Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Rufus Wainwright at the Hollywood Bowl
Photo: Lori Shepler/LAT 2007

It’s hard to watch someone you admire take a fall. Especially when that fall is in the least likely of places. Such was the case this weekend when Rufus Wainwright arrived at the Hollywood Bowl with his much hyped and ballyhooed Judy Garland tribute show. Wainwright made a splash last year when he recapped Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert in the same venue to commemorate her life and work. He has reprized these shows around the world in other cities Garland visited on that tour, including London and Paris, and Sunday he was joined by his mother, sister Martha, and Lorna Luft to work some of that memory magic here.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that magical. Sure it seemed great on paper – gay icon Wainwright performs the music of gay icon Garland in what is not only a tribute to her legend, but also a tribute of sorts to how much things have changed for gay men and lesbians in the West in the last 40 years or so. How could things go wrong? Well first off, there are the songs. Almost uniformly out of Wainwright’s range, what started out as an amusing parlor trick became nearly painful to listen to by show's end. Even with a little help from his friends, his voice was nothing but a ragged stump when all was said and done. Even when he could hold it together earlier on, he mustered so little power in the upper part of his range that even the sound mixers and amplification were powerless to stop his demolition by the Hollywood Bowl orchestra. While there was no doubt a great deal of fun reliving many of the songs that made her famous, as the evening wore on, it seemed more a reminder of how much was lost with her passing and what a huge talent she really was.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of laughs, particularly Wainwright's returning to the stage for an encore of “Get Happy” in full Garland drag right out of Summer Stock. And, as he himself noted, this was really an evening about fun and in many ways it was. If only it could have sounded a little more like that.

Labels: Hollywood Bowl, Rufus Wainwright

Stéphane Deneve
Photo: Lawrence K. Ho/LAT 2007

It’s August in LA and even though it’s only a week before Labor Day, our hottest months are just now getting underway. Which is why the light clouds provided relief in the form of a surprisingly cool evening for the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl last Thursday. The LA Philharmonic played under the leadership of Stéphane “Leopold” Deneve in his first Bowl appearance with a program of French masters including Berlioz, Debussy, Saint-Säens, and Ravel. And while there was little groundbreaking or new about the show, and it suffered from the awful acoustics that are part and parcel of the venue, everything was played so splendidly and with such skill and care that all the negatives melted away into wonder.

This success was in no small part due to the contribution of Jean-Yves Thibaudet who was the featured soloist in Saint-Säens’s fifth Piano Concerto. Thibaudet seems to love the West Coast and the region loves him right back - he appears as a regular fixture in both LA and SF in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues throughout the year. This piece can often be about the fireworks of the last movement, but Thibaudet had other things in mind leaving the crowd with a second movement that was nothing short of brilliant. He was a man on a mission.

But the show was far from over with Deneve leading our hometown orchestra through an especially Wagnerian version of La Mer and a rousing suite from Daphnis et Chloë. It may be the doldrums of late summer elsewhere, but the LA Philharmonic again proved that any night they are playing is likely one to remember.

Labels: Deneve, Hollywood Bowl, LA Philharmonic, Thibaudet

Diana Krall looking not unlike Daphne
Photo: Bruce Weber

If there were ever an argument about the benefits of staying through the intermission of a program that seems miserable at intermission, it was this weekend’s performances with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. To some extent, this is unfair to say since the show was really two programs in one. Most of the tickets were sold for the evening’s headliner, Diana Krall, who appeared with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. However, the powers that be must have decided that the Krall set would not be lengthy enough to occupy a full evening with an intermission, so the LA Philharmonic was recruited to perform an unnecessary and needlessly pandering 30 minute intro including orchestral excerpts from On the Town and Porgy and Bess. The talents of this group and the Phil’s associate conductor, Joana Carneiro, are wasted on this schlock filler - music that is both pleasantly familiar to a crowd largely uninterested in classical music and yet not given the requisite space or context to make it worthwhile.

Luckily, Krall was on the bill and did she ever deliver. Krall’s recordings are excellent, but none compare to the joy of seeing her live, and she is one of the rare performers who can take the mammoth space of the Bowl and shrink it to virtually nothing in an instant. Her dusky voice and intonation were magnificent in a program that focused heavily on Nat Cole and Cole Porter, as well as numbers from her current record From This Moment On. Although she can tend to fall off in the bottom part of her already low range, there is a no-nonsense quality to her playing and singing that make these standards seem both heart-felt and nonchalant simultaneously. Her support from CHJO was first rate, but for two extended stretches she was accompanied only by John Clayton on bass, Jeff Hamilton on drums, and guitarist Anthony Wilson. And just think, all that talent and virtually no pandering about the events in her personal life that have occupied so much of the press coverage about her in the last year. It’s always nice to see artists doing what they do best without the need to filter it through whatever the “story” is about them at the moment.

Labels: Diana Krall, Hollywood Bowl, LA Philharmonic