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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2008 > September > 12
Friday, September 12, 2008
Yo-Yo Ma gives the Long Center two thumbs up
The audience showered him with applause and ovations last night at the Long Center after famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma finished a virtoustic performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor.
But the ebullient cello master had praise of his own to bestow. Pointing in animated way to the ceiling of the Long Center’s Dell Hall, Ma then flashed two thumbs up.
The crowd roared back. Ma likes the place — he really, really likes Austin newest jewel of a performing arts center.
Ma was in town as a guest of the Austin Symphony Orchestra at a special gala kick-off concert to its new season. The concert sold out weeks ago.
As it was the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Ma and ASO music director Peter Bay, both fittingly paid tribute.
After a gorgeous presentation of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony, Bay returned after intermission to lead Carter’s gentle Elegy for String Orchestra and the Bach-Stokowski orchestration of “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Bay asked that both not be rewarded with applause, the silence instead a memorial for the victims of Sept. 11.
Then Ma took the stage for the Elgar concerto. A master musician such as Ma becomes music the music he plays — he doesn’t just perform it.
Interestingly, Ma, a longtime New Yorker, was on the road touring on Sept. 11, 2001 and scheduled to play the Elgar concerto, which he did. We asked him about the experience and you can about it here
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Review: ‘Macbeth’
Austin Shakespeare puts out a polished new production of “Macbeth” — one that is smartly burnished with just enough bits of contemporary culture to make the 17th-century tragedy of political power feel necessary and relevant today.
To mark the company’s debut at the Long Center — where a sold-out crowd filled the 200-seat Rollins Studio Theatre on Wednesday night — director Ann Ciccolella wisely places this “Macbeth” in a broadly global contemporary context.
The ambitious nobleman Macbeth — powerfully played by Marc Pouhe — is surrounded by soldiers in modern military fatigues and a royal court ringed with bamboo and draped with towering clear plastic curtains. Sharron Bower brilliantly delivers a Lady Macbeth brimming with brittleness, one who nervously texts, pops pills and slinks around her husband’s court in sleek modern gowns.
The production values make this show. Costume and set designer Michelle Ney has smartly blended silhouettes that read both classic and contemporary — the crowning image comes in the shape of the three witches who are nightmarish birds swathed in strips of white plastic, ammunition-filled bandoliers strapped to their chests. And Jason Amato’s shrewdly designed psychologically-charged lighting gives the entire setting an appropriately anxious edge. Music director Michael McKelvey charges the whole show with an edgy original score.
If some of the secondary roles didn’t consistently impress with their power, this “Macbeth” nevertheless delivered.
‘Macbeth’ continues at 8 p.m. tonight, Saturday and Sept. 18-20, and 3 p.m. Sunday and Sept. 21 in the Rollins Studio Theatre, Long Center, 701 W. Riverside Drive. $18-$36. www.austinshakespeare.org. 474-5664. For ages 13 and older.
