cerny had the idea for the simulcast even before he was hired to be general director. He visited Dallas, saw Cowboys Stadium and wondered if its 160-foot wide video screens could be used to draw a broader, more diverse audience to the Dallas Opera experience.

It worked. Ninety-two percent of the stadium crowd had never bought tickets before from the Dallas Opera. The hope is that enough of these newcomers may now buy tickets to the company’s regular productions in the Winspear Opera House to make the outreach effort worth it.

But the evening held appeals other than just free admission, as Julie from Bedford pointed out.

Julie: “It’s the only opera I could probably go to that I could have a beer. What other reason would there be?” [laughs]

Cerny: “We tend to regard opera as this very sacred experience and, in fact, there is wonderful opera performed in other parts of the world where you can actually get a beer and a pretzel and it doesn’t seem to undermine the artistic quality one bit. And that was very much a part of the plan.”

[music and applause play under]

There were glitches with the supertitles. And the sound could be deafening at times. But it was  a relaxed, family evening with far more children, even toddlers than normally seen at the Winspear. There also seemed to be few walkouts. The vast majority of the crowd stayed to the very end of Mozart’s three-hour opera.

Celestine Byrd from Lancaster had never seen an opera before. She loved the comedy and the casual mix of food and music.

Byrd: “Really, this is good, this is good. Yes … it’s like going to a Studio Movie Grille.” [laughs]

Image outfront and the screen above from Luke McKenzie, Dallas Opera.

Tomorrow, the Dallas Bach Society performs Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion. Next week, for the first time in 50 years, the Dallas Symphony performs his St. Matthew Passion. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports that the two concerts are linked by more than their composer.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

[‘O Sacred Head, So Wounded’ starts under] A Passion is a musical telling of the last days in the life of Jesus, as related in the different gospels. They were originally performed as part of religious services on Good Friday. For his, Bach even borrowed old church hymns — like this one. As a musical form, a Passion is an oratorio – like Handel’s Messiah. It has soloists, a chorus and a dramatic story but no sets or costumes.

In the early 1700s, Bach composed his Passions for St. Thomaskirche (above), a modest-sized Lutheran church — not a cathedral — in Leipzig, Germany. In modern cities like New York, Berlin or London, having both of Bach’s passions performed during the same Easter season may be common enough, but this seems to be the first time in Dallas it’s happened, and Bach himself never would have heard them in the same week. He composed four perhaps five Passions (the others have been lost), and he more or less alternated them (and revised them) over the years.

In fact, Bach’s use of any instruments in his church music broke with tradition, notes James Richman, director of the Dallas Bach Society. Holy Week comes during Lent, after all, when music-playing was frowned on. Medieval Passions were a capella. As it was, Bach was criticized for introducing fancy Italian-opera techniques like soloists singing in character. But then, Bach, Richman points out, is the only major Baroque composer who never created an opera. These are what he wrote instead, ’sacred operas,’ they’ve been called.

For the Dallas Bach Society’s St. John, director Richman will use pretty much what Bach wrote for: a chorus of sixteen plus two soloists and fifteen musicians playing period instruments. In contrast, for the St. Matthew, Dallas Symphony conductor Jaap van Zweden will lead a 53-piece orchestra with 88 singers — plus a children’s chorus of 60. It’s true the St. Matthew calls for a double chorus and orchestra, but those numbers are closer to quadruple the Dallas Bach Society’s.

One can easily see these two North Texas Passions as a David-and-Goliath story:  the smaller, more authentic Dallas Bach Society vs. the Dallas Symphony continuing the popular convention of large and lush. But there’s more to it than that. The two actually are related.

[music plays and continues under] This is from the final choral section of the St. Matthew Passion (Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder). It’s the classic 1961 recording with Otto Klemperer conducting the huge Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and starring such soloists as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears. The performance is silky, somber – and slow.

[music plays and continues under] This is the same ending conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt in 2000 with his Concentus Musicus Wien. It’s leaner, crisper and quicker. It’s so quick, Harnoncourt’s version of this final chorus is almost half the length of Klemperer’s, five minutes to eight minutes.

The differences between the two recordings reflect the growing influence of the early music movement. The movement has pushed for decades to strip away the grandiosity that 19^th century Romantics brought to musical performances: the sonorous sweep, the epic scale, the over-use of legato to make every note smooth into the next. Pioneers like conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt have advocated the use of historically accurate period instruments, more dance-like rhythms and clipped-off notes with less vibrato or legato.

James Richman of the Bach Society is a long-time proponent of early music. He says the movement has tried to understand just how composers like Bach, Rameau and Handel worked: their tuning, their instruments, how they turned limitations into advantages.

Richman: “What were they actually hearing? How were they actually playing this music? What did their ensembles look like?”

Alexander Kerr is the concertmaster, or lead violinist, of the Dallas Symphony. Before that, he was with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. That’s where Jaap van Zweden was concertmaster before coming to Dallas.  Since 1975, Harnoncourt, the early music pioneer, has been a chief guest conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw — where performing the St. Matthew Passion at Easter has been a popular, annual tradition since before World War II (Harnancourt has even recorded two versions of the St. Matthew.)  So both Kerr and van Zweden learned from Harnoncourt’s early-music approach — as well as from Phillippe Herreweghe and Dutch early-music pioneer Ton Koopman.

Kerr: “Jaap and I sort of a grew up in the tradition of Harnoncourt. And I think with Jaap, he wants to bring that tradition here.”

They represent how far the early-music movement’s influence has now reached. It’s moved from the fringe 30 years ago toward the center. But still, in America, only a few cities like Boston have taken to the movement in the way music audiences have in Europe.

And the DSO can go only so far. As van Zweden admits, the Dallas Symphony can’t really be an authentic Baroque ensemble. It doesn’t have the period instruments or the performers to play them.

van Zweden: “There is a huge difference between a modern orchestra like the Dallas Symphony and a Baroque orchestra which is playing on old instruments. But we have an obligation and not only that, we love this style.”

Kerr defines that style as “transparency” — a matter of clarity and  lightness. Van Zweden sees it as both a matter of the string section’s fingering and bowing — and in larger terms, a moral obligation. It avoids self-indulgence and sentimentality. It keeps you honest, he says. And that’s important here. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is considered one of the peak achievements in Western music – and in Western expressions of faith.

It’s ironic, then, that van Zweden actually prefers Bach’s other passion, the St. John. The St. Matthew is generally considered the greater work — more expansive and all-embracing, more beautifully shaped, more profound, while the St. John is considered thornier, more dramatic or confrontational (it’s the one that’s been accused of anti-Semitism because of John’s habit of calling the crowd “the Jews”).

It’s the ending of St. John, van Zweden says, that gets to him.

van Zweden: “Whenever that comes, I really have to cry.”

Weeks: “Why?”

van Zweden: “For me, this piece is being in a church, asking for forgiveness for everything, and he gives you forgiveness in every part.

“The beauty of Bach is that it cleans the soul.”

• James Richman: If the Passions are akin to Bach’s ‘operas,’ why is Jesus a bass — and not a heroic tenor?

• Alexander Kerr: Why shouldn’t Baroque performance, especially in the string section, employ long sustained notes, legato and sustenuto?

• Alexander Kerr: The two Passions are about, roughly, the same events. Yet they ‘feel’ different — why?

• Jaap van Zweden: How did the tradition of an annual St. Matthew Passion evolve in Amsterdam, when did it start, how did it change?

Photo of van Zweden by Hans van der Woerd/Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, A Box at the Theater, 1880, oil on canvas (left), Berthe Morisot

For the first time in their history, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum have joined forces to present linked shows, one big, one small. But KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports both have masterworks.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram review of The Age of Impressionism

Star-Telegram review of Sargent’s Youthful Genius

Dallas Morning News review of The Age of Impressionism (pay wall)

Morning News review of Sargent’s Youthful Genius (pay wall)

KERA radio story:

Expanded online story:

Both The Age of Impressionism at the Kimbell and Sargent’s Youthful Genius at the Amon Carter come from the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sterling Clark was an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. He was an explorer and a soldier in World War I, an expatriate who lived in Paris. Clark began collecting Old Masters – much as the first wave of American millionaire patrons did in the late 19th century, patrons like Henry Frick and JP Morgan.

But Richard Rand, the Clark’s senior curator, says Sterling Clark and his wife Francine changed directions.

Rand: “Mr and Mrs. Clark decided to leave off the Old Masters. Old Masters were really associated with their parents’ generation and they very quickly turned to more modern paintings.”

That did not mean simply Impressionists. The Age of Impressionism actually offers a cross-section of late 19th-century French paintings. The Clarks bought landscapes, portraits, still lifes, seascapes. They even purchased major works by Jean-Leon Gerome – the most outspoken enemy of the Impressionists (below, his Snake Charmer from 1879).

But it’s apparent that these 73 works were chosen because, as Rand says, they represent the core of the Clarks’ sensibility: Degas, Monet, Pissaro, Morisot and Renoir — the Clarks adored Renoir, the show has 21 of his works, dominating the Kimbell’s central gallery like a show of their own. Clearly, the Clarks preferred beautifully delicate, domestic works — like Morisot’s woman knotting her hair (above) or two rare self-portraits from Renoir. Compared to the way Renoir often reduces his textures to the same pretty blurs, his still life of onions feels admirably direct, humble, detailed and wondrously tactile. If they didn’t go for over-the-top show-stoppers — they were buying works for their home, after all — the Clarks also avoided one radical innovation the Impressionists championed: depictions of modern city life. No train stations, no factories, a few quiet docksides, only one street scene.

Rand: “They didn’t really have a taste for the grit and smoke of the modern city. And so, their view of Impressionism was one primarily of beautiful young women and sunny landscapes. And why not? That’s beautiful.”

In 1955, to house their more than 9,000 artworks, the couple opened the Clark Institute in Williamstown. It’s like an older, larger version of the Kimbell, a museum built around a single private collection. In fact, when the Kimbell was being developed in the ’60s, the Clark was one of its models. And like the Kimbell, the Clark grew too big for its home. So while its Massachusetts campus is being expanded, a portion of the Clark’s collection is touring the world. The Kimbell is the only American museum to host The Age of Impressionism – before it goes to London, Shanghai and Beijing.

But the Kimbell has had eight Impressionist exhibitions in the past 18 years. As Kimbell director Eric Lee has said, showcasing the Impressionists has been part of the Kimbell’s mission since its beginnings. No other artistic style or historic period comes even close to that popularity.

So as grand as The Age of Impressionism is, what’s unusual here is the much smaller show next door at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Fort Worth is the only city on this tour to have two shows from the Clark. Michael Conforti, the director of the Clark, happens to be on the board of the Amon Carter. So when this tour was being arranged, the Amon Carter sought an opportunity, too – but in a way that would complement the Kimbell’s show of French paintings. The Amon Carter owns a classic painting by John Singer Sargent, the kind of high-society portrait that made the expatriate American painter wealthy and internationally famous — and later derided as ’shallow’ by modernists. It so happens that the Clarks collected French artists and Americans, including Sargent. And Ruth Carter Stevenson, the Carter’s long-time president, appreciates Sargent’s work.

“So there was that lovely convergence.”

Andrew Walker is the director of the Amon Carter.

“The other convergence is a notion that the Amon Carter is really beginning to develop: How can we bring masterpieces to Fort Worth in small doses?”

Sargent’s Youthful Genius has only four works. It’s a pocket show, tucked away upstairs in the Amon Carter. But two of the works are masterpieces equal to anything in the Kimbell’s exhibition. The first is Sargent’s portrait of his teacher in Paris, the painter Carolus-Duran. Clearly, the student set out to outshine his master (in fact, Duran was proud of his student’s work — until Sargent began to steal away his clients). The other work is the Fumee d’ambergris (left). It shows a woman draped in layered, nun-like white hood and gown breathing in smoke from a censer burning ambergris, the expensive incense made from sperm whales (and occasionally used in perfumes). Sargent painted the work after a visit to Tangiers, but just who the woman is, what she’s doing, what country or culture she’s supposed to represent: All this Sargent left as attractively vague and dreamy as the incense vapor. The Clarks seemed to have a penchant for this kind of erotic Orientalism (see The Snake Charmer, above), perhaps because of Sterling Clark’s adventuring and exploring in the East.

But beyond its exotic mystery, Sargent’s painting is a stunning display of technique. In visitor polls, it overwhelmingly outranks any other work at the Clark. Thomas Loughman is the Clark’s assistant deputy director.

“The Fumee d’ambergris is a study of the color white, white-on-white, a marvelous essay on color and the handling of paint. So he’s showing off all his talents as a painter.”

The two paintings were virtuoso showcases, calling cards for the outsider Sargent in the Parisian art world. They were his tickets to patronage, to becoming the high-society artist we see at the Amon Carter.

And Sargent painted them when he was 23.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get back to work. Check back tomorrow at 1 p.m. for another one.

Let’s give it up for band, ladies and gentlemen!!

Think of it as a cross between SXSW Interactive and 35 Denton: the cutting edge in techno-pop. It’s a pity the headline across the video gives it away because it’s much more amusing to show this video to friends and have them figure out what’s happening as the little quadrotors (four prop choppers) play away.

YOU GOTTA HAVE FRIENDS. Maxwell Anderson started in January as the Dallas Museum of Art’s new executive director. And last week he made his first major hire: Robert Stein, the former deputy director of research and technology at the Indianapolis Museum of Art — which is what Anderson ran before he came to Dallas. Stein helped Anderson make the IMA a leader in technological innovation, and that’s the plan for him here, heading up the DMA’s “financial, education, conservation, technological, web and operational activities.”

Alex Organ as Philo T. Farnsworth, the rightful inventor of the basic device behind television — in Theatre Three’s The Farnsworth Invention

The invention of television may be as dramatic a story as any show TV has aired. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reviews a stage play getting its North Texas premiere at Theatre Three, a play that lays out the early, decades-long battle for control of the airwaves.

• Dallas Voice review
  

• TheaterJones review

• Pegasus News review

• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)

• Dallas Observer review
  

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

The Farnsworth Invention at Theatre Three is an extreme rarity – an American play that actually concerns history. And science. Of course, it’s the history and science of television, but still … name another drama that made it to Broadway in recent years that discusses lightwaves or the historic development of modern media.

Fittingly, author Aaron Sorkin is a TV and movie pro, best known as the writer of The West Wing and The Social Network. He’s extremely skilled at snappy dialogue, quick cuts, mixing up big drama with both comic relief and actor-y showcases. In fact, Farnsworth, before it ran briefly on Broadway, was a movie script — and it shows. Sorkin can be a slick, glib writer, condensing messy situations and issues into an entertaining crispness. We feel we’ve actually gained some understanding of a complex human reality when Sorkin has just neatly balanced out our sympathies. Simple test of Sorkin’s talent for dialogue vs. a real grasp of moral conundrums: Onstage, his military drama, A Few Good Men, seemed like a great deal of compelling courtroom bluster about not much. Everyone remembers “You can’t handle the truth!” from the film version. Can anyone explain what the “truth” was or what the court martial was about?

With The Farnsworth Invention, Sorkin packs in a lot of information about cathode rays and corporate espionage. But he keeps it quippish and engaging, all the while relating the story of how David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and the founder of NBC, stole the electronic building-blocks of television from an Idaho farmboy named Philo T. Farnsworth. Farnsworth figured out the way images could be broadcast and received electronically — while still a teenager. Sarnoff, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, gained a vision of mass communication as entertainment and cultural uplift back when radio was still a glorified telegraph, a single person transmitting crackly messages to another person. Farnsworth imagines how to build a better mousetrap with vacuum tubes. Sarnoff wants to distribute and control the delivery of cheese. The one is 19th-century thinking, even if it involves electrons; the other is 20th-century thinking; it’s about information networks — even if they’re enforced through legal thuggery. (“Nobody broke the law!” is Sarnoff’s best defense to his wife.)

The Farnsworth Invention is another drama shaped like Amadeus: Sarnoff plays Salieri, our conspiring narrator, the one person who truly appreciates Farnsworth’s genius, even as he tries to co-opt it. Onstage, Farnsworth does interrupt Sarnoff’s narration occasionally, but the two don’t actually argue over ideas. Farnsworth doesn’t present, say, a fundamentally different view of how mass communication should work. They just tussle over who did what, with Sarnoff himself conceding he’s embellished things (the concession makes him more appealing). Sarnoff is still the stage manager, setting the scenes and explaining what’s going on.

Jakie Cabe (above): “I’m David Sarnoff. There’s a rule in story telling that says you never tell your audience something they already know. But I’m going to chance it anyway. The only reason you can see me right now is light is reflecting off me. Light bounces. And I want to make sure that everyone understands this because twenty minutes in, you’ll be asking, ‘What the hell’s happening?’”

What’s happening is a twinned bio-drama that’s a great deal of fun to watch, although that’s partly because Sorkin seriously re-writes history to even out the moral stakes. Otherwise, this would be just a black-and-white story of the nice-inventor-crushed-by-a-phalanx-of-lawyers, another case of American ingenuity sacrificed to American capitalism. So on one side, Sorkin makes Sarnoff torn, agonizing over how his vision of TV as a force for good was lost to boob-tube advertising. On the other, he makes Farnsworth a tragic failure. In reality, Farnsworth won a million-dollar settlement against RCA. True, he died in obscurity — and with a drinking problem — but after losing control of TV, he still went on to become a leading pioneer in advanced electronics.

We can overlook much of this — even Sorkin’s talky, off-the-point ending — because it is fun to watch, thanks to Theatre Three’s crackerjack production. It’s a triumph for director and set designer Jeffrey Schmidt. Judging from the trailer of the Broadway show, it had a relatively conventional-looking, realistic set. But this is a play about light, controlling light, and Schmidt turns Theatre Three into a fantasy of an old-school TV studio, a land of giants long ago, with the entire stage floor designed like a test pattern and huge spotlights bracketing the set. Thanks to Amanda West’s smart lighting and video work, we see a stark, noir-ish world, both stylish and a little grainy and fading-to-black. All this suits Sorkin’s period simulation, his wisecracking talk, his TV-drama moral universe, his penchant for legal face-offs. One half-expects to see Perry Mason or Rod Serling walk onstage.

The show’s performances are anchored by the two leads: the superb Alex Organ as the recklessly innocent Philo Farnsworth — it’s a complete about-face from the actor’s utterly convincing, cold-hearted heel in Second Thought’s Red Light Winter — and Jakie Cabe as Sarnoff. Considering Hank Azaria played the role on Broadway, Cabe makes casting sense as perhaps our most Azaria-ish local actor. With seeming ease, he fills out what Sorkin needs in Sarnoff: a talent for quips-with-an-edge but also a sad-eyed sense that he can’t help his drive to survive, his need to win. Cabe, Organ and Schmidt make this Farnsworth Invention breathe life  – and look sharp.

It’s a show about TV. Looking sharp counts for a lot.

San Francisco’s de Young Museum recently hosted a superlative exhibition, Masters of Venice, filled with Titians and Tintorettos. But it was a painting that wasn’t there that impressed me the most. Bellini’s The Procession of the True Cross (above) hadn’t actually left Venice’s Galleria d’academia, where it’s housed, but the Masters show had a life-size, highly detailed, digital reproduction, and it was dazzling. It took up most of a wall. I’d never realized it was that big nor that Bellini had used a great deal of gold leaf on it. None of the images online or in art history books does the painting justice. Much of the entire upper third is gilded; it glitters, bright as brass.

That’s because the arches and spires of the Basilica San Marco, the church dominating the painting, are covered with gold leaf. In the piazza today, we don’t catch all the original effect because the gold leaf is thin, it’s 700-800 years old. Even so, when the sun sets on a clear day and the angle of the sunlight is right, we can see something of the shine, of what led the average Venetian to dub the basilica Chiesa d’Oro (the Church of Gold). The basilica dazzles.

For all of the genius artists whom the Venetian patriarchs hired, for all the beauty and splendor that makes the city so beguiling, there was a large degree of nouveau riche vulgarity here. Around the corner to the right between the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica is an ornate entrance, the Porta di Carta (or the Gate of Documents — because it linked the palace with the city archives). Over the doorway is a life-sized statue of the doge who built it. He’s also covered in gold: the Venetian Donald Trump.

All that showy bling proclaimed Venice as what it was: one of the richest cities on the planet, the world’s first, true, merchant empire, the major faucet controlling trade between East and West.

Standing in the de Young, all this struck me — and the realization that Venice’ Piazza San Marco was the pre-electric Wall Street and Times Square rolled into one showplace. It was the big money and the high wattage. In our terms: Venice’ gold leaf was the 15th-century version of the lights glittering on Dallas’ Omni Hotel or the spotlights marking out the ghostly, rocket trajectory of the Hunt Hill Bridge. The sun shines and Venice looks like a Romanesque vision of the Gates of Heaven. The sun sets and Dallas glows — looking like diamonds and video games. Welcome to our own new merchant empire.

Actually, what Patrick Kennedy said the Bank of America’s argon-green stripes reminded him of was a giant stack of money. Kennedy was one of the panelists for Bright Lights. Great City?, the Dallas Center for Architecture’s public discussion last week about the new swarms of lightning bugs that flicker around downtown Dallas: the Omni, the Hunt Building (above), One Arts Plaza and so on.

It was Kennedy’s D Magazine column last November, The Lite-Briting of Dallas, that partly prompted the panel discussion. The other prompt: The fact that new technological developments in LED design and computer programming have made our new architectural fireworks possible. In his essay, Kennedy seriously questioned the need for all this new lighting, doubted its effectiveness in improving downtown as a vibrant cultural or economic center. He didn’t think a postcard skyline matters that much to a city’s fortunes, anyway. Other than the Sears Tower, does anyone remember what Chicago looks like?

During the panel, Kennedy (in tan jacket, left) was more subdued than his column. He really didn’t put up much of a fight. Too bad. But as UT-Arlington architecture professor Wanda Dye said from the audience, the event was somewhat stacked against him.

With KERA’s Jeff Whittington as moderator (far left), the panelists included Scott Lowe (the design architect of the Omni), Kennedy, Marcel Quimby (of Quimby McCoy Preservation Architecture), lighting designer Scott Oldner (who dressed up the Uptown luxury tower Park Seventeen) and urban planner Michael Buckley (of UT-A’s Center for Metropolitan Density).

As they went along, panelists would agree with Kennedy’s larger points about the city’s neglect of pressing urban issues (walkability, livability, affordability). Or the fact that the Omni’s billboard-sized pop-up ads may be insomnia-inducing for nearby bleary-eyed apartment dwellers. But then came their counter-arguments: The Omni, Quimby noted, has certainly brought new pedestrian life to what had been a derelict urban area. A city’s skyline is a major appeal of a city, Buckley argued. It’s a lucrative piece of real estate, developers build and sell with those views in mind. And exterior lighting is meant to enhance architecture not to disguise mediocre designs — this last from Oldner (who used the term ‘enhance’ often enough it called to mind DMN critic Scott Cantrell’s description of such lighting as the architectural equivalent of breast enhancement).

So the evening became, more or less, a Defense of Flash. So much so, that by the end, one lighting industry businessman in the audience expressed satisfaction with the proceedings. But in taking on some of Kennedy’s assertions, no one seemed to address the illogical nature of his central line of thought — or its streak of Puritanism.

Nor did anyone really talk about the aesthetics of such lighting.

Basically, Kennedy argues that all this optic dazzle is a childish distraction from Dallas’ more pressing issues. It makes people think, Hey, downtown’s looking jazzy and happ’nin’ — when it ain’t. So we go on, ignoring the city’s general lack of coordination when it comes to reviving its core. But this presents an either/or opposition that doesn’t really exist. Kennedy’s message is: You Can’t Enjoy Any Building Baubles Until You Get Your Homework Done. This also suggests that the one factor, lighting, may actually prevent real urban improvement by distracting us, draining away resources. But I suspect people aren’t fooled by all the electric scrimshaw. We enjoy it, but does it really make a suburbanite move here? Over more practical considerations, like real estate costs or ease of commute?

Besides, all the corporate money and effort that’s gone into these light bulbs, if re-directed, wouldn’t make much of a dent in downtown’s more serious problems. And I also suspect that it was never a real choice. No CEO ever considered — for longer than a minute — Hmmmm, should we spend money on dressing up our headquarters with cool new night lights? Or should we make some effort, however small, toward solving Dallas’ thorny urban transit issues?

Night lights!

To be fair, Kennedy quickly made it clear in the discussion that he actually doesn’t oppose such lighting on principle. He lives downtown, he looks right out on the Pegasus, which he likes. And to be the fair in the other direction, the arguments against him often had little more than an economic basis. They made exterior lighting seem effective and grimly inevitable without ever making an attractive case for it, as something anyone might actually want or enjoy.

For instance: Kennedy claimed the Omni is not improving downtown in general. But, Buckley countered, that wasn’t the intention. It was specifically built to help the Convention Center, that’s all. And it seems to be succeeding. Hurrah for that, although it’s not clear how this justifies the fancy lighting. Kennedy claimed that “If signature lighting were driven by economic forces, the phenomenon would exist elsewhere. But it doesn’t” — and cited successful, visually subdued cities with much livelier downtowns than ours, such as Vancouver and Denver.

But he was being rather selective here — as Buckley showed with projected images. Any number of cities around the world have been eagerly tarting themselves up with lighting, including Paris and Hong Kong. It’s a different context for our need to compete: Does Dallas want to be more like livable, earnest, appealingly Canadian Vancouver?  Or more like splashy, impractical, oil-rich, liquor-banning Dubai? (Interestingly, the one city no one mentioned — the one that has probably more LEDs per square inch than any other place on the planet — is Las Vegas. Tons of wattage and lots of tourists, and perhaps the worst real-estate economy in the country. A sharp disjunction between lights and a healthy local economy.)

One thing the discussion definitely wasn’t about was aesthetics. Surely, there are good and bad examples of signature lighting — even Kennedy likes the Pegasus. But what principles beyond getting the building noticed and showcasing the owner’s name in Big Letters govern these designs? Hence, my request, in the question-and-answer session, that the panelists name examples of what they thought were good and bad lit-up buildings, and no fair voting for their own projects. Diplomatically — or with real honesty — Oldner, the lighting designer, said the only bad lighting was a building that hadn’t been lit up yet. OK, so everyone needs neon; that’s a sales job, not an aesthetic. To his credit, Oldner provided the evening’s most enlightening anecdote. A few years ago, he and a team devised a new lighting plan for downtown — not the decorative stuff but the ordinary, vital, lighting-the-streets-and-making-things-safe stuff. The city’s ultimate verdict on all their work? We’ll just let the developers decide. Welcome to our urban design free-for-all.

Personally, I think the LEDs on the Hunt Building do, in fact, enhance it. They augment an ungainly building by making it look actively garish at night. But then, I lean more toward funky old-school. My favorite lights in Dallas are the Mussolini-ish floodlights at Fair Park and the stripes on the Greyhound bus station (left). In its aim, the Greyhound’s neon is as crass a corporate logo as any skyscraper’s. But it and the Mercantile’s clock faces, which resemble a child’s drawing of an art-deco robot-future, have something human that our other signatures lack. They’re retro-cool, but they don’t set out to overwhelm and conquer. They’re charming. And a bus station needs all the charm it can get.

So does Dallas. Charm is a word rarely applied to this city.

It’s safe to say more LED embellishments are on the way because lighting is a blunt, cheap way for commercial dominance, for rivalry to express itself. I once described the effect that the Bank of America’s tower-of-greenbacks had on the skyline to a friend who’d never been to Dallas. For instance, it can easily be seen from airplanes.

“Oh,” he said. “You mean it won.”

Precisely. LEDs are the new ‘we’re the tallest skyscraper in town,’ the new Basilica San Marco, the new CEO ego trip-by-branding. It’s no surprise that the majority of bright city lights that Buckley cited are in our new capitals of commerce: Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, where the world’s tallest skyscrapers now stand. No surprise, as well, that old-style masters of the universe like the Empire State Building have added new colors to their night-time mascara.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Where would our dull lives be without the corporate fight to impress us, dazzle us, get our attention? But it’s worth noting that this is the basic impulse that makes nighttime Dallas look like the carnival has arrived — because commercial self-interest is probably not going away. Trying to get that impulse to preen in ways that won’t cause retina burn would seem to be the aim. One audience member suggested someone should ‘curate’ the skyline, an unlikely idea in our land of free-market-takes-all, but it was so refreshing and unexpected, it was received with some wonder and enthusiastic head-nodding.

Still, recall the anecdote about actual city-planning for practical, safety-producing, crime-reducing street lighting. Let the developers decide.

As for the lights that started all this discussion, the Omni’s (above), no one can deny they’re not absolute eye-poppers. At a distance, they rivet your attention, giant glowing letters and numbers seem to float across the skyline. Up-close, like any Jumbotron, they can be jaw-dropping. Blinding and garish but also awe-inspiring.

But they could also be, well . . .  entertaining. Endearing. Even a new art form. They’re almost there, already. Really. Have the programmers dump all the scrolling business cards. Create, instead, some stick-figure, comic-strip, Flash animations. Don’t go all Disney-artsy-ambitious. Think of a skyline with a giant ‘Krazy Kat’ or ‘Calvin and Hobbes‘ acted out on it. Maybe even skip the word balloons and use nothing but images and actions that anyone can grasp from a half-mile away. Use only short storylines, characters evoked with a few squiggles and eye dots, make a giant neon puppet show, some 20 stories tall.

You want to draw a crowd downtown? That’ll do it.

Image: Bergsengs.com

Big congratulations to Art&Seek’s Jerome Weeks and KERA-FM’s Bill Zeeble! Their arts coverage has been recognized by the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters 2011-2012 Radio Contest.

Jerome won first place in the specialty or beat reporting category.  We are especially proud of him, as his arts reporting was singled out in a category that considers work across all genres of news (health, education, etc.).

The body of work  included these stories:

A look at the artist-in-residency program at the Fairmont Hotel.

An explanation of what the heck countertenors do and why they’re important in Baroque opera

A trip behind the scenes at the Dallas Historical Society archives

KERA fans are familiar with Bill Zeeble’s news reporting, but careful listeners may also have picked up on his deep appreciation and knowledge of music.  That, and his great use of sound, was recognized with a second place award for Use of Actuality-Production for his piece on the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s collaboration on a percussion premiere with D’Drum and Stewart Copeland.

All told,  your mighty KERA news team took home an impressive 9 awards.

KERA radio story:

Expanded online story:

In January, when the Dallas Opera announced its live simulcast in Cowboys Stadium, only 7500 seats were available. Those seats were quickly snatched up. Dallas Opera general director Keith Cerny says they really didn’t know what to expect.

Cerny: “This is the first time that the Dallas Opera has held this kind of event in a stadium, and we didn’t really have anything to go on in terms of estimating numbers. I will say I’ve been particularly delighted in seeing how quickly this audience has come together in the metroplex.”

With 21,000 requests, the Opera has decided to open up both sides of the stadium. People will watch the live feed from the Winspear Opera House of the April 28th performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. An additional 5,000 seats are now being reserved for schools and student groups.

Requests for the free tickets are still being accepted, but they can only be done through the Dallas Opera’s website. So far, the requests have come from 23 states and Canada. And 93 percent have come from people not found in the opera company’s own database.

Cerny: “Which is very much part of the goal here. We’re trying to tap into a new set of people. And of course, over time, we hope to build them into single ticket buyers.”

Several opera companies around the country have had success with such sports venue simulcasts. The San Francisco Opera is believed to have attracted the largest single audience with 32,000 people in AT&T Park.

Image outfront from The Onion Sports Network.

Full press release follows:

OVER 21,000 TICKETS REQUESTED FOR THE DALLAS OPERA’S 2012 COWBOYS STADIUM SIMULCAST!

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MOZART’S THE MAGIC FLUTE LIVE!

SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012 at 7:30 PM

STADIUM DOORS OPEN AT 6:00 PM

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FREE SEATING, FREE PARKING, PAID CONCESSIONS

FREE TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TDO WEBSITE

DALLASOPERA.ORG/COWBOYS

DALLAS, TX, MARCH 1, 2012 – The Dallas Opera, in partnership with Cowboys Stadium, is thrilled to announce that more than 21,000 tickets to the Dallas Opera’s April 28^th Cowboys Stadium Simulcast have been requested by opera lovers from throughout Texas and 23 additional states.  Ticket requests have also come in from the District of Columbia and Canada, since the joint announcement was made one month ago on January 26^th at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

Additional data collected from those making ticket requests indicate that, as of today, 93% of participating households have no previous purchasing history with the Dallas Opera.  For many, the Cowboys Stadium Simulcast will mark their first, live experience of the art form in any venue.

Gene Jones (the wife of Dallas Cowboys Owner, President and General Manager Jerry Jones), whose vision led to the Stadium’s museum-quality collection of contemporary art, set the stage for the announcement explaining, “Sports and art are not typically thought of as belonging together.  Yet sporting events and great art do something similar—they get people talking.”

Now, people are talking about family outings to the Dallas Opera at Cowboys Stadium, many to experience a live classical performance or opera for the very first time.

An additional five thousand reserved seats will be made available to area schools and student groups as part of the Dallas Opera’s newly expanded educational efforts.

Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE will be simulcast live on Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 7:30 PM (doors open at 6:00 PM) at the high-tech home of the Dallas Cowboys at One Legends Way in Arlington, Texas.  Patrons will be able to enjoy a complete, unabridged live performance on the world’s largest high-definition video board structure, comprised of four massive viewing screens (the largest, 72 feet tall and 160 feet wide) suspended directly above the playing field.

Reserved seating is still available (up to 10 seats per person) through the Dallas Opera website at www.dallasopera.org/cowboys.

“We are excited to partner with the Dallas Opera on such a distinctive event,” said Dallas Cowboys Executive Vice President of Brand Management Charlotte Anderson.  “Our organization admires and respects The Dallas Opera’s original thinking and stewardship in making a ground-breaking event like this a reality.  We truly value the importance of the arts in our community, and we hope that this first-of-its-kind opera broadcast gives us a way of sharing our love of the arts with a new audience at Cowboys Stadium.”

“One of the goals of the Dallas Opera is to bring great singing and world-class theater to the widest possible audience,” explained Dallas Opera General Director and CEO Keith Cerny.  “As part of our commitment to expanding our community outreach we are thrilled to announce an unprecedented, ‘game-changing’ collaboration with the Cowboys organization.  Let me also say that the Dallas Opera is especially grateful for the generous support of the Jones Family, encouraging our efforts to create one of the most unique and memorable events in the history of this opera company.

“I hope that the centralized location of Cowboys Stadium will draw music and theater lovers from all across North Texas to this free simulcast of Mozart’s action-packed masterpiece,” Mr. Cerny adds, “especially those who, for a variety of reasons, have perceived opera as an intimidating or challenging art form, rather than the fantastic entertainment experience it is.”

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THE MAGIC FLUTE will star soprano Ava Pine, the Dallas Opera’s very first Resident Young Artist, in the role of Pamina—one of her personal favorites.  Ms. Pine, a Baroque specialist with a tremendous local fan base, made her Dallas Opera debut as Anna in our 2006 production of Nabucco, and has appeared on our stage in numerous roles including Adele in Die Fledermaus, Zozo in The Merry Widow, Elvira in L’italiana in Algeri, the Slave in Salome and, most recently, as one of three featured artists in the Dallas Opera’s Family Concert, performed in the Winspear last November.

Wherever she goes, Ms. Pine makes the critics struggle for superlatives.  Of her 2008 role debut as Adele, Dallas Morning News Classical Music Critic Scott Cantrell wrote: “She can sparkle through coloratura, but also radiate lower-register warmth.  And she’s no less dazzling an actress, dancing, flirting and pretty much tying everyone around her little finger.”

Ava Pine’s performance is made possible with support from The Charron and Peter Denker Rising Stars Endowment Fund.

Alongside Ms. Pine, the Dallas Opera has cast celebrated tenor Shawn Mathey as Tamino.  “He is simply one of the finest Mozartean tenors in the world,” explains Artistic Director Jonathan Pell “and we have spent years trying to tempt him to come to Dallas for his long-awaited debut on our stage.  I think audiences will find him absolutely thrilling, from his first note to his last.”

Mr. Mathey’s 2011-12 Season engagements have included debuts with San Francisco Opera as Don Ottavio and with Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera as Lysander in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  He is also slated to record Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F minor with Marek Janowski conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romand.  Praised by Lawrence A. Johnson of Chicago Classical Review for “displaying a honeyed tenor and proving both ardent and amusing,” Mr. Mathey is in tremendous demand overseas (Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy, and Sweden) as well as at opera companies across the U.S.

“This production from Lyric Opera of Chicago,” says Mr. Pell, “is the most magical Magic Flute I’ve ever experienced.  It’s been revived there, time and again, because it’s so immensely popular but it’s a production that could never have been done in our previous performance venue.

“Our move to the Winspear Opera House has finally made it possible to bring this incredibly charming, classic, August Everding production to Dallas and we’ve gone out of our way to stack-the-deck with the addition of a delightful cast.”

Bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi, a comic genius who nearly galloped away with the Dallas Opera’s final production in the Music Hall, The Italian Girl in Algiers, returns in the role of the original Birdman, Papageno, Tamino’s love-sick companion.  The multifaceted Mr. Carfizzi’s recent engagements include Paolo in Simon Boccanegra with San Francisco Opera, Brander in Le damnation de Faust (Berlioz) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Nourabad in Les pêcheurs de perles for Seattle Opera, Dr. Bartolo in Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Canadian Opera Company, and additional roles at the Met.

Slovakian soprano L’ubica Vargicová, praised by the international media for her remarkable technique, her glittering high notes, and her commanding stage presence has made the Queen of the Night a signature role since her operatic debut while still a student in Bratislava, and she has left audiences gasping around the world.  The New York Times wrote of her Metropolitan Opera debut in this role, that Ms. Vargicová “dispatched the Queen of the Night’s devilish coloratura with fearless attack, bright tone, and impressive accuracy.”  That she is breathtakingly beautiful is merely the icing on the cake; it is her artistry in the coloratura repertoire that has enabled her to earn rave reviews as Lucia di Lammermoor, Ophelia, Amina in Bellini’s La sonnambula, and Marie in La Fille du régiment opposite Juan Diego Flórez.

Bass Raymond Aceto, the chilling Sparafucile in the Dallas Opera’s acclaimed 2011 production of Rigoletto, has appeared in more than a dozen productions with TDO since his 1995 debut as Monterone, portraying a host of unforgettable characters from Leporello in Don Giovanni (2003), Colline in La bohème (1999), and Fafner in Siegfried (2000) to Lodovico in the Dallas Opera’s 2009 inaugural production in the Winspear Opera House: Verdi’s Otello.

Opera News reported in November 2008 “The American bass has a magnificently warm, round and full voice coupled to a compelling stage presence.”  He was also identified as one of the “world class” artists in the Dallas Opera’s cast of Rigoletto (Opera Warhorses).

Bass Kevin J. Langan, who has sung numerous roles with the Dallas Opera, will appear in the role of The Speaker.  He was recently described as “the complete package: vibrant, ringing tone, polished phrasing, incisive diction and convincing, unfussy acting” (MusicalCriticism.com).  Mr. Langan has nearly 1300 performances to his credit and a vast repertoire (more than 80 roles from the early Baroque through the 20^th century) that has made him a leading bass for San Francisco Opera for three decades.  Recently, he became the first artist in SFO history to sing 300 performances in leading roles.  Mr. Langan has also been a leading bass for Lyric Opera of Chicago for the past eleven years, in addition to fourteen seasons—and 165 performances—at Santa Fe.

Tenor David Cangelosi, one of the most consistently insightful opera artist bloggers in cyberspace, will sing the role of Monostatos.  Heaped with critical plaudits for his contributions to the success of the recent San Francisco Ring Cycle, Heard and Seen International declared him: “…possibly the greatest Mime ever.  Nobody has ever been more effective or as amusing as David Cangelosi…he made every minute of this often annoying role a total pleasure.”  He most recently appeared with the Dallas Opera in our monumental, widely acclaimed 2011 production of Boris Godunov.

~~~~

Mozart’s 1791 masterpiece is one of the greatest comic operas of all time, made all the more interesting by the poignant—even disturbing—moments endured by the lead characters, as they attempt to earn their “happy ending.”

The Magic Flute comes by its zany plot honestly, having been inspired not only by 18^th century Masonic practices, but by literature reflecting several different traditions.

The music, on the other hand, couldn’t be more polished or more focused.  Reflecting the highest ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and filled with wit, warmth, and genuine humanity, The Magic Flute continues to bewitch audiences with its variety of perfectly expressed musical moods—from utterly comic to soaring and sublime.

~~~~

Soprano Angela Mannino will make her Dallas Opera debut in the role of Papagena, and the Three Ladies will be sung by soprano Caitlin Lynch, mezzo-soprano Lauren McNeese, and mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani in their company debuts.

Resident Young Artist Aaron Blake will return to the Dallas Opera stage in the dual role of Second Priest and First Man in Armor.  Bass Darren K. Stokes will sing the role of the Second Man in Armor.

The simulcast performance will be conducted at the Winspear Opera House by the Dallas Opera’s Mrs. Eugene McDermott Music Director Graeme Jenkins, who most recently raised the baton on our season opening production of Lucia di Lammermoor.

Maestro Jenkins drew tremendous praise for the work that brought our 2010-2011 Season to a close: Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.  According to Dallas Morning News Classical Music Critic Scott Cantrell, it was “a triumph for any opera house, anywhere.”  Additional plaudits came his way for his superb conducting of the Dallas Opera’s triumphant new production of Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, which played to sold-out houses this month.

Jenkins has conducted more than a hundred different operas from Australia to Amsterdam to Vienna, and has served as music director for this company since 1994.

This production will be staged by Matthew Lata, making his TDO debut.

Mr. Lata has staged more than a hundred productions with leading opera companies throughout the U.S.  He began his career as a director on the staff of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for five seasons.  During that time he directed revivals and special productions for the Lyric Opera of Chicago Center for American Artists.  Currently, he serves as Director of Opera at Florida State University.

Scenic design for The Magic Flute is by Jörg Zimmermann in his company debut, with costumes designed by Renata Kalanke.

Lighting design will be by Duane Schuler, with wig and make-up designs by David Zimmerman.

Chorus preparation will be by Dallas Opera Chorus Master Alexander Rom and Children’s Chorus Master Melinda Cotton.

~~~~

Single tickets for the remaining mainstage productions of the Dallas Opera’s “Tragic Obsessions” Season are on sale now, starting at just $25, through the Dallas Opera Ticket Services Office at 214.443.1000 or online at www.dallasopera.org.  Student Rush best-available tickets can be purchased at the lobby box office for $25 (one per valid Student I.D.) ninety minutes prior to each performance.

Secure your seats today for the remaining spring mainstage productions: La traviata, and The Magic Flute, as well as the Dallas Opera’s brand-new production of a haunting1980 chamber opera: The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies.  Marking the operatic debut of director Kevin Moriarty, Artistic Director of the Dallas Theater Center, this work will play to intimate audiences in the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre across the street from the Winspear.

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A re-posting: A master Japanese calligrapher in North Texas may seem like a fish out of water. But KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports that Chaco Terada has found her own style here — as well as a little piece of Japan. The Crow Collection of Asian Art currently has a small retrospective of of Terada’s works, Word Spirit, along with David Gibson’s photos of the Kasuga Grand Shrine in Japan — so we decided to re-post this story from two years ago.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

[sound of water gurgling]

Chaco Terada sits at a low table in a simple, spare, Japanese-style room of tatami mats and sliding paper doors. It’s a studio behind photographer David Gibson’s house in Dallas, and it looks out on a lush, quiet garden (below), a Japanese refuge of bamboo and stone and a pond filled with large, slow-moving koi .

It’s easy to forget this is Texas. Terada comes here to meditate — which means to meditate and practice calligraphy. [sounds of paper rustling]. She lays out what are called the ‘four treasures’ of Japanese writing: water, paper, sticks of ink and the flat stone used to mix the ink with water. Just doing this, she says,  just practicing brushstrokes can make her happy.

Chaco: “How the brush move, or my finger move, or the color. . . . I love those.”

Many children in Japan are taught calligraphy beginning with the ancient, blocky Chinese symbols and then eventually the more fluid, Japanese style or kana. But Terada says, when she was born in Toyama, Japan, she was born into calligraphy. Her father, Soseki Terada, is a master calligrapher there — a マスターの書家, teaching classes of 50 students at a time.

Chaco: “I started when I was about three years old. Even I didn’t know how to sit the Japanese way. So I sat on my mother’s lap, just to play with a brush.”

It wasn’t until she was a young adult, visiting other countries through cultural exchange programs like Up with People, that Terada turned to calligraphy as a way of conveying something of herself to foreigners and connecting to home. Terada’s first husband brought her to Dallas in 1992. She’s taught classes in area schools and has demonstrated calligraphy at the Crow Collection of Asian Art — after she learned English as a second language at El Centro and Richland College.

Chaco: “As I study English, I also did a lot of ex – experiment? – with calligraphy or even I did more like a sculpture.”

Terada’s work has appeared on book covers. Her writing and photos have been shown in galleries in Santa Fe and North Texas. Her work is currently on display at the Joel Cooner Gallery in Dallas. Cooner recalls seeing Terada’s work four years ago when she was creating bold,  dashed-off, iconic pieces, often of a single word or symbol.

Cooner: “Then I saw on the side, a series of paintings on silk, which were smaller, more delicate. I liked her work mainly because it wasn’t like any other calligraphy I saw.”

That’s because it’s no longer conventional Japanese calligraphy. Terada is using the traditions she was taught, but now she creates swirling, dreamy collages.

She starts with a photo. An assistant uses a computer to manipulate and blur the image and then print it on silk. Terada adds a second layer of silk and a third. On these, she uses her brushes and inks. Sometimes, so she doesn’t create a recognizable word, she pivots the silk sideways or upside-down.

The resulting paintings look immediate but refined or playful.  They can recall some of the works of the abstract expressionists – but they’re like abstract expressionism imbued with a Japanese sense of restraint and elegance. They can be soft yet sudden, as if something rapid were glimpsed through a veil.

Chaco: “A lot of calligrapher wants to show the big power splash, it’s just really masculine. But somehow, I feel the beauty of shade or mist or something you don’t really see clearly. This is a feeling. It’s a movement of energy.”

In fact, there is something literally hidden about some of her paintings. Terada contemplates the original photo until she distills what it means to her into a single word or phrase — like “mirror” or “forest” or time.” In the past, she used to write that word or phrase on the reverse of her paintings. Cooner reports that he deliberately has these works framed with a little window on the back to keep what he calls “the poem” visible.

But now her process is different.

Chaco: “And then, when the silk ready, I kind of sit and then just look. And then — let that word go.”

In short, this is calligraphy beyond words. Terada has a separate series of photos in which she creates images of light through rice paper or folded origami paper, paper that’s been written on. But again, no words are clearly visible (above right). Calligraphy was created to say something — beautifully. Terada uses calligraphic techniques to say something beautiful — hidden, fleeting, barely seen.

Her father might not approve, Terada admits. But she doesn’t regret extending the traditions that he began teaching her more than 40 years ago.

Chaco: “I think it’s pleasure to find your stroke or your way of expression. So I think this is what any artist supposed to do.”

The celebrations for the new Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge start Friday. Closing Saturday’s festivities will be a band most North Texans have never heard. But KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports they’ve been hailed in New York, France, Australia. And now they’re back home, playing in West Dallas after 30 years.

• Schedule of celebration activities this weekend.
• Dallas Observer story

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

[“Walking On” instrumental intro continues under]

Twelve years ago, Mike Buck of Austin’s Antone’s Records handed Noel Waggener an old cracked 45 rpm record. Waggener is an Austin DJ, and he runs the Heavy Light record label with Charisse Kelly. He’s had an interest in out-of-the-way soul groups, Texas funk obscurities — and here was an old treasure like nothing else.

Noel Waggener: “I was just, I was floored. A gospel record? That sounds like early Funkadelic or Sly and the Family Stone?”

A gospel record – by an unknown group Waggener would spend years tracking down. They were the Relatives. They were formed by two brothers from West Dallas: the Reverend Gean West and the Reverend Tommy West

Gean West (left) got into music early, hitting the road in 1957, singing gospel with such groups as the Mighty Golden Voices and later, the long-established Southernaires.

Gean West: “It was seven of us in a ’52 Cadillac. Believe it or not, we left with a tank of gas and six dollars between all of us.”

At the time, black touring artists couldn’t stay in most hotels. Tommy West says the family’s West Dallas home became a layover for performers like The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Sam Cooke…

Tommie West: “Aretha Franklin, Shirley Caesar. And, what’s this girl’s name? Tina Turner! She even visited my mama’s house.”

Gean West: “And that’s how we learned a lot about singing. We was hooked up with all the traveling groups.”

Back in West Dallas in 1970, the Wests formed the Relatives with five other musicians. They recorded three singles with a feverish fusion of funk rhythms, acid-rock guitar, gospel fervor and raspy James Brown-like vocals. That mix was intentional — a way to reach beyond the usual churchy audience.

["Don't Let Me Fall" starts under]

Tommy West (left): “We wanted to give the younger generation something, you know, put a little funk behind it. And we came up with that beat. And it worked out.”

Except on radio. The Relatives’ music didn’t fit gospel or pop station playlists. So the Relatives were stuck playing apartments and the occasional church. In fact, they were fearful of playing churches because of the possibly angry reception, so they slipped a few gospel standards into their repertoire — “something to fall back on,” Gean West says. The group’s biggest event was playing outdoors for 5,000 in a public park for the West Dallas Community Cleanup Campaign in the early ’80s. That got them Dallas nightclub bookings — for the first time. But without airplay or record-label support, the group soon disbanded.

End of story. Until, that is, Noel Waggener heard that cracked old 45. By then, the Wests were ministers of their own small churches: Gean West with God’s Anointed Community Church of God in Christ in West Dallas, Tommy West with the No Walls Ministry in South Dallas. That’s how Waggener finally tracked them down – through a fellow minister. When Gean West told fellow band members like Earnest Tarkington (right), their original drummer, about the contact –

Gean West: [laughing] “They didn’t believe me.”
Tarkington: “Really. [laughing] Me and Tommy.”
Gean West: “Him and Tommy thought I’d just gotten old.”

The second happy surprise came when looking around for more recorded material, they learned veteran Dallas sound engineer and producer Phil York still had session tapes from 1974 — with five more unreleased songs by the band. In 2009, Waggener put out the Relatives’ first album, Don’t Let Me Fall. With the addition of younger members, including Gean’s son, Cedric, the Relatives rocked the South by Southwest conference in Austin that year. They’ve played on Austin City Limits and have toured (and recorded) with Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears (they’ve dubbed their collaboration on ‘You Been Lyin’ ‘gospel punk.’) They’ve played major festivals in France and Australia. They’ve toured to Houston and New Orleans, performed outdoors at Lincoln Center in New York with gospel legend Mavis Staples. And in two weeks, they’re scheduled to head back into the studio — to record a second album, this time with Spoon’s Jim Eno as producer (who also did the honors on the Honeybears’ new CD, Scandalous).

After all that, the Relatives are still pretty much unknown in their hometown. Their Bridge-O-Rama concert Saturday is the group’s first outdoor event in West Dallas in 30 years — the first, in fact, since that West Dallas Cleanup Campaign (their first area nightclub gig was at the Loft last year). Yet after all these years, the band isn’t really an oldies act. They never made it big, never had a hit to sit easy and coast on. Which may be why they feel utterly classic, yet utterly fresh.

The original Relatives are in their 60s and 70s. (“What amazes me,” says Tarkington. “I’m the youngest original, and I’m 65.”) Yet onstage, they have an open-hearted energy — with the shouts and hand claps, the soul-group glides and spins, their evident joy in singing, passing the leads and harmonies back and forth. When it comes to onstage energy, Waggener even compares them to Iggy Pop’s early punk group.

Noel Waggener: “When they book the Relatives, I think a lot of times, people think they’re going to be getting the Blind Boys. And they end up getting the Stooges.”

[live music starts under, sounds of yelling and clapping]

One secret to their fountain of youth is clear on a Sunday morning at the Reverend Tommy West’s No Walls Ministry tucked behind a concrete bunker of a shopping strip on South Lancaster. West (in orange shirt, left, blessing a church member) preaches and sings, and members testify for two-and-a-half hours.  It’s already been a workout — West has taken off his suit jacket — but then he says the spirit’s moving him to run and he zips off, jogging. About a dozen church members follow as he lopes around the congregation three times. Then they start back to singing and praying, non-stop. Like many preachers, the reverend will do it all over again for another service this evening.

Before and after any show in a nightclub or on a concert stage, the Relatives can be seen praying together.  Tommy West says that’s because there’s no difference between this service and the Relatives’ nightclub shows. It’s all a part of getting outside the walls of the church, trying to appeal to younger people. It’s a form of  electrifying ministry.

Tommy West: “God said take the Word into all the world. Even though it’s a nightclub, everybody in there is still God’s peoples.”

[live music wraps up, Tommy announces, “You may be seated – if you can!”

With Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears at South by Southwest, 2011:

The Relatives at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans, 2010:

On a 1974 KXTX-TV broadcast: “Let’s Rap”:

Teaching the French how to groove in Cognac’s Blues Passion festival, 2011

Playing Outdoors at Lincoln Center, 2011:

Tom Hardy in the film adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel, The Wettest County in the World

Matt Bondurant writes novels about small, tightly-knit societies — like the secretive families in a creepy Irish town. Or a cult of Egyptologists. KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports that the UT-Dallas literature professor wrote about one such clan — a violent one — from his own family history.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

Matt Bondurant is sitting in a Dallas coffeehouse after a morning jog [ambient chatter and noise]. He’s written three novels, all of them different. Different subjects and locations, very different styles. Bondurant says all that difference can be a problem. He’s not building a loyal following from book to book.

Bondurant: “I don’t know if the publisher’s really happy about that. I don’t know what to do. It’s not like I’m choosing from a selection of, ‘Oh geez, what are all these different, interesting ideas that I have?’ I’ve had four ideas for novels in my life — the three I’ve written and the new one I’m working on. And that’s all I got.”

But a big following may be coming his way – anyway.

We’ll get to that, but to help us understand it when we do, first, this: Whatever else they have, all of Bondurant’s novels have elements of the thriller — mysteries, suspense, the hidden and the violent — but perhaps the most thriller-like is his first novel, The Third Translation. It concerns a mid-career Egyptologist, an American on a dwindling grant who’s desperately trying to decipher the real-life hieroglyphic puzzle known as the Stela of Paser — when he gets caught up in its theft. Bondurant wrote the novel while he was in graduate school in Florida State University and says he didn’t have thrillers so much on his mind as more literary and witty inspirations, like the novels of Martin Amis and Umberto Eco. One can see this in his arcane, antic story’s philosophical concerns about codes and languages.

But it was the thriller qualities that seem to have won over readers: When it was released seven years ago, The Third Translation became an international bestseller. Perhaps as a historical-cultural-decoding mystery, it rode The Da Vinci Code tidal wave. But that still doesn’t explain why it didn’t sell in America yet continues to sell well in  France.

Bondurant: “You know, I’d like to think the French are just astute, intelligent readers. They appreciate good writing [laughs]. I don’t know. … I think it’s because it makes fun of the English,  you know what I mean? The French like that.”

Bondurant’s most recent novel, The Night Swimmer, has earned strong reviews, especially for its lyrical language evoking the storming, frigid Atlantic and the remote, rocky southern coast of Ireland (reviews can be found here, here and here, for instance). It’s the gothic tale of a long-distance ocean swimmer, a young American woman who tangles with another of Bondurant’s reclusive bands — this time, the tight-lipped Irish families, many of whom are, yep, hiding secrets.

But The Night Swimmer came out only a few weeks ago. It’s too soon to tell if it’ll gain a wide readership.

It’s Bondurant’s second novel, from 2008, that’s most likely to take off this year. The Wettest County in the World is about the backhills moonshine wars in Virginia in the ‘30s. Bondurant’s story of brotherhood and revenge is drawn from court records, newspaper clippings – and Bondurant family lore. Three of the local bootleggers who were targeted for killing by corrupt law officers were the novelist’s own grandfather and two grand-uncles.

The Depression was a grim, hungry time for Franklin County, Virginia, and residents didn’t seem keen to hear more about white lightning and shootings up in the hollers.

Bondurant: “There was a little bit of uneasiness, sort of when the news of the project came out – because everybody was like, ‘Oh, what is this guy gonna do  – with our story?’”

Bondurant’s family came from the area, but he didn’t grow up there – only visited it often from Alexandria, Virginia. So he was viewed as an outsider — and felt like one. But what Bondurant did with this history was write a novel that was hailed from The New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle. The Wettest County was even compared to Cormac McCarthy’s writing in its grimly effective handling of cold-blooded violence: throat-cuttings, brass-knuckled beatings, car-racing ambushes.

Bondurant: “You know, my own father was kinda like, ‘Did you have to make him so, you know? Did you have to have so much …?’ And the answer is yes, I did.”

Even with rave reviews, The Wettest County sold only respectably — which is to be expected, Bondurant says, for a historical novel. There’s a layer of literary self-consciousness to it, too — another element that appears in all of Bondurant’s books (in The Night Swimmer, the husband tries to write a novel, while the wife reads
John Cheever). By happy coincidence, the Bondurant family’s square-off against the law was covered by newspapers at the time –  in part, by none other than Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, mentor to both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Anderson was on the downhill side of his career in the early ’30s but had bought a newspaper company in Virginia and moved there as well, building a country home near Marion, Virginia. He covered the lengthy trial that later became known as The Great Moonshine Conspiracy of 1935. Bondurant is an admirer of Anderson, but what particularly attracted him to the author in this instance was that he, like Bondurant, was an outsider trying to write about the taciturn mountain folk. So Anderson appears in The Wettest County, struggling to get them to talk. As much as Bondurant’s novels are about secretive clans, they’re about outsiders: Many of his central characters are, essentially, fish out of water, trying to decipher or unlock a strange environment.

The Wettest County seems to have anticipated a small wave of renewed interest in the period and the region, in illegal stills and corn liquor. PBS broadcast the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition last year, while the Discovery Channel series, Moonshiners, recently wrapped up its first season, having sparked questions about whether its scenes with contemporary bootleggers were staged or not. Even The New York Times had a recent story about how home-brewing ‘micro-distilleries’ are now legal in one area of the Great Smoky Mountains.

I’ve sampled moonshine on occasion — courtesy of a brother-in-law who’s flown in from Tennessee with some. To my surprise, it was a smooth, sipping bourbon, a little warmer or ‘hotter’ than commercial brands but nothing like the harsh ‘mule kick’ of legend. In an afterword to The Wettest County, Bondurant (left) reports that one question he’s often asked by readers is whether he’s tried any corn liquor himself. He has and we compared notes on the ‘alternative beverage industry.’

Bondurant: “I’ve had some really awful stuff, and I’ve had stuff that, like you’re saying, I could sip it or put it on ice. The smell of it is kind of strong sometimes, that rotten-corn smell is like, Whoa, but then you sip it and it tastes like bourbon. I do like it, though, with fruit in it, with peaches and stuff. We had a jar of it for a long time and that’s always nice.”

Having anticipated the public’s rediscovered taste for illegal liquor, Bondurant’s novel is now coming back in what may prove to be a powerful, distilled form: The Wettest County has been made into a film with Gary Oldman, Shia Labeouf and Tom Hardy. Labeouf plays Jack Bondurant, Matt Bondurant’s grandfather, while Hardy plays Forrest Bondurant, his grand-uncle. The film — written by songwriter/screenwriter Nick Cave (The Proposition) — was originally set for release this spring but has now been held back until August. Normally, that’s a bad sign in Hollywood. But Bondurant says it’s good: The producers are waiting on The Dark Knight Rises, which opens July 20. The anticipation for Tom Hardy’s performance as the villain in that Batman movie has been so high, the producers of The Wettest County now hope to ride on his coattails.

Bondurant saw the British actor in Georgia, filming the bloody bar fight that triggers the open war in The Wettest County. Hardy’s performances in such earlier films as Warrior and Bronson have had a brooding ferocity, and Bondurant saw that in action on the set – in take after take.

Bondurant: “He was freaking me out, I mean, because he just turns on this rage and he’s flying really fast with these stunt men. And it’s, it’s … frightening.”

This year, Bondurant’s new novel, The Night Swimmer, or the film adaptation of The Wettest County may bring the UT-Dallas professor more readers. But he’s already had a public reading to remember – back in Franklin County, where he’d been viewed with some suspicion. Soon after the novel The Wettest County came out, he was invited to the Franklin County Historical Society.

The crowd was so large, he had to talk outside on the porch.

Bondurant: “There was over 200 people there. We only had 50 books. And we sold them all out and then another 150 people signed up and paid for a book that they’d have mailed to them later.

“I mean, that’s the best reading you’re ever gonna get.”

• Matt Bondurant will read from The Night Swimmer at UT-Dallas on Wednesday.

• FrontRow review

• TheaterJones review

• Dallas Morning News review (pay wall)

• Dallas Observer review

• Pegasus News review

• Flash List review

Steven Walters’ play, Pluck the Day, is smarter and funnier than I feared a homegrown, West Texas, backwoods, blue-collar buddy comedy might be. But not as smart or funny as I hoped it would be.

Pluck opens the new season of Second Thought Theatre, where playwright Walters is a co-founder, when he’s not onstage acting at the Dallas Theater Center. His comedy is sort of a Texas My Name is Earl — if Earl never wandered out of reach of the beer cooler on the porch. On a Sunday morning, two and a half guys drink and argue over crossword puzzle clues and wonder what’s happened to their other chum, the peyote-using Fred (Mike Schraeder) who’s stumbling around lost in the cacti again.

I count two and a half men at first: There’s the loud, drunk, dimwitted Duck (Clay Yokum), the smarter, more sensitive Bill (Chris LaBove) — and comatose-asleep in the corner most of the time is the nearly non-existent Merle (musician Greg Schroeder). And when April (Jenny Ledel) pops in, it’s clear she exists mostly for the plot complications among the men. Chemically enlightened from his psychedelic walkabout, the prodigal Fred returns, determined to marry her — having neglected their relationship for far too long. But Duck raises some objections. Some Jim Beam gets consumed, a shotgun is waved, fidelity and friendships are questioned.

Walters is clearly dealing in stereotypes about good ol’ boys but, somewhat like Earl, he’s updating them, undercutting them, making them not so redneck-y and mean (hey, Duck loves ABBA). These layabouts are more lovable, partly because they’re young and lost and self-medicating. But that’s a gentling process the playwright doesn’t have under firm control.

Typically, buddy stories raise one of two issues. Possible Issue One: If the buddies are involved in a business or some project, will they betray each other to get ahead? Will one of them sink the project for his own needs or does the project itself turn out to be unworthy of them all? (Think David Mamet or That Championship Season or a million heist films.) Possible Issue Two: If the buddies in question are younger, single or college-age, will one or more of them ‘grow up’ and leave the old gang — get married, go off to college, find some new opportunity or purpose? (Think American Graffiti or Breaking Away or Merrily We Roll Along.)

The difference between the two comes to this: In the first type of buddy story, the betrayer is often expelled. In the second, the new adult often leaves under his own steam. Pluck is definitely a buddy comedy of the second sort; the question is: Who’s quitting the porch first? Fred wants to get married, while smartypants Bill knows he’s long outgrown his fellow Squidbillies. But Walters brings in complications of the first sort of buddy story as well, issues of betrayal and disguise. And it’s here, when he tries to complicate these characters, that Pluck gets clunky.

The Second Thought production, directed by Matthew Gray, is exemplary, far sharper than the untidy lives it portrays. Whatever else Pluck does, it gives the performers some choice material to work with. One can’t escape the notion than an actor named Clay Yokum was destined to play a yokel like Duck, and play him wonderfully well. Yokum pretty much drives the play’s energy and entertainment, bringing a bright sweetness to Duck, even as Duck bellows homophobic slurs.

But Duck’s true mental capacity is actually a little uncertain. Like the play itself, he seems, at times, to be putting on the slackjawed act, being self-consciously outrageous. What are we to make of a college failure who uses words like “euphemism” and calls someone a “Brutus,” yet is unable to decipher the crossword clue: “a hill-building insect,” three letters?

This means Duck-as-idiot-bully is mixed, unevenly, with Duck-as-pugnacious-scamp. Perhaps Duck’s entire opening scene — in which he doesn’t deduce a single, simple crossword — is not a display of his lowbrow credentials at all but is his sly way of goading Bill. With growing irritation, Bill offers the right answers and their obvious explanations.In this way, Duck forces him to remind everyone, including himself, why he’s the ‘outsider’ here: He’s gay, full of book-larnin’ and hates this bigoted, backwoods purgatory.

But if so, it’s odd that Bill never calls Duck on this ploy. Bill, we’re made to understand, is the smartest person parked on the porch. Duck prods Bill into revealing his genius-level IQ and into explaining why, nonetheless, he remains here among the empty heads and the empty cans of Old Milwaukee. And Bill never throws it back at him.

Perhaps Duck is cagier than he appears or perhaps Bill is not so smart. He misquotes Descartes’ famous conclusion that “I think therefore I am,” saying, “Cognito ergo sum.” Cogito and cognito are different Latin verbs, the one essentially meaning “think,” the other “know.” It seems playwright Walters has Bill use the wrong cognito as a set up for Duck’s later twist on it with Incognito ergo sum: I dunno, therefore I am. Which, once again, makes Duck look cleverer than he seems.

You’re right: Who cares about all this first-year Latin — especially when there are peyote jokes to laugh at? Walters has an enjoyable way with wordplay and humor. But seeing as his stage play ultimately pivots on a mistaken identification and a hidden, sexual orientation, just how smart, dim, disguised or self-knowing these characters are is certainly relevant. Otherwise, the mistaken ID and the revelation seem like plot contrivances; they don’t develop organically out of the characters’ desires and failings.

Which, in fact, is an issue. Duck, for instance, is a guilty party here, not so much because he’s a gossip-spreading moron but because he’s unwilling to ‘fess up to an optometrical weakness. That particular twist in the evidence against April (Duck spotted her in flagrante delectable, fooling around behind Fred’s back) is a little old-fashioned and trivial-mechanical, like something out of Perry Mason. (“You couldn’t detect the distinctive odor of cyanide, Mrs. Winthrop, could you? Just as you can’t tell I’m wearing Old Spice aftershave! You have chronic sinusitis!”)

One critic has argued that Walters has sacrificed his more serious intentions for the play’s hee-haws. If that’s the case, it was a futile sacrifice. It actually takes awhile for Pluck to build up its yucks and just when it’s hitting its beer-bellied stride, in come the complications. It seems more likely that Walters wants to seize it all — humor and heartfelt characters and dramatic surprise — and grabs lumpy bits of each. A little like Duck and Bill, Walters is either not willing to stick with the dumb-bumpkin humor or gets too clever for his own good trying to make the bumpkins mean something sensitive.

Which isn’t to say Pluck doesn’t get to be howlingly funny at times. In addition to Yokum and Schraeder’s performances, I particularly enjoyed the moment when it’s discovered that Merle in the corner — who’s been living here, not saying much, drinking everyone’s beer, sleeping on the porch — is not actually related to anyone. Considering how contained Pluck is (in a very Mamet-like fashion, all the action takes place in one place, in one morning), this bit of nonsense is a howl.

One reason it’s such a grace note: It’s completely unrelated to all the other characters’ complications. It comes out of nowhere and just exists to be funny.

A final note: Little mention in the press has been made of Second Thought Theatre’s transformation of Bryant Hall into a black box theater, other than to note the new season’s new location in what had been a rehearsal room. Second Thought had previously presented an earlier version of Pluck the Day in their first season and in a different location.  This time, it’s downstairs in the Heldt Administration Building next to the Kalita Humphreys Theater.

Many years ago, a small group of associates and I changed a similar rehearsal hall into a mini-proscenium, and it took power tools and real labor. But the transformation — we made a theater where there wasn’t one — proved deeply satisfying. So, my compliments. Matthew Gray’s set design is both crisp and backwoods-rundown. It shows off the new space well.

I was also surprisingly touched. I knew Ken Bryant, the late artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center who died young from a wretched medical accident in 1990.

I suspect he’d appreciate that his name graces what is now an actual, working theater. Welcome back, Ken.

Dallas-Fort Worth has beat Houston and Kansas City as the site for Theatre Communications Group’s national conference next summer. KERA’s Jerome Weeks explains what this could mean for the local theater community and North Texas.

• KERA radio report:

• Expanded online report:

As national conventions go, it won’t be large. Only about 1300 non-profit theater professionals will be coming. But this is the first time the 50-year-old Theatre Communications Group will hold its national convention in Texas. And it’s the largest theater conference of its kind in the country. For many of the visiting actors, designers, directors and managers, it’ll be their first visit to the Wyly Theatre, the Winspear Opera House or Bass Hall. It may well be their first look at theaters like the Undermain, groups they’ve only read about in the pages of American Theatre, the monthly magazine that Theatre Communications Group publishes.

Kevin Moriarty is artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center. He says Dallas’ Office of Cultural Affairs first approached him about bringing the conference here. They formed a host committee with area theaters and the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. When two TCG reps made a site visit here in December, arts leaders, community members, artists, funders, even the Mayor’s office worked on pitching the North Texas theater scene to them.

Moriarty: “It was an exciting couple of days, the whole city coming together to convince the national theater community that what we have here is special.”

Based in New York, TCG is the largest independent publisher of theater works by such artists as playwright David Mamet and composer Stephen Sondheim. It serves around 500 theater companies across the country as an information resource and advocate. TCG has been holding its national conferences since 1976. Speakers at recent conferences have included Broadway director Julie Taymor, film director John Waters and choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Moriarty (left) says bringing the conference will have area theaters working together, they’ll learn from the visitors and the visitors will see a theater community he believes is worthy of national attention.

Moriarty: “The TCG conference will not only show off the immense excitement and growth that are here, it will also ultimately bring us together and serve as a catalyst for continued growth and change.”

When Kevin Moore, TCG’s managing director, and Dafina McMillan, director of communications, came for their site visit, North Texas was already one of three semi-finalists, including Houston and KC. Part of that visit was a collective meeting held in the Wyly Theatre’s rehearsal room Dec. 8 with theater directors, managers, media folks and performers from across the region. Many of them extolled what could be done here for such a conference, what advantages the area has.

There are the brand-new buildings in the Arts District, of course, and the collective draw of two major cities — Dallas and Fort Worth — plus surrounding suburbs with their own stage companies, like Lyric Stage and African-American Rep. There’s also a burgeoning crew of smaller groups from Kitchen Dog and Uptown Players to Upstart Productions.

As several people also noted, TCG would more or less be coming home: TCG was started in 1961 with a Ford Foundation grant. But that grant was triggered, in part, by the foundation recognizing the rise of fledgling, professional, resident theater companies across the United States. It saw the need to encourage them to develop professional theater outside of Broadway and Broadway-fed tours. The first of these start-ups, of course, was Margo Jones’ Theatre ‘47, here in Dallas. It didn’t survive long enough to benefit from Ford Foundation seed money but did last long enough to inspire other founders of the resident theater movement, notably Nina Vance in Houston’s Alley Theatre.

The most recent host cities for the TCG Conference have been LA (2011), Chicago (2010) , Baltimore (2009) and Denver (2008). This year’s conference, Model the Movement, is being held in Boston, June 21-23 — and concludes TCG’s year-long celebration of its 50th anniversary.

The TCG conference next summer will follow this year’s visit by the League of American Orchestras to Dallas on June 5-8 (at the Sheraton Hotel). So this summer,  it’s the symphony musicians coming to town. Next summer, it’ll be the theater folks. The Arts District will be awash with artsy, interested out-of-towners. No one can say the arts aren’t doing their part to increase the area’s profile and its convention business.

Even if they don’t actually use the Convention Center or the Omni Hotel.

• KERA radio report:

• Expanded online report:

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra announced today that it has signed a new distribution contract with the major classical record label, Naxos. Currently, if people wish to hear the symphony with van Zweden on a CD or a download, their only recourse has been two CDs for sale on Amazon in America. Otherwise, they’d have to come to the Meyerson in person to buy the CDs.

Of course, the symphony’s recordings with its previous music directors are available on various platforms under a bewildering array of labels (RCA, Telarc, EMI, ProArte, Dorian, Delos and Hyperion). But none of the DSO’s work with van Zweden has been available for download.  And none of that work has been available in any form internationally.

Conductor van Zweden says that increasingly, people in other cities have heard of the Dallas Symphony and his work here. But the DSO has not been able to capitalize on its growing reputation.

Van Zweden: “If I conduct in Europe or Chicago or like last week in Boston, and they ask for the records of me and the Dallas Symphony, I have to say, ‘Well, they’re not out yet.’ ”

Naxos is one of the two largest-selling classical labels in the world; it’s the largest independent classical label (it’s owned by Hong Kong-based German businessman, Klaus Heymann and not by a parent media conglomerate. Coincidentally, van Zweden recently was appointed music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic).

In addition to internet downloads, the DSO will gain access to markets in Europe and Asia, where music stores continue to play a major role. Naxos will start by distributing three recordings on the orchestra’s own label, DSO Live — two Beethoven symphonies, two Tchaikovsky symphonies and Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien and Mozartiana Suite. A fourth recording will be released later this month: Composer Steven Stucky’s August 4,1964, the oratorio about Lyndon Johnson that the DSO commissioned and premiered in 2008. And this week, the DSO is performing Tchaikovsky’s 6^th Symphony at the Meyerson — it’s being recorded for release later this year.

Whether as CDs or downloads, classical recordings rarely turn a profit these days. But van Zweden says it’s not about the money.

Van Zweden: “If you’re a fantastic orchestra but invisible on records, then nobody knows this. And so I’m very delighted that Naxos is willing to bring this out and even work with us in the future.”

The press release follows, naturally:

Dallas Symphony Orchestra Announces International Distribution Partnership with Naxos

Recordings by Jaap van Zweden and the DSO available via download for first time

DALLAS, TX (February 15, 2012)-  Dallas Symphony recordings on its DSO Live label will soon be available around the world for purchase and downloading through a new agreement with Naxos, one of the world’s largest distributors of classical recordings, Dallas Symphony Orchestra Interim President and CEO David Hyslop announced today.

The distribution partnership begins its three-year term April 1, 2012. The agreement covers all of the recordings with Music Director Jaap van Zweden that have been released or are scheduled for release on the DSO Live label during the contract.

“This agreement will put our superlative recordings in the international market place,” Hyslop said. “Naxos is a pipeline to vendors throughout North, Central and South America, in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. This partnership will also allow music lovers around the globe to download Dallas Symphony recordings.”

“Naxos’ interest in the Dallas Symphony is proof of the tremendous artistic growth of this orchestra,” van Zweden said. “This international exposure will reflect well not only on the musicians of the Dallas Symphony, but on the city itself as a major cultural center. We are proud to serve as cultural ambassadors for Dallas through this new partnership.”

The recordings to be distributed initially include Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies; Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Fifth Symphonies; Capriccio Italien and Mozartiana Suite; and Steven Stucky’s August 4, 1964, an acclaimed work for soloists, chorus and orchestra about the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Stucky is scheduled for release in late February, 2012. Future recording projects will include Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Rococo Variations, which will be recorded live at concerts in February and May of this year.

“We are delighted to add the Dallas Symphony’s recordings under Jaap van Zweden to our distribution family,” said Jim Selby, CEO of Naxos of America. “This is a very fine orchestra, and its exciting recordings deserve to be heard by music lovers all over the globe.”

Celebrating 25 years in 2012, Naxos has evolved from its beginnings as a budget label to a leading classical music group. Headquartered in Hong Kong with distribution and marketing subsidiaries in 15 countries, the group distributes its Naxos, Naxos AudioBook and Marco Polo labels, while providing distribution and licensing services to more than 200 independent and major CD and DVD labels. The Naxos group is also an industry leader in music education, boasting a wide range of physical and digital education products. Operating across six platforms, the Naxos Group’s digital products include the Naxos Music Library, Naxos Spoken Word Library, Naxos Video Library subscription service, and the ClassicsOnline download platform. For more information, visit www.naxos.com.

The Dallas Wind Symphony will present an all-Gershwin concert tomorrow for Valentine’s Day. The composer can’t be there. But KERA’s Jerome Weeks reports, George Gershwin will certainly play — thanks to some advanced digital help.

• WRR’s Art Matters program

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

[Sounds of orchestra tuning up continue under.]

The Dallas Wind Symphony is rehearsing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in a way no one has ever rehearsed it. Or ever played it.

Conductor Jeff Hellmer: “All right. Everybody ready?”

[Rhapsody starts and continues under].

The Wind Symphony is trying to recreate the performance of Rhapsody that took place on June 10, 1924 when it was first recorded. Paul Whiteman conducted, and George Gershwin was at the piano – just as they were when Rhapsody made its famous debut earlier that year in Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music” concert in New York.  To fit on both sides of the 12-inch record, Gershwin’s first, ambitious orchestral work was shortened from 15 minutes to nine and half. Nonetheless, the 1924 recording is as close as we can get to that first Rhapsody, and the Wind Symphony has been configured just like Whiteman’s original, 28-instrument band, right down to a banjo.

Yet there’s no pianist.

That’s because George Gershwin’s part will be played by a Yamaha Disklavier PRO – a kind of super-computer player piano mechanism inside a classic, nine-foot concert grand. It’s essentially a “playback” instrument; what’s truly special here is what will guide the Disklavier: the Zenph Sound Innovations software that meticulously replicates a musician’s performance as computer data.

Jeff Hellmer, director of jazz studies at UT-Austin, will conduct the Valentine’s Day concert.

Hellmer: “The people at Zenph have painstakingly studied Gershwin’s piano performance and have attempted to codify every aspect of the 10,000 notes that Gershwin played. And then they have the piano recreate each of these notes as closely as possible – and in fact, eerily closely.”

A recorded performance is digitally broken down along a complex set of factors including not just pitch and volume but also a pianist’s entire ‘attack’ — his use of pedal, tempo, etc. In effect, Zenph ‘reverse engineers’ the performance, taking into account the player’s style, the particular piano he used, the recording environment — all the factors that led this performer to create this set of sounds at that moment. In 2006, the company released its first CD of such a recreated performance: Glenn Gould’s landmark 1955 album of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It has since released  CDs of performances by such pianists as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. The original source recordings are frequently in mono, and some, as with the 1924 Rhapsody, were recorded before the advent of electric microphones. At the time, all the musicians would have crowded around and played into a gramophone horn with the sound waves being etched into a master. Such an analog method was not kind to high or low frequencies.

These CDs have been received with great excitement in audiophile and music circles. The concerts – Zenph calls them “world premiere re-performances” – have been described as “ghostly” and “supernatural,” even “science fiction.” They allow people to hear these giants perform –”live” — in optimum audio conditions.

But as fascinating as all this is, it’s not the company’s ultimate goal. Zenph is not really in the recording and concert-touring business. It’s in the digital musical interface business, creating rehearsal tools and musical tutors for the computer. John Q. Walker is the founder and chairman of Zenph.

Walker: “So, interestingly for us, it’s not about the recording. It’s about the data.”

The performances and the subsequent recordings, he says, are really just beta tests proving they got the performance data right. Having created these highly nuanced maps of great musicians at work, Zenph is looking forward to ways to put them to use. What can we learn from them? Precisely how did this master play? And can that be broken down in such a way that it can be taught?

[music clip starts under]

This is from the iconic 1959 recording by Leonard Bernstein. It’s the more richly orchestrated arrangement of Rhapsody by composer Ferde Grofe in 1945 that most of us know.

But this is how George Gerswhin played it in 1924.
[clip]

Disregarding the tinny, scratchy sound quality, there are a number of striking audio features. The first is that there’s no percussion, none of the booming kettledrums in the Bernstein version that give the passage a swaggering, military air. The early gramophone technology actually could record some kinds of percussion, but quite often, they weren’t used — as with the Rhapsody. So the Dallas Wind Symphony has had to work out how to handle the percussion.

But even more striking is how fast Gershwin plays. This is not the lush or dreamy Rhapsody we often hear. Gershwin is brash, almost frenetic. He’s 25 years old, the world is coming to hear him play something more than one of his pop tunes — and he’s showing off.

Walker: “We have these expectations from pianists interpreting the score these many years. And George just goes for it [laughs].”

Hellmer: “You have to remember that Gershwin was what they called a ‘plugger’ back on Tin Pan Alley – where he would play popular tunes in the window of a publishing house to attract sheet-music buyers. And the way that he played Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 seems very similar to how he might have plugged a song.”

Right now, that’s a headache for the Dallas musicians. The Whiteman band had played Rhapsody half-a-dozen times before they recorded it, so they knew what to expect — showing off like he did, Gershwin didn’t keep tempo. He sped up and slowed down all over the place. The Wind Symphony is trying to shift with Gershwin on the fly; it’s a first rehearsal for them and it’s stop-and-go. Hellmer conducts from a Zenph-designed computer display of the score, but he’s also listening to an audio ‘click track’ in an earphone, a track that registers Gershwin’s accelerations and hairpin turns.

But capturing and accompanying that brashness and energy — that’s the spirit of the brilliant, young pianist the Dallas Wind Symphony hopes to conjure onstage Tuesday night.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get back to work. Check back tomorrow at 1 p.m. for another one.

Long-time AfterDelighters may recall the mesmerizing work by the Australian dance company Chunky Move, involving choreography with real-time laser projections. Today we see a motion-control test film directed by Duckeye with choreography by celebrated British dancer and choreographer Alexander Whitley (for London’s Rambert Dance Company) Normally, I don’t enjoy the way contemporary dance gets manic editing chop jobs for our hyper, strobe-light attention spans. But Atelic is a striking and lovely application of camera technology to human movement.