Walled Off

Oh, No, Not Poetry! Dept.: One of the most unique theatrical/musical events I’ve ever been involved with takes place (as of this writing) quite soon, when Musicians of Ma’alwyck join forces with Nacre, a Saratoga Springs-based dance troupe, and Creative License, an Albany theatrical company, to present a program titled “Suite of Love” at 7:30 pm Sat., Feb. 11 at the Cohoes (NY) Music Hall and at 2 pm Sun., Feb. 12, at Schenectady County Community College. A dozen musical works ranging from Henry Purcell to Cole Porter will be performed by a trio of flute, violin, and guitar (my arrangement for them of “Night and Day” contains an obscure musical surprise) between scenes of narrative verse performed by a quartet of actors, myself among them. And there is an impressive variety of dance to the words and music and even moments of stillness. I also crafted the texts for this event, which look at a variety of the manifestations of love and its exciting offshoots, and offer below one of the more overtly political poems.

I EMIGRATE towards your heart
But you Ellis Island me with suspicion.
Do I look like you? I don’t.
Does it matter?

It matters to me, says your eye –
Which, as a child, saw beauty alone
But since has been carefully taught
That beauty resembles your twin.
No touch of the tarbrush,
No renegade blood.

Post as Romantic

PROKOFIEV’S FIRST PIANO SONATA is over a hundred years old; he finished his ninth and last in 1947. There hasn’t been a time more tumultuous in music before or since that period, yet he rode through it with his Romantic banner held high. Being Prokofiev, however, he redefined musical romanticism, and his piano sonatas exemplify this progress.

I’m hoping that Alexander Melnikov’s recording of three of those sonatas is the harbinger of more. This Russian-born pianist (a Richter protégée) made his mark with a recording of Shostakovich’s formidable Preludes and Fugues a few years ago, offering performances both electrifying and unifying, letting the composer’s distinctive voice shine in these Bach-homage settings.

That’s also what sets this Prokofiev recording apart from the pack. If you’re looking for music that’s relentlessly pleasant, don’t look here. The sonatas give an illusion of accessibility, but even at their most melodic, those melodies are in service to an architecture of unease.

The composer’s life was bracketed by wars. He exiled himself to Paris between them, but returned to his homeland as it entered its most repressive phase. This is the story being told in the Sonata No. 6, which was finished in 1940. He began work simultaneously on the ten movements that would comprise the sonatas 6, 7, and 8, eventually concentrating on the four for number 6 – and it’s one of the most difficult and disconcerting works in the piano repertory.

On the Other Hand

Given the Choice Dept.: When The Alt debuted in New York’s Capital Region last November, I wrote the piece below to celebrate the concept of culinary alternatives.

                                                                                           

WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE when your larder isn’t yielding what the recipe demands? We’re familiar with some of the common ones: use white sugar and molasses in place of brown sugar, try yogurt in place of mayonnaise, add a little vinegar to some tomato sauce in place of ketchup – although if you’re running out of ketchup before the tomato sauce is gone, then your diet may need more than this article for help.

Such tips, once buried in the end pages of books like The Joy of Cooking, are now at the easy other end of an online search. But what’s the alternative when you just don’t want to eat a particular item? It’s a more subjective path, but it’s a path that opens new culinary vistas.

For example: You need protein, and you want to turn to the garden for more of it. The leading candidate: Kale. It’s way up there on the green-leafy protein scale, with 2.9 grams of protein in one cup (67 grams) of the chopped-up stuff. The only drawback is that kale is vile, a tough tangle of stems and resistance that probably costs you a gram or more of that protein in chewing alone. The alternative: Arugula. Although it contains only 0.6 grams of protein per cup, a cup of arugula weighs only 10 grams. On an equal-weight basis with kale, 67 grams of arugula contains 4.2 grams of protein, and a mere 6 calories versus kale’s 33. Of course, that’s a hell of a lot of arugula to chew through, and it needs dressing, so there go your calories.

Bop Being Bop

BE-BOP WAS THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT JAZZ STYLING to achieve popularity without first having been co-opted by white musicians, but its formative years – 1942-44 – went largely unrecorded because of a ban imposed by James Petrillo, hotheaded head of the American Federation of Musicians. Being as much a rebellion against as an outgrowth of swing, bebop wasn’t about to steal many Benny Goodman fans, but its joyous angularity found fans aplenty.

But fans need records to collect, and records need producers with the vision to encourage and capture performers still courting recognition. For the Savoy label, that was Teddy Reig, an ebullient jack-of-all-(music)-trades who landed in the producer’s chair in time to record a quartet fronted by tenor-sax genius Dexter Gordon. This was in December 1945, and started a run for Reig that would last until the middle of 1949 – including a few months in 1948 when he ignored another AFM ban and recorded some sessions anyway.

As Bob Porter observes in his introductory notes to the Mosaic Records set “Classic Savoy Be-Bop Sessions 1945-49,” “While there had been some bebop on Savoy prior to Teddy’s stewardship, things began to blossom as his activity increased.” And while bop wasn’t Reig’s only pursuit (he shepherded “The Hucklebuck” to its hit status, for example), he recorded enough to fill most of the ten CDs that comprise this set – and that’s without Charlie Parker’s contributions, which are easy to find elsewhere.

For Your Classical Consideration

THIS HAS BEEN THE KIND OF YEAR that imprints its many aspects on all edges of our cultural life, and we need to go into 2017 with music that both heals and inspires. Here are some selections from the past twelvemonth with which to get started.

Lara Downes: America Again (Sono Luminus)

Although this CD was released a couple of weeks before The Election, it couldn’t convey a more necessary post-election message. “America Again” is the title of prolific pianist Lara Downes’s debut on the Sono Luminus label, taking its title from a Langston Hughes poem that asks, “Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – Let it be that great strong land of love,” a wish that will be tried and brutalized during the next four years.

The 21 selections offer compelling juxtapositions of works by composers synonymous with Americana and less-familiar voices, as when Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy” (after a Nina Simone arrangement) is followed by Rican-born Angélica Negrón’s “Sueno Recurrente.” The 35-year-old pursued the dream of journeying from one America to another, ending up in Brooklyn with a varied and inspiring career.

Other highlights are Amy Beach’s evocative “From Blackbird Hills,” Duke Ellington’s appropriately titled “Melancholia,” an Art Tatum arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” and the traditional melodies “Shenendoah” and “Deep River” – along with short works by Lou Harrison, Florence Price, Scott Joplin, Harold Arlen, and others.

Road to Morocco

THANKS TO DENZEL WASHINGTON, we have a Moroccan restaurant in Schenectady. “I’d signed a lease on a building in Harlem,” says Aneesa Waheed, chef-owner of Tara Kitchen, “when the realtor called me and said that the owner was backing out of the agreement. That’s because Denzel Washington would be filming in the area and wanted to use the space–and would be paying $3,000 a day for it!”

Aneesa Waheed | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Waheed was upset, “but it was a blessing in disguise. I knew I would have been taking a huge risk, and, in the long run, I don’t think that would have been the place to do it.”

Tara Kitchen opened at the beginning of 2012 at 431 Liberty St., a couple of blocks away from Schenectady’s downtown, with Waheed and her husband, Muntasim Shoaib, putting in backbreaking hours while raising one small child and expecting another.

Waheed has a dynamic presence with an enthusiasm that’s contagious. And the courage to give up a very lucrative career. “I worked in publishing in New York City for ten years, but my life revolved around food. If I wasn’t thinking about what or where to eat, I was watching the Food Network. I grew up with seeing my mother cooking all the time. Indian culture revolves around food. While you’re eating breakfast, you’re planning lunch and dinner.”

Fiddler’s Peak

THERE WAS A TIME when it was considered unseemly to perform Bach’s solo violin sonatas without added piano, and Schumann was among those who obliged with accompaniments. That time is well behind us, and it’s now the mark of a fiddler’s mettle to record them solo, perhaps hitting them two or three times in the course of a career to show artistic development. Kyung Wha Chung has waited. Interpretive styles have shifted; the vogue of the historically informed performance style, which seemed obligatory twenty years ago, has eased, and Chung clearly has thought about how to color her approach to these monument.

Sonata No. 1 banishes any worry about a too-historically informed interpretation, especially in the second-movement fugue, where phrases are allowed to linger and twine to satisfy the odd contrapuntal requirements – odd only insofar as the violin’s physical limitations (you can only play two adjacent strings simultaneously) require some of the contrapuntal lines to be interrupted and thus implied. And that sonata’s gorgeous third movement also enjoys a richly bodied treatment.

The sonata finishes with a presto taken at an appropriately lively clip and with none of the interpretive pauses that plague other performances.

Dancing out of the Dark

Girding Our Loins Dept.: The national tour of “Dirty Dancing” landed at Proctors in Schenectady shortly after the election. The timing offered an unexpected insight into the show, as my review reveals.

                                                                                    

WHEN THE MOVIE “Dirty Dancing” premiered in 1987, it was looking back a quarter-century to a more agitated era. Civil rights demonstrations were bringing out firehoses in the South; the birth control pill invited sexual liberation, but abortion was still illegal. We’d struggled, we’d fought, we’d won, and the ambitious uncertainty of teenaged Frances Houseman, known as “Baby,” seemed quaint.

Christopher Tierney and Jennifer Mealani Jones
Photo by Matthew Murphy

In moving the movie from screen to stage, the filmic structure has been maintained, complete with video dissolves as it rushes from scene to scene with a near-constant musical accompaniment. It serves the sappy coming-of-age story well, but just after the Broadway tour arrived in Schenectady last week, everything changed. The key song of the piece no longer is “The Time of My Life.” It’s “We Shall Overcome,” poignantly rendered by Chante Carmel in a scene that plays out like a picnic that Pete Seeger is about to attend.

We’re picnicking at Kellerman’s, a Catskills resort, where the waiters and counselors are there to instruct and serve in whatever ways will please the guests – up to a point, as affirmed by hard-assed owner Max (a commanding Gary Lynch).

Country Bistro

THIS YEAR'S THANKSGIVING theme was French Country Bistro, an excuse for making as many casseroles as possible, thus sparing me a lot of a-la-minute work. This was partly inspired by the research I've been doing on cast-iron cookware (article to come), research that won me over to the joy of make-ahead slow-cooking.

The Great Pumpkin

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: What with Thanksgiving looming, let’s skip dinner and move right into dessert – or make dinner a little more interesting with a look at the old-fashioned uses of that favorite fall gourd, the pumpkin, as I noted in a Metroland piece a dozen years ago.

                                                                                           

IT’S NOT EXACTLY ON THE ORDER of Hallowe’en pumpkin smashing, but the noble gourd rated a mention in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor as those titular wives plotted to humiliate the fat, randy Falstaff.  “Go to, then,” says Mrs. Ford, as her friends help her set up an assignation. “We’ll use this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumpion; we’ll teach him to know turtles from jays.”

The Greeks called it a “pepon,” or large melon; this got Gallicized into “pompon” before Shakespeare got hold of it. Early American settlers changed the second syllable to “-kin,” itself a version of the German “-chen,” and still used as in instrument of maternal torture in such formations as “my little lamb-i-kin.”

For all that European travel, the pumpkin itself seems to have originated in Central America; certainly the recipes that have endured are known to have crisscrossed the American continents for several thousand years. Now it’s grown in every continent except Antarctica.

On a Folksong Kick

From the Vault Dept.: Singer-songwriter-guitarist Jim Gaudet has been a folk scene fixture for enough decades to earn every accolade available. When I saw him in 1990, he’d already spent a few years building a catalogue of original songs to replace the covers he started out with. These days he works in the company of the Railroad Boys (bassist/vocalist Bob Ristau and mandolinist/guitarist Sten Isachsen), with a bluegrassier sound, but the same gentle wit and bashful presence. The long-gone Peggy’s, however, abandoned its coffeehouse fairly quickly.

                                                                                           

TO EFFECTIVELY REVIVE the coffeehouse spirit of 30 years ago means emphasizing stuff that’s bad for you. Coffee, for one thing, although it has its apologists (I’m one). Smoking – remember when such a club wore a pale blue haze? But it also can be done in song. Good thing we have singer-songwriters able to keep us aware of such hazards, and much more.

Jim Gaudet

Peggy’s Restaurant took a trip back in spirit, and, it’s hoped, forward in time with its first program in a Coffeehouse Revival series Thursday night. Local artist Jim Gaudet played and sang a concert comprising his own material (for the most part), an easygoing blend of sentiment and humor.

First the hall: the bar area/dining room that overlooks the Canal Square courtyard already has something of a coffeehouse look to it. One wall is brick, there are paddle fans in the ceiling, the chairs are kind of rickety.

It’s not as acoustically benevolent, however. The room is reverberant – glass-topped tables, tile on the floor – and last night’s patrons weren’t all used to the idea of paying attention to a troubadour.

Savor Schoharie Valley

THERE’S NO GOOD TIME for a flood, but late August has to be the worst for a farming community. The Schoharie Creek ran up over its banks when Hurricane Irene hit during that time of year in 2011, punishing the area in and around the town of Schoharie with a disaster that killed livestock, ruined crops, and left homes and business under water. Along with governmental assistance came help from the community, and one group, calling itself Schoharie Recovery, plunged into the thick of the disaster with food for the displaced residents. It was a successful enough program to suggest that there was cause to continue even after the damage had been cleared, and Schoharie Area Long Term (SALT) Development was formed.

Dining at the home of Emily Davis and
Mike Warner. Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“Five years later, we’re still looking for new ways to move forward,” said Emily Davis, one of the dinner hosts. “The valley has always been oriented towards food. We have the Carrot Barn the Apple Barrel Country Store, and so many individual farmers.” With that in mind, SALT held its third annual Savor Schoharie Valley festival on Saturday, October 22, a blustery evening laced with rain that reminded us of the area’s seasonal volatility.

The festival is a fund-raiser that introduces people both to the county’s food and to its hospitality, and Davis was one of the hosts for the event, although it began and ended at Schoharie’s Lasell Hall. This is an imposing 18th-century tavern in the village center, a building now owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution who, several decades ago, established the town’s first library here, and who more recently restored the lower-level of the house from the damage it sustained in the flood.

Prometheus Rebound

TWO THINGS ARE HAPPENING on the stage of Catskill’s Bridge Street Theatre this weekend: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” gets stripped to its dramatic, philosophical essence, and Steven Patterson gives the performance of a lifetime as he deftly portrays the many characters through whom we’re told this tale.

Steven Patterson as the Monster
Photo by John Sowle

 

Patterson took on this tour-de-force a decade ago at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, whose artistic director, Jim Helsinger, fashioned the script. And the piece is an appropriate choice for the young Bridge Street Theatre, which seeks fare that’s off the beaten path, especially if there’s some moral complexity involved. We saw Patterson’s versatility in last summer’s “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” another one-man show, but “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus” pushes his characterizations to even more challenging (and successful) extremes.

The action plays out on a simple-seeming set of rough wood platforms and ramps that serve as shipboard, classroom, laboratory, dwelling, and even the mountains of Switzerland. An upstage curtain takes on a variety of colors and textures to accentuate the scenes, all of it the work of the theater’s Managing Director, John Sowle, who also directed. The superb sound design, by Carmen Borgia, set up atmospheric beds when appropriate, giving the sound of a ship creaking through ice or the birdsong of a meadow, and punctuated the action with appropriate effects.

Young at Heart

BY THE TIME LESTER YOUNG hit the studio in 1936 to make his first recordings, the 27-year-old already had developed a significantly original sound – no easy feat in an era when many original tenor saxophone voices were busily redefining jazz’s boundaries. Coleman Hawkins was a few years away from revealing his more mellow side, while artists like Ben Webster, Barney Bigard, the short-lived Chu Berry, and audacious Bud Freeman were emerging from the pack.

But Young was more different still, his rhythmic intensity dancing behind harmonically inventive solos rendered in a creamy voice. And he was helped, on this session, by a rhythm section so tight that they played as one person. The triumvirate of Count Basie, Jo Jones, and Walter Page packed a syncopated wallop in every bar they played even as their music seemed to stare at you through sleepy, half-lidded eyes.

“The first thing that you have to keep in mind as you listen to these four selections is that nothing like them had ever been heard before,” writes Loren Schoenberg, a jazz historian who also wields a mean tenor sax. “And in the young Lester Young there can be heard the reinvention of the tenor saxophone as well as the first recorded examples of a new vocabulary for jazz.”

Here’s the Beef

In a Stew Dept.: I recently taught a very successful class about making French stews (at Different Drummer’s Kitchen in Albany, NY), one stew of which was Beef Bourguignon. So when Schenectady’s Daily Gazette asked me for a piece on some manner of ethnic cookery, I wrote the following.

                                                                                           

THERE ARE MANY GOOD REASONS to revisit French cooking, and they don’t all involve butter and cream. There’s also alcohol.

Photo by Marc Schultz

Take the beginning of this recipe from Auguste Escoffier’s celebrated 1903 “Le Guide Culinaire”: “Lard the piece of beef along the fibres with large strips of salt pork fat which have been marinated in a little brandy ...”

That’s the first step in preparing his version of Boeuf Bourguignon, or Burgundy Beef, a peasant stew that acquired a fancier reputation once the likes of Escoffier got hold of it. Getting those nonprime cuts of beef to become tender and tasty is a challenge that’s usually met by slow-cooking it for a long time. (An exception is something like London broil, which achieves its tenderness mostly because it’s sliced very thin.)

What gives Beef Bourguignon (as it’s usually styled in English) its unique flavor is an overnight spent in a red Burgundy wine. This isn’t a marinade that tenderizes the meat — for that you need something more aggressively acidic, or with the kind of enzymes pineapple juice contains. As with most marinades, this one’s purpose is to enrich how the meat will taste.

Eyeing the Storm

IT’S EASY, THESE DAYS, to investigate the evolution of motion pictures, but live theater is an experience of the moment and wears its history only insofar as a contemporary play accumulates trends of the past. But those trends tend to get thrown off as theater evolves and a presentational acting style turns naturalistic and then more naturalistic still.

From left, Brett Owan, Alexandra Doggette, Elisabeth Henry,
Kane Prestenback, and David Smilow. Photo by John Sowle

By the time George M. Cohan wrote “The Tavern” in 1920, Eugene O’Neill was winning the Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Horizon” and Broadway was about to get his “Anna Christie,” while Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” was playing down the street. In the wings were such playwrights as Maxwell Anderson and Sidney Howard and that innovative juggernaut, The Theatre Guild, all poised to change the face of Broadway entertainment – but this also was the year of “Frivolities of 1920" and a revival of “Floradora.”

“The Tavern” opened in the midst of all this as a both a tribute to and satire of the simplistic melodrama that O’Neill et. al. sought to supersede. This kind of story must have bubbled in Cohan’s very bones, given his by-then very long theatrical career, both as a writer and performer. He grew up touring in vaudeville and minstrel shows, and, with a long line of successes behind him, became fascinated with a script deemed so lousy by another producer that he sent it to Cohan just to share a laugh.

The Gypsy for Me

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Among of the highlights of my busy reviewing schedule thirty years ago were the trips into New York’s Washington County to a converted dairy barn where the chamber group L’Ensemble performed. This also dates back to when I typed my review into a terminal in the office of the Schenectady Gazette, and thus have no computer file in my archives. I assembled booklets of clips from that era, and have enjoyed going through my thirty-years-ago cultural history.

                                                                                              

THE FIRST SURPRISE FLUSHES OF FALL provided an atmospheric setting Saturday night for L’Ensemble’s “A Gypsy Summer” at the group’s not-too-modified barn-cum-concert hall in Cambridge, NY.

The spirit of the Hungarian fiddler was effectively captured in performances of mainstream classical chamber music with characteristic gypsy elements.

The idea for this program came to artistic director Ida Faiella last New Year’s Eve at a café in Budapest, she explained in her introduction; as a performer in the first half of the Cambridge concert, she sang Brahms’s “Ziegeunerlieder” with a vivacious understanding of the evocative poems.

Brahms spent some time performing with a violinist who shared with him the characteristic sounds and stylings of the gypsy’s music, so that the composer could inform even original melodies with an appropriately exotic flavor.

Vaudeville Revisited

From the Vault Dept.: The New Vaudeville still struggles to find a mainstream toehold, and I suspect it never will. Which, while it may help preserve its weird, antic nature, renders it hard to find outside of the biggest cities. Here’s a 30-year-old look I took at one such event, brought from Washington County into Schenectady’s Proctor’s Theatre.

                                                                                         

SOMETHING WONDERFUL HAPPENED at Proctor’s Theatre Saturday night, although it left much of the audience wondering exactly what it was that had happened. It was funny, it was tricky, it sang, it danced, it disappeared.

It was the New Vaudeville Show from Hubbard Hall, originating just upstate in Cambridge, Washington County.

Now, it wasn’t vaudeville with potted palms and signboards, and there wasn’t a dog act anywhere near it. In fact, it was a collection of five acts with a cooperative attitude. Let’s look at them one by one.

George Wilson is a fiddler who looks the part: bearded, grey, red suspenders. He gave us a medley of contagiously fun rhythmic material that made you want to get up and dance, which is exactly what clogger Ira Bernstein did throughout the show. Joining Wilson for tapping or clogging, Bernstein started off in jeans and ended up in a modified tux, and in the course of things gave us the exuberance of Ray Bolger and the elegance of Astaire – with some down-home heel-kickin’ thrown in.

The Wright Bros. aren’t consanguineous brothers, as they explain in a comic song, and yet it seems as if they must be related. They must be. You get the feeling that this must be what the five Marx Brothers were like, but with a dash of Three Stooges thrown in. They juggle, they dance, they sing (with dreadfully funny results), they tear up the stage.

Gettin’ the ‘Cue

THERE’S NOT A BIG BARBECUE PRESENCE in Provincetown, Mass. Stroll down busy Commercial Street and you’ll be exhorted to try burgers and pizza and, of course, seafood. So my wife and daughter and I were delighted to learn of a fairly new place with a wonderfully impressive moniker.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The first surprise at Two Southern Sissies is that the barbecue on offer, which includes pulled pork and beef brisket, isn’t smoked. The second is that it’s nevertheless delicious. Not that it should be any surprise: although he was raised in upstate New York, co-owner Keith Lewis claims a Virginia heritage that goes back far enough to number explorer Meriwether Lewis among his forebears. “My father was the first in the family to stray farther than fifty miles from home,” Keith explains.

Thus, his recipes are taken from a long family tradition, but adapted to be more healthful than might otherwise have been the case. Hence the smoke-free slow-cooking, not to mention ingredients that come from grass-fed, humanely raised critters and, when possible, local farms.

Progretto’s Progress

MARTHA ARGERICH’S LUGANO FESTIVAL (Progretto Martha Argerich) is in its 15th year, with a just-completed schedule of events that bodes to be its last. Switzerland’s BSI bank has dropped funding – a move said to be unrelated to the bank’s indictment for criminal activity – and there’s no native sponsor who can replace the amount.

Which means that the three-CD set “Live from Lugano 2015" may be the penultimate such edition, and that’s a shame. The festival has spawned 13 three-CD sets, a four-CD set of concertos, and a handful of single CDs, and they’re all treasures. The Argerich imprimatur guarantees good performances, even when she herself isn’t participating. And the festival has always brought together old friends and fresh talent, the latter including such now-stars as the Capuçon brothers and pianist Gabriela Montero.

In other words, you can trust the performances, even if you’ve never heard of the players. Better still, you can trust the repertory, which always is shrewdly programmed to mix the unfamiliar with the warhorses. Typically there’s a big, familiar lead-off piece, although the recently issued 2015 edition pulls a small switcheroo by giving us Brahms’s Horn Trio, Op. 40, in the viola version.