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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 30
Monday, March 30, 2009
Explore Austin’s other live music scene
We’re launching a five-week project through April focusing on Austin’s other live music scene — the classical music scene. Coverage so far: Critic’s picks | A Coffee With … Anton Nel
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Anton Nel: A luscious Long Center showing
The audience wouldn’t let Anton Nel leave the Long Center stage Sunday afternoon.
That seemed just fine with Nel. The celebrated Austin pianist exudes an elegant joy when he performs. And he clearly preferred to be nowhere else but performing for a hometown audience and on the stellar nine-foot Hamburg Steinway he helped the Long Center select.
The admiration was mutual. And Nel rewarded the audience’s appreciation and ovations with three encores after a particularly rich — and rigorous — program.
Indeed the concert was a bit of Austin arts history in the making. Since opening a year ago, the Long Center — Austin’s first civic performing arts center — hasn’t yet had a solo classical recital grace the stage of the acoustically exquisite Dell Hall. Fitting perhaps then Nel played the first such concert. The South African-born pianist and now proud Austinite has been eager supporter of the Long Center despite his own hectic schedule of teaching at the University of Texas and concertizing around the world. Nel made the Dell Hall and its Steinway shimmer Sunday.
Brilliantly virtuosic in his technical ability, Nel so smartly eschews showiness. He’s far too sophisticated a musician to be aggressive with the flourishes. Emotional tone and color is what he draws out with style and nuance.
Nel drew the intricacies out of Brahms’ Vier Klavierstucke and out of Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major, Nel extracted an ethereal mood. The selections from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words Nel offered like distinct little jewels, each with its very different shine. And he played Mendellsohn’s Fantasy in F Sharp with a kind of affecting intensity which made the profound and deep moments all the more exquisite.
Nel’s a jewel himself. Would that we could have a Long Center recital by him an annual event. Please?
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Tuesday music pix: Busy, with tough choices
Tuesday, March 31, is tough when it comes to classical music choices. The new or the historic? Running up against the evening concert of the always interesting University of Texas New Music Ensemble is the legendary St. John’s College Choir, the UK-based choir with a most notable history dating back centuries. Before that, UT’s Bach Cantata Project, the little noon-time concert series that could.
I plan to attend the Bach Cantata Project. Then in evening, it’s going to be a tough coin toss.
Bach Cantata Project
The Bach Cantata Project has become something of a phenom in the three years since it started. Crowds now show up at noon on the last Tuesday of every month to hear one of Bach’s 200 cantatas presented by UT faculty and staff musicians in the Blanton Museum. This month it’s ‘Himmelskönig, sei willkommen.’ Noon. Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Brazos Street. Free with museum admission ($3-$7). 471-5401. www.blantonmuseum.org
St. John’s College Choir<br>
With a history dating to the 17th century, Cambridge University’s St. John’s College Choirs is simply one of the finest all-male collegiate choirs in the world. Their current five-state, nine-concert tour brings the 30-member choir to town, a guest of UT’s Butler School of Music, for a concert that includes Byrd’s Four-Part Mass, Howells’ Gloucester Service, Swayne’s Magnificat and Holst’s Nunc Dimittis, among other works, 7 p.m. St. Austin Catholic Church, 2026 Guadalupe St. $20 ($15 seniors, $10 students). 471-5401. www.music.utexas.edu.
St. John’s College Choir has terrific online webcasts for free listening opporturnites.
UT New Music Ensemble
The music of visiting composer Gabriela Lena Frank pulls from indigenous Peruvian music and legends. And a new work by Ian Dicke, ‘Lunatic Fringe,’ uses chamber orchestra and pre-recorded voice to plumb the last decade of American politics. 8 p.m. Bates Recital Hall, Butler School of Music, UT campus. Free. 471-5401. www.music.utexas.edu.
The UT New Music Ensemble concert will be webcast live.
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Texas Biennial brims with brio: 4
Oh, Jill Pangallo is so funny. But mostly she is smart. And when she weaves funny and smart together as she did Friday night with “Let Me Entertain You,” her solo show presented as part of the Texas Biennial, she comes up with something poignant and a little painful in its truth telling.
Conceived, written and performed by Pangallo, “Let Me Entertain You” was nonetheless culled from writings, emails and notes by 11 of Pangallo’s peers who respond to her email asking for “donated” writing. The theme? Identity.
About 200 people braved a freakishly cold and windy spring night on Friday to fill the seats at the Fiesta Gardens stage and courtyard, a modest municipal facility with its own identity problem of sorts. (It’s plays host to everything from community fundraisers to quincenañeras.)
To such a motley stage, and with a certain do-it-yourself production value of over-the-top costumes and campy style, Pangallo brought a cast of equally motley characters. Some appeared via video; others we saw live.
There was a painfully shallow couple who met on one reality show and auditioned for another. A dowdy woman who found comfort and meaning via YouTube cat videos. An anxious college student who spilled her heart to an answering machine. Even the eccentricities of a Renaissance fair don’t have room for the fantasy self of Pangallo’s sad characters.
These are 21st-century lonelyhearts — people whose ability to communicate has become over-mediated by media to the point that they are trapped by their own utter inability to communicate at all.
That’s sad. It’s also comical. In Pangallo’s hands, it’s Facebook-age schadenfreude writ live and on stage. (Pangallo’s all-too-true monologue about Facebook’s time-sucking erstaz communication made for a real highlight.)
Pangallo understands that ultimately, performance art has to be theater, no matter what conceptual conceits are foisted on it. And theater is what she delivered.
After all, like she said, she was there to entertain us.
Photo: Jill Pangallo as P.J. Chavez.
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Monday Music Pix
Tonight: University of Texas Symphony Orchestra.
Since conductor Gerhardt Zimmerman took the baton a few years ago, the University of Texas symphony orchestra has sparkled. Sure, they’ve got youthful vigor and enthusiasm on their side. But Zimmerman burnishes them with plenty of
Monday they play Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony No. 5, Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri and Dvorak’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra featuring Elizabethe Lee, winnder of the Butler School of Music String Concerto Competition.
8 p.m. Bates Recital Hall, Music Building, UT campus. $10 ($5 students). 471-5401. www.music.utexas.edu.
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