Tag Archives: Charles Noble

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, Food, General, Music, Theater

What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores

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  • The royal whatzis
  • The Cherry Orchard at Artists Repertory Theatre
  • Noble Viola on Opus at Portland Center Stage
  • Brian Libby on the failed Columbia River Crossing
  • Portland Taiko tells a tale
  • James E. McWilliams on eating locally and globally

Portland Taiko. Photo: Rich Iwasaki/2009Portland Taiko. Rich Iwasaki/2009

By Bob Hicks

We’re given to understand some sort of white-tie wedding is taking place in the wee hours of Friday morning, and much of the world is agog. Art Scatter does not plan to cover it. With any luck — if the cat doesn’t come slapping at our cheek with her paw, demanding to be let outside — we’ll be snoozing.

And now, on with the news.

Chekhov the composer: On Wednesday night the Scatters took in The Cherry Orchard, playwright Richard Kramer’s world-premiere adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s final dramatic masterpiece, at Artists Rep. It struck us again that, like so many leading playwrights, Chekhov thought like a musician.

Like a string quartet: Linda Alper, Tim Blough (background), Michael Mendelson and Tobias Andersen in "The Cherry Orchard." Photo: Owen CareyThere isn’t much story to The Cherry Orchard, but there are themes, counter-themes, motifs. It’s chamber music, and the way we hear it can be startlingly different from production to production, depending not just on our own life experiences (interpreting Chekhov relies to an extreme on what the audience brings to it) but also on the emphases of interpretation on the stage: Do we concentrate on the cello tonight, or the bassoon? In truth, I suspect that even more so than ordinarily, every member of the audience sees a different play when watching Chekhov.

Kramer’s intermissionless adaptation, which I like quite a lot, sets out to rough up the Chekhov-as-wistful-yearning school of thought, and it succeeds. To extend the musical metaphor, it’s a bit like Bach rearranged by Bartok: depths and balances and gorgeous tones, but syncopated and spiked up.

Continue reading What wedding? — on Chekhov, string quartets, bridges, drums and locavores →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Television, Visual Art

Thursday links: Trash-art TV, unkind cuts

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter doesn’t watch much television (especially since the Mariners have taken a dive into baseball’s primordial ooze of futility: where are you now, Edgar and Buhner and Big Unit?), and he doesn’t really go in for the American Idol model of determining cultural “winners.”

Nao Bustamante, not shocking enough for TV. Shows like Idol and So You Think You Can Dance certainly reflect the effect of the marketplace on the art world — an effect that a lot of people like to pretend doesn’t exist but is in fact crucial. That doesn’t necessarily make it a positive, only an inescapable fact of life. Still, as we’ve all become excruciatingly aware, an unchecked marketplace can be an arena for disaster, and Mr. Scatter is not convinced that his musical listening habits, for instance, should be determined by a popular vote.

This is a long route to confessing that he hasn’t actually watched an episode of the Bravo network’s Work of Art, in which visual artists advance or fall by the wayside according to a Trump-like theory of failure and success. Fortunately Regina Hackett, from her perch at the provocative and insightful Another Bouncing Ball, has watched, and thought, and written.

Her post Reality TV: artists as female stereotypes is a good read, and typically for ABB, it rattles the cages of conventional wisdom. And Hackett can be funny. Musing on Work of Art‘s judges, whom she judges to be pretty lame, she wonders whether the show couldn’t be goosed up a bit if venerated critic Donald Kuspit joined the panel: “When being fed nonsense, I prefer it to be elegant nonsense, like Kuspit’s.”

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Hackett’s post here on Dave Hickey (she calls him “the great tap-dancing art critic of our time”) is also a refreshing read. Here’s Hickey on university life: “It took me a few years to realize you can’t talk to other English teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though. That’s why you want to learn all the names of the professors’ pets, so when you see them in the hall you can ask, ‘How’s Roscoe?’ and they will go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever you want.”

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Meanwhile, Barry Johnson at Arts Dispatch and David Stabler at The Oregonian have been having an interesting conversation about whether it’s smart or dumb for arts groups to  slash budgets in tough times. Should you cut budgets and programming, because it’s prudent to balance your budget? Or does that simply make you look desperate? The ping-pong has been interesting, and so have the comments by a lot of smart onlookers.

I like the latest (so far) take on the fray, by Oregon Symphony violist Charles Noble at Noble Viola: “What you cut is almost as important as how much you cut. … For example, cutting all pops programming because ‘the audience is all dying anyway’ is catastrophic cutting, whereas searching for the audience that we most want to develop and then catering to them within the general pops genre is the better route, though possibly more expensive and time consuming. The difference is what you or I might do to our prized Japanese maple tree if we just randomly hack off stray limbs instead of hiring a skilled arborist to perform careful pruning to make the tree more healthy.”

In other words: Constantly reassess, in good times and bad. And spend smart.

This is a discussion that might actually have an impact. If you haven’t already, catch up on the conversation at these links and throw in your own two Euros’ worth.

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Illustration: Nao Bustamante’s performance piece wasn’t shocking enough for the judges on Bravo’s “Work of Art.”

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Saturday scatter: too little time, too much to do

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Josh Kornbuth brings a contemporary edge to Ben Franklin. Photo: Owen Carey

Josh Kornbluth bringing a dash of deceptive comedy to Founding Father Ben Franklin in his solo show in Portland Center Stage’s basement. Photo: Owen Carey

We have truly entered fall, and it’s not just the fireplace weather that tips me off. The sad truth is, suddenly Portland’s jumping with things to do, and Mr. and Mrs. Scatter just can’t jump high or fast enough.

We’ll miss the great Mikhail Baryshnikov and dancing partner, Ana Laguna, and we feel very bad about that. Our friend and cohort Martha Ullman West filed this terrific review of the White Bird show in this morning’s Oregonian.

Just last night we missed several one-time-only musical opportunities: the Portland Jazz Orchestra‘s Buddy Rich show; Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya; the promising-looking Paris Guitar Duo; Portland Vocal Consort‘s evening of Handel and Haydn.

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We did see monologuist Josh Kornbluth’s opening-night performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged in the intimate basement space at Portland Center Stage, and given that you can’t see everything, it was a pretty good choice. Kornbluth and Ben will be playing the basement stage through Nov. 22, and I hope they get a good, packed run.

Kornbluth seems a little bit like a more extroverted, less dyspeptic Wally Shawn. He plays the nebbish role to the hilt, borrowing freely from Borscht Belt comic history and the vein of intellectual New York Jewish-radical neorosis that Woody Allen mines so freely. Starting with comic traditions that have served entertainers as diverse as Mort Sahl, Buddy Hackett and Neil Simon so well, he transforms them into a seemingly free-flowing riff that eventually doubles back on itself and makes structural sense.

To hear Kornbluth tell it, he became interested in old Ben when he looked into the mirror one day, inspected his receding hairline, and realized he’d come to look like the Founding Father. So why not do a show about him?

Like a lot of successful one-person shows, Ben Franklin: Unplugged takes its audience on a dual journey: one into the psyche and obsessions of the performer himself, the second into the performer’s discoveries about his external subject — in this case, Ben.

The link is fathers and sons: Kornbluth’s unresolved relationship with his own father, who died when Kornbluth was in college, and Franklin’s tortured relationship with his illegitimate but favored son William, who seemed the apple of his eye until the two took opposite sides on the issue of the Revolutionary War: the father the unrepentant radical, the son the extreme and sometimes ruthless loyalist.

Along the way Kornbluth creates a marvelous supporting character in the aged, accidental scholar Claude and unearths little pieces of fascinating biography in search of “my own Ben Franklin.” The wry blend of famous-man biography and obscure-entertainer autobiography makes for an engaging evening.

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Other stuff to keep you eyes on:

La Boheme. Tonight is the final performance of Portland Opera‘s lively, fresh and winning production of the Puccini favorite, which Art Scatter wrote about here.

A Chorus Line. Musical-theater history at Stumptown Stages. How does this groundbreaking backstage show hold up after 34 years? Mr. Scatter will be there tonight to find out.

The Trip to Bountiful. Profile Theatre kicks off its season of plays by Horton Foote, who died last spring just shy of his 93rd birthday and who is perhaps best-known for his superb screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Becky’s New Car. Steven Dietz’s comedy opened last week at Artists Rep, but I haven’t caught it. I like Dietz, though: He’s been turning out good, well-shaped plays for regional theaters for many years.

A Country Doctor. Somehow Defunkt Theatre‘s season opener slipped past me. I don’t know this play — it’s an interpretation of the Kafka story — but it’s by Len Jenkin, another writer who’s always worth a shot.

Jon Kimura Parker and the Oregon Symphony. Pianist Parker performs Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and the orchestra plays Bartok’s Divertimento for string and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 in what could be a bell-ringer of a season-opening concert series Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Symphony violist Charles Noble, on his music blog Daily Observations, was enthusiastic about rehearsals.

Haochen Zhang. This year’s Van Cliburn winner plays Ravel, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and Mason Bates in a Portland Piano International performance at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Newmark.

San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Don’t know this touring group, but the program of Latin American sacred music sounds intriguing. 7:30 Saturday at University of Portland‘s Buckley Center, 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Salem.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. The Southwest troupe performs pop-savvy Twyla Tharp’s Sue’s Leg at a White Bird performance Wednesday in the Schnitz.

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Music

Music, maestro, please. But can’t you be a little nicer?

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So much going on in town, so little time. So VERY little time, when you’re on the road.

TBA? For a lot of people in Portland, PICA’s orgy of the experimental and unusual is the biggest arts deal of the year. Looks like I won’t catch any of it. Which is why, Dear Reader, you won’t be reading about it here.

Carlos Kalmar/Oregon SymphonyThe symphony’s kicking into its season. So are the opera and the city’s theater companies. Ballet is getting ready to haul out the slippers. Across the city, tuxedos are coming out of mothballs (OK, that’s an exaggeration: This IS Portland) and uptown revelers are dusting off their dancing shoes.

Me? This morning I’m behind the wheel again, making like Willie Nelson as I head for far eastern Oregon and the Wallowa Mountains. If Heaven can wait, so can All My Sons.

Yes, the League of Tough-Guy Arts Observers is going to have to do without me for a spell.

Playing catch-up, I discover Bill Donahue’s intriguing profile in the current Portland Monthly of Carlos Kalmar, the Oregon Symphony’s conductor and musical director. I know Bill a little, and he’s not only a good guy but also one of the city’s most graceful writers. And he’s fearless. He admits right up front that he went into this story knowing next to nothing about classical music. Then he does his homework, and he does it well enough to write some gorgeous passages about life behind the scenes.

Trouble is, according to a lot of musicians, it’s tough to make up for a lifetime of neglect in such a short time. In short, they say, Bill didn’t know enough about the way orchestras work to be able to weigh his impressions adequately. They believe he misunderstands the complex relationship between conductor and musicians, and sees lots of controversy where little exists. True enough, a certain amount of ogre shows up in Bill’s depiction of the Big Bad Autocrat, although he also hints that all that aloofness and disdain might be just part of the maestro act.

Wherever you fall on this question, Bill’s story is a good read, and I recommend it — with this caveat: To balance it out, you should go to Daily Observations, symphony violist Charles Noble’s urbane and insightful music blog, to see how he and other musicians respond. The conversation — the dialectic, if you’re a Brechtian or a devotee of classical Greek philosophy — is sharp, and maybe by bouncing the two sides against each other you’ll find your own version of the truth. This is Noble’s main post on the controversy, and it includes a lot of reader comments worth your time.

Happy reading. I’m thinking about dusty roads and cowboy hats.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket

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Hansel and Gretel, illus. Arthur Rackham, 1909. Wikimedia CommonsThe smashing success of last Friday’s Dance United gala benefit notwithstanding, it’s a Grimm world out there right now for Portland’s arts organizations: There go Hansel and Gretel, trailing bread crumbs as they traipse into the thick of the woods, and here come the birds, pecking away at the crumbs so there’s no trail out again.

There must be some way out of here. What Hansel and Gretel and the Oregon Symphony and Oregon Ballet Theatre and all-classical radio and Portland Center Stage and the rest need is a financial GPS.

For arts groups here and elsewhere, the fissures of the global economic meltdown have become a chasm, a canyon carved by the raging River Deficit. Given the state of the financial union it’s astonishing that Oregon Ballet Theatre has managed to almost wipe out its $750,000 emergency shortfall in less than a month. Celebrate this as a victory, because a victory it surely is.

But the sobering truth is, it’s only the beginning. Now the hard, tough work begins. And it’s going to be extremely difficult keeping up the sort of adrenalin that has at least temporarily pulled OBT back from the brink.

This string of financial crises has predictably pulled out the trollers, the mocking wise guys who laugh and declare that if arts groups can’t survive in the marketplace, they deserve to die (presumably, like Bank of America and General Motors). These loudmouths understand nothing about the not-for-profit world, or if they do understand it, they despise it with every fiber in their rugged-individualist, social-Darwinist bodies. Ignore them. They are happiest when someone shouts back.

Even among arts people the current crisis has inspired a lot of hand-wringing about “dead art forms” and the possibility that in an age of radically new media and runaway-success popular art forms,  people just don’t care any more about things like dance and serious music.

I don’t buy it. In a way, the “traditional” arts have never been more popular. The Oregon Symphony, which has piled up a $1.5 million deficit in the just-ending fiscal year, sold more tickets in the just-past season than ever before. OBT is playing to packed, enthusiastic houses. Portland Center Stage keeps extending its Storm Large musical hit, Crazy Enough. Radio market share at KQAC, Portland’s all-classical station, is booming. As I make the rounds I see good-sized crowds at fringe events, too, from puppet shows to new vaudeville to cold readings of new play scripts. Dance and classical music, for all their financial woes, are undergoing a renaissance sparked by rigorously trained and exquisitely talented young performers — the very people who are supposed to have defected to American Idol and Twitter and “reality” TV. What’s more, they’re extending the boundaries of their art forms, reinterpreting them for today’s world even as they keep their heritages alive.

And audiences have responded. If there’s a crisis — and there is — it isn’t a lack of enthusiastic audiences, who are finding ways to continue to participate even in the midst of their own financial travails. The thirst for art is real, and our greatest hope for long-term optimism.

So what’s the problem?

Continue reading Not out of the woods yet: Arts groups in a fiscal thicket →

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Food, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

We’re No. 1 with a dart! (pass it along)

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Actually, it’s a multiply shared No. 1, a sort of pay-it-forward No. 1, a chain-letter pat on the back that feels nice and warm and fuzzy.

From somewhere out of the blue (OK, it was from our cyberspace friend Rose City Reader, the literary omnivore who in the real world hangs out just a few blocks away) comes to Art Scatter the Premios Dardo Award.

It’s not the Nobel, it’s not an Oscar or even a Pulitzer. But neither is it a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme. No money changes hands (isn’t that just life in the blogosphere, though?). The Premios Dardo robs no one of their dignity or life savings. It’s simply a way of saying, we like what you do, and we’d like you to tell us whose work you admire on the Web. Fair enough. A lot of wheezing takes place on the Net, and one good way to get to the fresh air is to listen to recommendations from people you trust.

We haven’t been able to track down where the Premios Dardo Awards began or who’s behind them, but it really doesn’t matter. By this point it’s a crazy quilt stretched loosely across the globe, and we’re happy to add our few stitches to the pattern. (As near as our feeble translating abilities can figure out, by the way, “Premios Dardo” means roughly “Top Dart.”)

Here are the rules:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So, here goes. Here’s our pick of 15, listed in that boring-but-still-useful old alphabetical order. If you haven’t already, give ’em a look. You might find some new friends:

Bunny With an Art Blog

Charles Noble’s Daily Observations

Culture Shock

Dave Allen’s Pampelmoose

Dramma per Musica

Little Red Bike Cafe

Mark Russell’s CulturePulp

Mead Hunter’s Blogorrhea

Port

Portland Architecture

Portland Spaces/Burnside Blog

Reading Copy Book Blog

Splattworks

Third Angle Music Blog

TJ Norris