Tag Archives: Anthony Bannon
Guest soloist Anne Akiko Meyers performs Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor Andrew Litton Thursday evening in the Amp. Photo by Eric Shea.

CSO, Meyers leave audience amazed at the wonder

August 4, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

The noise-makers were out again Thursday evening for Maestro Andrew Litton: the super-sneezer timing an entry with the timpani in the soft beginning of Mahler’s “‘Titan’ Symphony,” and then the dogs and a few of the others.

But at the end of the evening, which included communication with Mendelssohn and Mahler, the audience walked out amazed at the wonder. It was the amazing wonder of a symphony orchestra so well led and so well informed, and of an artist as tuned to the gods as Anne Akiko Meyers, the master violinist who has made such a mark with her global performances of Mendelssohn’s esteemed Violin Concerto in E Minor.

She arrived in flowing summer whites and with her Stradivarius, and she quickly acknowledged her readiness. In this concerto, the solo instrument starts right in, and one knew it was going to be special. Not special based on fancy flourish, though there were plenty of chances for that. With Meyers, it was played not for drama, but for delectation; not for flash, but for all that is fine. Her artistry has no need for razzmatazz.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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Guest Conductor Andrew Litton leads the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra in its Tuesday performance in the Amphitheater. Photo by Eric Shea.

CSO, Litton serve up ‘rousing good time’ in Tuesday concert

August 2, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

’m sorry that I have to challenge Maestro Litton like this, but I can’t let go a characterization that the Gerard Finzi piece for piano and strings he conducted and performed with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra was “a palate cleanser.” It was not at all the sorbet the maestro promised Tuesday evening. It was not a parfait, either. It wasn’t even gelato.

It is true that Finzi’s short work called Ecologue Op. 10 is only 9 minutes long, and it is also true that it fit between what the conductor — speaking extemporaneously to the audience — called “two larger dishes”: Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien Op. 45, which is 15 minutes long, and Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, which is all of 37 minutes.

One might argue that by sonic weight, the Finzi work is light, with far fewer occupied seats than either of the other two, which are full orchestra productions. Both the Tchaikovsky and the Franck employ a tuba, which is heavyweight against Finzi’s strings-only.

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Symphony
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Nina’s husband, Adam (Michael Gaston), sits on the bathroom floor with Nina’s common-law step-sister Zoe (Leah Anderson). Photo by Eric Shea.

‘Fifty Ways’: A promising play full of hurt, more hurt and hope

July 24, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Fifty Ways, the new play by Kate Fodor showing in premiere with the Chautauqua Theater Company, might become music in time. Its promise is atonal. Right now, it plays too pleasantly.

Fifty Ways begins with great assurance, dropping several F-bombs by the end of Page 3 and keeping up that verbal damage for the duration.

As well, the protagonist quickly and convincingly vomits three times, his wife having just concluded a declamation with an odd synesthesia about the different barks her house emanates, which is her way of complaining about the things that don’t work around the place. Those things that don’t work bark at her.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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Wesley Anderegg. “Man,” “Two Headed Man,” “Woman,” “Lollipop,” “Man with Pipe.” Ceramic plates. 18˝ × 23˝ Photo by Lauren Rock.

31 nameless orphans, looking for a home

July 18, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Very few pictures wear name tags. Naming is the province of the caption, or of an oral tradition, sometimes passed on from parents to children, but more often eluding the good intentions of commitment to writing. The boxes of anonymous photographs in most home closets are silent testimony to this nominative failure. Worse yet, consider the images of family and friends banished, orphaned, at estate sales and flea markets, touching evidence of the painfully anonymous tradition of the portrait.

Judy Barie, director of the galleries of the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, has opened an image shelter for the nameless at Strohl Art Center, in which she offers 31 unnamed images to patrons ready to provide foster parenting and a new home for only partially identified images.

Yes, there are a few pictures known by first names in the shelter — Allen, Joe, Steve, Trudy, Joe, and Virginia among them. Otherwise, we must be content with Two Headed Man, Small Female Head, Young Bride, and Teens on the Beach.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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Chautauqua Festival Dancers perform Mark Diamond’s “Foresight” during the Chautauqua Dance Student Gala on Sunday afternoon in the Amphitheater. Photo by Eric Shea.

Sunday’s School of Dance Student Gala provides hopeful glimpse into future

July 17, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 1 Comment

The audience in the Amphitheater enjoyed a look into the future Sunday afternoon and saw that it is full of excellence and adventure — and that there is hope. The future, we saw, loves beauty and doesn’t shirk from difficulty or from ideas thought impossible.

There is a strong sense of community in this future, foretold by the young dancers gathered to present the Chautauqua Dance Student Gala, a presentation by Chautauqua Festival and Workshop Dancers, under the direction for the past 30 years, of Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux.

A banner on stage, in fact, announced this year of celebration, a legacy looking back upon a “Rich Tradition” and forward to an “Exciting Future,” and Bonnefoux and his Associate Director Maris Battaglia also took opportunity to memorialize contributions of the late Ed Anderson and Margery Gootnik, volunteers with the School of Dance, who were like family.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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Dee Donasco, a Chautauqua Opera Apprentice Artist, performs a piece from Handel’s Alcina with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, directed by guest conductor Stephen Osgood, Saturday evening in the Amphitheater.

Opera Young Artists fill the huge space of the Amp as Osgood leads CSO with high energy, family spirit

July 16, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 1 Comment

All who were in the Amphitheater Saturday evening know that we will hear these voices again — on another stage. But the hope that night, shared around, was far more venial — namely, that we’d hear just a little more right then and there, for the night was yet young and music that special.

But no avail.

We’d been given a powerful wrap-up of eight lead voices and 18 from the corps against the full Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra — all unamplified. That was, we’ll acknowledge, huge. It was from the sextet added to Act 2, or sometimes to Act 3, of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, but crowded here into eight voices, plus the corps. And that spells big sound.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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Several “D.P.W. Platters,” by Boris Bally, are on display as part of the “Recycle. Reuse. Reinvent.” exhibition at Fowler-Kellogg Art Center. Photo by Michelle Kanaar.

Fowler-Kellogg exhibits deep, thoughtful work

July 4, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Scrap metal, cereal boxes, tea bags, plastic container lids: “Recycle. Reuse. Reinvent.” It is an exhibition of art sponsored by the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution.

But are there no limits, no boundaries, for the artist? Scrap metal?

“Recycle. Reuse. Reinvent.” is Judy Barie’s nominative for a harvest of invention, for an art that looks out and beyond rather than drilling analytically into some reduction. Barie is VACI curator and director of the galleries on Wythe.

One might figure Barie’s parallel exhibition in the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center as a counterweight notion to the ebullience of the ecology of “Recycle.” The parallel show is called “Transitions in Black and White,” meaning how one essentially black and white work in one medium transitions into a black and white work in another medium.

But guess again. Those artists are more interested in addition than subtraction.

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Guest Critic Reviews, Visual Arts
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Chautauquans view the 55th Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art, on display until July 12 in the main gallery at Strohl Art Center.

55th Annual Exhibition full of challenges, alarm, surprises, delights

July 3, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

“The world has come undone,” claims the 55th Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art.

Paintings are topsy-turvy; grass submits to an unearthly force and ends up above the sky; the Pope on his throne rides in the sky, above the clouds, laughing like crazy; and, most miraculous of all, children’s books take flight and soar off the shelf and across the wall, up and away, their pages becoming birds in flight.

No joke.

That is art the way it is supposed to be: full of challenge and alarm but providing the safety valve of surprise and delight, inspiration and idea.

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Guest Critic Reviews
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