Guest Blog: What I see with my ears I hear with my eyes.

Long time friend and partner in crime, Aurora*, has provided me with an opinion piece regarding an art gallery we went to this past Friday.

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We spent the evening at Towson University's senior student art exhibition at the Load of Fun gallery in downtown Baltimore.  Like most contemporary art exhibits, the gallery is a playground of speculative reality.  Unlike those Rorschach images where you interpret what you see, these images are what their creator tells you they are, often defying all laws of congruency. Tonight's were definitely exercises in the extemporaneous: welded metal bracelets linked to replicate handcuffs welded to an eyeglass case filled with origami birds made out of pages pulled from a porno mag is wittily dubbed "Sexual Frustration". Photographs of plant life bursting through plots of urban decay is "Wasted Space" - funny, my daughter is curating a gallery showing of similar works in a couple months which go by the theme of "The Third Conflict". Like I said, we must believe the artist's perspective, no matter how quantum the leap from their vision to ours.

Art is language, language similar to the speaking in tongues heard in old revival tents (or some Pentecostal churches). Not unlike Pentecost, each man hears it in his own language, regardless of what is being said. I must say some of what I looked at tonight was babble - things more geared toward the intellect than the heart.

I can't help but compare this language with the older mumblings of Mr. Van Gough or Gogh as you will or if you follow BBC's Dr. Who, Van Goth...(and a postmortem identity crisis ensues),  Like Mozart's four to eight measure classical constructions geared to the primate mind, Van Gough's language is simple and direct.  His vowels are color, his consonants clean dark lines, his elisions clouded skies and starry nights.  He will get in your face and speak of hope past despair with impeccable  diction. No need fear anything being lost in translation. He speaks to the heart, and his words leave you breathless.

I have a hard time reconciling the honesty of image found in photos by Pollock, or paintings by any great master from time immemorial with a gallery of works by students who have been taught to be fundamentally dishonest in the name of creating a commercial product, created without the discipline whose transcendence is the language of true art.

Or maybe this is the frustration of an old lady whose first love was the crayon box.  I did ok, the problem was the music was always voted more impressive than the drawings, which may have led down the inevitable path towards engineering, as it did for so many others on one side of my family.  I remember a high school guidance counselor looking over the results of one of the many tests we were subjected to and muttering something along the lines of "it seems you have an aptitude for engineering.  Too bad you're a girl. Have you considered a vocation with the Dominicans?" and so I turned to a life of crime instead.

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*I have poked and prodded Aurora to start a blog of her own, but she prefers to remain the silent but deadly member of my crime syndicate. Show her some love so that she'll blog for me again. 

Event Review: Mirena e Floro

Welcome back Armand O'Bryan, my pen-named pal, with yet another BVAF review!

Nagged, cajoled and wheedled by my colleague Maria into attending yet another event offered by the fledgling Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation, I found myself in Brown Center's Falvy Hall watching yet another unusual performance, which seems to be this organization's calling card.  "Love Between Acts - A Program of Operatic Intermezzi" was supposed to have been a dual presentation of Mirena e Floro by Francesco Gasparini and Giovanni Battista Bononcini alongside Pergolesi's famous La Serva Padrona.  Being more familiar with the Pergolesi work, I was disappointed to learn that it had been canceled due to a singer's illness. The company forged ahead with the earlier intermezzi,  an unusual compositional sandwiching of three scenes, bound together thematically only by the title characters' battle for dominance in their dysfunctional relationship.

The operatic intermezzo, literally meaning "in between", is not meant to tell a complete story.  Presenting brief, comic scenes, these works were used as inconsequential dramatic relief between the acts of larger, opera seria productions from the late Baroque to mid Classic eras. "Inconsequential" probably best describes the flimsy plot of Mirena e Floro, in which two combative lovers try rather unsuccessfully to resolve deep-seated and unexplained trust issues. The difference in compositional style between the sections by Gasparini and those by Bononcini would not have been evident  when the works were presented as separate entities placed between acts, but when offered side by side, the disconnect is more obvious.  Bononcini proves more adept at setting musical comedy, while lyrical melodies flow more easily from Gasparini. The overall effect makes almost as much musical and dramatic sense as watching un-sequenced re-runs of "I Love Lucy". 

Baritone Andrew Sauvageau and soprano Laura Strickling were for the most part equal to the challenges presented by this trilogy, with Strickling playing straight-man to Sauvageau's incredibly nimble comic antics.  Sauvageau proved the consummate singing actor. Vocally and physically flexible, he was a delight to the eye and ear.  Ms. Strickling, while somewhat unsteady at the onset, grew stronger as the show progressed and delivered lush tone and impressive vocal pyrotechnics in the third intermezzi. Some clever staging and overt hamming made this non-sensical work bearable, but it is easy to see why Mirena e Floro has not endured in standard operatic repertoire.

If you want to see the La Serva Padrona, the show that was canceled, BVAF has a Youtube channel with the production from January at Baltimore Theater Project.

Trapped Backstage,
-Maria (& Armand!)

PS - And there was no cajoling or nagging involved. It was Artscape; everyone wants to go to Artscape.

Event Review: Journeys - A Cabaret About the Places Life Takes You

Please give a Meep-worthy welcome to Armand O'Bryan, a friend IRL who shares an appreciation with me for nom de plumes. Friday the 8th, we both attended Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation's latest cabaret. Now, for a word from our guest blogger!

 

Cabarets and dinner theater are not usually the places I expect to find innovative programming, but I was pleasantly surprised by the Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation July 8th at Germano's Trattoria in Little Italy. 

 

Titled "Journeys - A Cabaret About The Places Life Takes You", this mini-production, lightly staged in the compact confines of Germano's Cabaret room, featured a highly eclectic combination of song literature, thematically tracing aspects of the emotional journey from cradle to grave. At first glance I thought I might find the juxtaposition of art song and Broadway ballad or blues unsettling, but for the most part this was not the case. Some repertoire combinations worked better than others, the most successful being Laura Stuart's rather amazing stylistic metamorphosis as she moved from Massenet's challenging "Je suis encore" from Manon, to a full out Broadway belt rendition of "Here I Am" from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'".   

 

All the artists exhibited a surprising degree of stylistic versatility, switching easily between classical and contemporary repertoire. Some stand out moments included baritone Michael J. Begley's rendition of "How Many Miles" from Kurt Weil's Lost In The Stars, soprano Adrienne Webster's bluesy, heart wrenching singing of Leslie Adam's "The Heart of A Woman", and Robyn Stevens' transcendent rendition of Rorem's "Ferry Me Across The Water".  While I found the placing of "For Good" at the end of the program a little too blatant an appeal for knee jerk water works, and the encore audience sing-along of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" tacky, I still have to applaud the tender and tasteful interpretation of Schwartz offered by Stuart and Webster, whose performance left me thinking: "how nice to hear this sung by real voices".

 

For a company that's only a year old, BVAF has done an impressive job, establishing presence and high performance quality. I've been lucky enough to attend and work for a number of their shows over the past year, and their latest show, Journey's, is just proof to me that they're going to keep getting better.

 

We Sing, We Dance, We Go Home Happy,

-Maria (and Armand!)

Still Kicking

Oh my goodness, it's been a month - almost - since my last post. Amazingly enough, this is not completely because I'm a lazy slob. I've got a couple of books reviews I've been working on, two guest reviews of events, and my thoughts on the last Harry Potter movie to share with you. Unfortunately, my main man, my baby, my one true love, Edgar, got hacked a few weeks ago and has been out of commission until, well, yesterday. While I still have his big sister, Yachiru, typing anything on her 9 1/2 inch keyboard is an exercise in raising my blood pressure.

But I'm back for now!  First up, we'll be getting an event review from a friend for Baltimore Vocal Arts Foundation's latest cabaret (I would have reviewed it, but since I'm kind of working with the company now, that would be a definite conflict of interests), followed by my feeble attempts to articulate how Deathly Hallows Part 2 made me feel. Stay tuned for more exciting and potentially snarky opinions from yours truly.

The Girl Who Cried,
Maria

September Sleep

Hey everybody! Maria checking in.

School has started up and I'm taking a larger load of classes than ever. In addition to that, Nevermore is chugging along at an exciting clip. What this means is that most of my reading time is going to be devoted to text books, and any time away from homework and papers is going straight into Nevermore.

But I'm not abandoning you forever!

First up, I'm scheduled to guest blog over at Bri Meets Books next week for Roald Dahl Week! Then, I have PLANS for October. *insert crack of thunder and insane laughter here* I promise, it'll be great. I have a couple of reviews to get to, not the least of which being Mockingjay, Archenemy, and Juliet(still!) and maybe even some movie and event vlogs.

So feel free to keep ignoring me this month. Just check out Bri's site and come back for October!

That's all folks,
Maria D