Brian Stokes Mitchell playlist

Ezio Pinza

Brian Stokes Mitchell sang up a storm at Sanders Theatre on Friday night. He showed his remarkable vocal and stylistic (not to mention acting) range throughout, though my guess is he would have had the audience in the palm of his hand even had he chosen to sing nursery rhymes with his mouth full of sunflower seeds.

My favorite juxtaposition of styles was the transition from the full-bore Some Enchanted Evening a la the great Ezio Pinza (looking slick, above), to a finger snapping take on The Best Is Yet to Come in which he nailed Tony Bennet's (1962) delivery of the song's title: The-BEST-Is-YET-to-COME-and-BABE-won't-it-be-fiiine....It takes chops to negotiate that turn, brothah.

Here is his set list, imperfectly annotated by yours truly:

Some Enchanted Evening (from South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein)
The Best is Yet to Come (Music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh)
Wheels of a Dream (Composer, Stephen Flaherty)
Love for Sale (Composer, Cole Porter)
So in Love (Composer, Cole Porter, from Kiss Me, Kate)
This Nearly Was Mine (from South Pacific, Rodgers and Hammerstein)
I Was There
Bein' Green/Hooray for Tom (Yes, that Bein' Green, written by Joe Raposo)
New Words
'30s and '40s medley

Encores:
Some Other Time (Composer, Leonard Bernstein, from On The Town)
The Impossible Dream (Music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion)
How Long Has This Been Going On? (George and Ira Gershwin)

Three final notes:

1) How Long Has This Been Going On? is humorous choice for a closer, but it would be a funnier third encore if the show was longer than a perfectly reasonable, but hardly lengthy 90 minutes. "How Long Has This Been Going On? Since 8 o'clock, why?" It's not like I want him to wear out his voice, or anything, I'm just sayin'.

2) Our crack programming staff tells me Mr. Mitchell's next gig is/was a fundraiser for his son's preschool. Aaww. For the playlist, I recommend keeping The Best Is Yet to Come, though I might reconsider Love for Sale.

3) The Celebrity Series presented Ezio Pinza at Symphony Hall four times back in the '40s. I wonder if he ever sang at a pre-school fundraiser...?

Gil Rose takes our version of The Proust Questionnaire

Marcel Proust

In the interest of creating original content for the web we have developed our own - slightly different - version of the famous Proust Questionnaire. Boston Modern Orchestra Project conductor Gil Rose was gracious enough to answer our version of the Proust Questionnaire recently. What is The Proust Questionnaire, you ask?

Background
The young Marcel Proust was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to them. At the birthday party of Antoinette Felix-Faure, the 13-year-old Marcel was asked to answer the following questions in the birthday book, and here is a sample of what he said:

Marcel Proust's answers at age 13 in 1884:

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
To be separated from Mama

Where would you like to live?
In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater



Gil Rose

Gil Rose's answers in 2007:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Cocktail Hour

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
No Cocktail Hour

What is your most marked characteristic?
A tendency to make obscure but self-entertaining cultural references

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Dignity

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Dignity

What do you most value in your friends?
Dignity

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
A tendency to overvalue dignity in my friends

What is your favorite occupation?
Cocktail Hour

What is your favorite journey?
Escaping from town (preferably to a cocktail hour)

Who is your favorite hero/heroine of fiction?
Lassie

What books are currently on your bedside table?
"The Aesthetics of Survival" by George Rochberg

Who are your favorite composers?
This is a closely guarded state secret

Who is your favorite performing artist?
Every soloist I ever worked with because I got to perform with them

What is it that you most dislike?
Hamloaf

Which talent would you most like to have?
I would like to be able to juggle

How would you like to die?
In a dignified juggling accident

What is your motto?
I never want to belong to a club that will have me as its member.  (thanks Groucho)

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project perform at Sanders Theatre on May 19.

On the Harlem Line with Rachmaninoff and The Babe

I visited Westchester County, New York this past weekend and on Sunday my brother and I made a trip to a graveyard. It was a nice day, what else were we going to do?

Along Grand Central Station's Metro-North Harlem Rail Line and the Taconic State Parkway in the vicinity of Valhalla there are a series of cemeteries - Kensico, Gate of Heaven, Mt. Eden, Mt. Pleasant, etc. - forming a sort of "cemetery row." We advanced a number of theories as to why there might be so many graveyards along this strip, but came to no conclusions. Regardless, these cemeteries are the final resting place of quite a few famous New Yorkers.

At Kensico Cemetery, high on a hill, across the street from the Actor's Fund obelisk, and surrounded by a hedge of tall yews, we found the final resting place of none other than composer, pianist and conductor, Sergei Rachmaninoff, his wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Princess Irina Volkonsky.


High on a hill, surrounded by a hedge of tall yews...

Mr. Rachmaninoff died in 1943, but not before he played Celebrity Series piano recitals in 1939, '40, '41, and '42 and at least one pre-Celebrity Series Aaron Richmond engagement in 1925. He did a few other notable things along the way that you also may be aware of...

Because of his history with the Celebrity Series, Rachmaninoff's grave was the perfect find for this blog, but in the interest of full disclosure I must tell you that we didn't go to Kensico Cemetery looking for Sergei Rachmaninoff. Our goal was this marker down the street at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery:

We found The Babe, then went looking for Lou Gerhig at Kensico and found Harry Frazee (never heard of Frazee? follow the link). Mr. Frazee's grave was free of any evidence of vandalism (Still lost? see story), and he is no doubt resting more comfortably since 2004:



Frazee more or less brought us to Rachmaninoff and we have come full circle.

This Cemetery Row is quite an impressive strip of real estate. Kensico Cemetery alone is the eternal resting place of author and playwright Paddy Chayefsky, actor Danny Kaye, swing-era trombonist Tommy Dorsey, author Ayn Rand, baseball star Lou Gehrig, aviatrix Harriet Quimby, actress Billie Burke and her showman husband, Florenz Ziegfeld, composer Peter DeRose, soprano Geraldine Ferrar, radio announcer William B. Williams, and RCA Chairman David Sarnoff.

Don't worry I won't post all my vacation adventures like this...unless they have interesting cemeteries at the beach, of course.

Denizen: "A layered treat of sound, light, moving images"

Former Herald theatre critic Terry Byrne reviewed the world premiere performance of Kinodance's Denizen for the May 4 edition of The Boston Globe - here's a sample designed to tease you into reading the entire article, after which you will be ever on the lookout (as you should be) for future performances of Denizen and anything by Kinodance:

"In the opening scene of the world premiere of "Denizen," Kinodance Company's contribution to the Boston Cyberarts Festival, two dancers wander the stage moving in unison -- arching their backs, reaching up in supplication, spinning and searching for a place to rest. To the sound of a bouzouki playing in a mournful minor key, the fluid choreography is hauntingly beautiful, filled with wonder and longing."

Read A layered treat of sound, light, moving images

Kinodance's Denizen: Half folk, half alien

Kinodance's Denizen at the Tsai Center, Denizen is an homage to Seasons (1975) a masterwork of the great reclusive Armenian avant-garde filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian

Kinodance, Boston's Alisa Cardone, Cyberarts, and the world premiere of Denizen received a collective profiling in today's Weekly Dig, courtesy of Rachael Rosner:

"Over the past decade, local movement artist Alissa Cardone has performed in grimy punk clubs, crawled through caves and tunnels, and joined a Butoh instruction program that also had her growing vegetables and raising chickens. Her latest project, Denizen, presented as part of the Cyberarts Festival, is no less bizarre or ambitious it's a live-action film project that had her traveling 5,000 miles across the globe to the stark countryside of Armenia."

Read all of Half-folk, half-alien Cyberarts extravaganza

Denizen runs tonight, May 2 at 7:30pm and tomorrow, May 3, at 8pm at the Tsai Performance Center right there on Commonwealth Avenue.

Evgeny Kissin: Tone, shaded to perfection

Evgeny Kissin

Pianist Evgeny Kissin's recital Sunday afternoon was his fifth for the Celebrity Series, and, judging by the audience response alone, his most successful. Mathew Guerrieri reviewed the performance for The Boston Globe, and Kissin's playing of Chopin's "Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brilliante" drew this from the critic and author of the blog, Soho the Dog:

"As the ineffably limpid nocturne of the introduction gave way to a polonaise of increasingly giddy virtuosity, Kissin surmounted each hurdle with inexhaustible reserves of color and imagination, veering from a whisper to a roar in an instant, turning phrases with coy charm and deploying kaleidoscopic legerdemain with a magician's flair. It even hushed the audience."

Read all of Kissin plays with color and imagination from the Globe and Guerrieri's blog entry, Din and tonic, covering the part of his review that was cut for space. I applaud Guerrieri's use of the virtually free real estate available online to make all the points he wanted to make (of course I do). I hope he is rewarded for his efforts with readers making the leap from atom to byte.

The Bug: Steampunk Computer Mouse

Today's funhouse entry comes via boingboing.net (though I'm linking directly to the blog from which this thing crawled). Yes, it's a real functioning computer mouse, and there are other creations, too. Follow the link for story and pictures:

"Jake of All Trades's homebrew steampunk computer mouse comes complete with a little short story about how it came to be invented!"