Blues in the Night

When: 3/25/08
Where: Ordway
Who: Jamecia Bennett, Julius C. Collins III, Debbie Duncan, Regina Marie Williams (vocals); Raymond Berg (keyboards), Mark Lenander (guitar), Jay Young (bass), Joe Pulice (drums)

I'm previewing Blues in the Night for MinnPost this week and went to see it last night. Great classic songs (blues, torch songs, jazz), fantastic singers (any one of the four cast members could knock down the walls of Jericho), wonderful set and staging, sparse crowd. The show deserves better.

Debbie Duncan granted me an interview this morning, during which she said, "As you live and breathe and walk this Earth at some point in time, you will experience the blues." Yes, but when you experience them like this, you go away happy.

My MinnPost column is a preview, not a review, so I couldn't mention the songs that were high points for me: Debbie's "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues," Jamecia's "Taking a Chance on Love" and "Willow Weep for Me" (wrenching and emotional), "Kitchen Man," a song mined with double entendres which Debbie sang with considerable relish, Bessie Smith's "Dirty No-Gooder's Blues," which Debbie nailed, and Alberta Hunter's "Rough and Ready Man," magnificently sung by Regina Williams. Good stuff.

Photo of Debbie Duncan taken at the Artists' Quarter in March 2007.

Lang Lang

When: 3/13/08
Where: Ordway Center for the Performing Arts
Who: Lang Lang, piano

This was the second time in four years that young Chinese pianist Lang Lang appeared in the Schubert Club’s International Artist Series. We also saw him the first time, in October 2004. He was 22 years old.

That night, he played Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 10, a Chopin piano sonata, some Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt, and three encores, including one accompanied by his father on the er-hu, a Chinese instrument. When he walked through the door leading offstage after his final encore, he leaped into the air.

Tonight he seemed more serious, less ebullient. Between then and now, he has performed before royalty and presidents, to crowds of tens of thousands, and to an audience of who knows how many millions during the most recent Grammys, where he and Herbie Hancock played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” He’s the global brand ambassador for Audi and Montblanc, and Steinway has named pianos after him. He’s huge.

He opened with a Mozart piano sonata, this time No. 13. Thoughtful and beautiful. His reading of Schumann’s C-major Fantasy lost me. His performance of Chinese works transcribed for piano—he described them as “an impressionist Chinese piece,” “Chinese Bach,” “a Chinese tango,” “a very traditional tune,” and “Happy Holidays”—was lovely and warm. His soft notes are so soft it’s as if moths are landing on the keys, yet managing to sound them.

During Granados’s “Los Requiebros,” I kept thinking about how poor Granados had died: crossing the Atlantic during WWI, his ship the SS Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat. He was safe in a lifeboat when he saw his wife in the water. He tried to save her and both were lost.

Two Liszts followed, including the grand finale, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. (In 2004, it was Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.) This was the flashy, fiery Lang Lang I remembered from before.

But no Chopin. And no leap following his single encore, a classical piece I recognized but can’t name.

I enjoyed the concert—Lang Lang is an amazing artist, an alien creature born with a great gift to parents who sacrificed everything to it—but I also wondered how things were going at the Jazz is NOW! NOWnet preview performance, which was happening concurrently across the river. I wished I could be in two places at once.

Photo by John Whiting.

Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott

11/9/07, The Schubert Club, Ordway Center: For its 125th birthday, the Schubert Club invited Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott to play. We bought cheap seats and were astonished to find ourselves in the best possible place for the occasion, overlooking the stage and the piano keyboard. (Gallery Boxes Left, Box A, seats 1 and 3—the left leading edge of the topmost balcony.) Thanks to my new Nikon Trailblazer binoculars, which I brought because I was sure we'd be sitting somewhere in Wisconsin, I could see everything: the unruly cowlick at the back of Ma's head, the sparkles on Stott's shoes, and the back-and-forth between them as they played a beautiful program: Schubert's Sonata in A minor for Arpeggione and Piano, Shostakovich's Sonata in D minor, Piazzola's Le Grand Tango, a collaboration by Eberto Gismonti and Geraldo Carneiro ("Bodas de prata & Quatro cantos"), and Franck's Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano. At one point during the Schubert Adagio, Ma was reading over Stott's bare shoulder; she turned her head, they looked at each other, and it was a moment of breathtaking intimacy. We watched her graceful hands on the keys, and his on the long fretless road of the fingerboard. At times, Stott's hands seemed lighter than air, as if she was forcing them down to land delicately and skip over the keys and rise again.

Which cello was Ma playing? The 1733 Montagnana from Venice named Petunia, worth $2.5 million, which he once left in a New York City taxi? Or the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius, formerly owned by Jacqueline du Pre? (The Duport Stradivarius, built a year earlier, was owned by Mstislav Rostropovich. The scratch on its side supposedly came from a spur on Napoleon's boot.) Ma calls the Montagnana "my voice," so I'll guess that's the one he had at the Ordway.

When you sit close and/or have a decent pair of binoculars, you can see that making music takes sweat and breath and physical effort. Both Ma and Stott worked hard at the Ordway, playing for a sold-out crowd (oversold; we had to borrow a program from someone seated near us), cheerfully returning for four encores, raising oversized wine and martini glasses in a mock toast, and reappearing in the foyer, where the audience had been invited for champagne and birthday cake. The music there was provided by pianist Laura Caviani, tenor sax player Pete Whitman, and bassist Gary Raynor. A friend later told me that the always gracious Ma told the crowd he'd been the opening act for Laura and her trio.

Stealth photo by an anonymous photographer.

Eroica

The Schubert Club, Ordway Center, 10/2/07: The 125-year-old Schubert Club launched its annual International Artist Series with a performance by "the most sought-after trio in the world," the Eroica (not a word that's missing a t, eroica is Italian for heroic, and the name of Beethoven's Third Symphony). They played beautifully and looked fabulous, wearing the slinky gowns shown here and amazingly high heels. Pianist Erika Nickrenz is tall; her piano bench was perched on four little trapezoid-shaped columns for extra height (someone should tell jazz pianist Jon Weber about those). They played Jean-Baptiste Loeillet's Trio Sonata No. 2 in B minor; three tangos by Astor Piazzolla; Paul Schoenfield's "Cafe Music," commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and based on an idea Schoenfield had while sitting in for the pianist at Murray's Restaurant (home of the Original Silver Butterknife Steak); and Schubert's Trio No. 1 in B flat Major, Op. 99.

I loved the sensuous, smoky tangos and the witty Schoenfield. The Schubert happened after intermission, and by then we were at Kincaid's sipping martinis and ordering steaks. I'm sure the Schubert was exquisite but we were hungry and, as I looked at the program and pondered what to do (stay? leave?), what sealed it for me was realizing that the Eroica would bring their own stamp and flavor to the piece, but there would be no improvisation and I could listen to a recording later (the Beaux Arts Trio on iTunes, for example). Jazz may have spoiled me for written-down, played-by-the-note music. Listening to the Loeillet, my mind strayed and I wondered, "Why does the second i in violin change to an o in violoncello?"

Photo from the Eroica Trio Web site, Gallery section.