Instant Classics
The Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, Dec 7
Judah Adashi was thinking about music—not unusual, since he teaches at the Peabody Institute. He had noticed a lack of concert series and ensembles devoted to the music of living composers. "People are doing everything under the sun," he says, "but if you go to a symphony concert probably one of the latest pieces you'll hear is Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring"—which premiered in 1913.
So in 2005, Adashi, a composer himself, founded a concert series focusing exclusively on living composers. The resulting Evolution Contemporary Music Series has featured an eclectic mix of up-and-coming and established composers, including those championed by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, whom Adashi praises for venturing into new repertoire.
Each concert this season explores whether a composer's national or cultural heritage leaves a discernable mark on his or her music. The series' December offering, Across the Pond, features five composers from the United Kingdom, including Thomas Adès (whose compositions were dubbed "viscerally appealing and intellectually stimulating" by a New York Times critic) and Peabody faculty member Oscar Bettison, whose "Neolithic Airs" (a ten-minute piece for detuned violin) will receive its world premiere. "Does it matter that these are all British composers?" Adashi asks. "Is there something about the music that has an ‘Englishness' to it?"
Across the Pond will be followed by Finlandia in January and When in Rome in March. Last October's concert, New Amsterdam, featured composers and performers based in New York City. "Their music has more pop in it," Adashi says. "It's a little more influenced by minimalism, the pulsing energy. Even if it's not fast, there's a beat."
Adashi's main goal is to introduce composers and performers to audiences who may not be aware of the tremendous diversity of styles in contemporary music. "Definitely there's some music that is atonal and complex, some that is conceptual and abstract, but there is lots of tonal music that is very melodic," he says. "‘Crossover' is a loaded word, with connotations of Pavarotti singing pop songs, but there is a lot of interesting stuff that happens between genres."
—Brent Englar
For tickets, call 410-385-2638 or go to www.evolutionseries.org.
FILM
Small Wonders
Nineteen23 film series at
14Karat Cabaret, Dec 4
Future Shock
The 16-millimeter film gauge was invented in 1923, but the heyday of the format was the pre-VCR postwar period, what one might call the Golden Age of the A/V Club. Every American high school had a few of those industrial-strength projectors in the closet, and educational producers, film students, and enterprising hobbyists cranked out umpteen reels of short films on every conceivable subject. Last summer, Baltimore's Martin L. Johnson, a doctoral student in film at NYU (and an Urbanite contributor in December 2007) decided to open a window on this lost world of non-theatrical releases: He picked up a couple of old projectors on eBay and started the Nineteen23 film series, which combines educational and industrial training films with avant-garde shorts and various arty obscurities, most exhumed from the vaults of the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Sights and Sounds Department and many unavailable on DVD. "The idea was to put together films that would definitely not be seen together," Johnson says.
Each evening's program tackles a different theme. October's "Automatic/Withdrawal: Machines in the Wilderness" mixed a General Motors factory film, a documentary about suburban development, and a Dadaist silent from 1924. This month, Johnson salutes the new year with films about rebirth and the future, headlined by Future Shock, a 1972 doc based on Alvin Toffler's pop-science bestseller. Starring a cigar-puffing, scenery-chewing Orson Welles in his voice-of-doom mode, the movie is also stone hilarious—a Day-Glo slab of grade-A '70s techno-paranoia. As a Moog synthesizer throbs and Welles rumbles ominously about "the death of permanence," we see jittery quick-cut montages of rioting hippies, sideburned scientists, and huge chattering punch-card computers ("This machine makes our lives move faster!"). Sharing the bill is New Architect in Town, also from 1972, an eight-minute experimental short from Baltimore's own George Gipe and George Udel, set in the pre-Harborplace downtown. ("Final scenes of forgotten and neglected structures suggest a possible apocalyptic future," says the Pratt catalog description.)
Johnson's got plenty more where that came from: There are more than 2,100 16mm films in the Pratt's collection. "I've calculated that I've got ten years of material," he says. "Easily."
—David Dudley
For more information on Nineteen23, go to www.normals.com/14k.html
THEATER
Shtick
Mama's Loshn Kugel at the Jewish Community
Center of Greater Baltimore, Dec 13
The Folksbiene Troupe's one-night performance at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore this month is Yiddish Theater 101, according to director Motl Didner. "But we don't talk about it. We do it."
The six-person musical revue, called Mama's Loshn Kugel (a play on words mixing the Yiddish terms for "mother tongue" and "noodle pudding") is a hodgepodge of traditional and updated comedy routines with song and dance. Some skits will be familiar—bits involving bad telephone connections and husbands and wives arguing—reminiscent of the vaudeville and Borscht Belt humor that inspired radio and early television sitcoms. And some of the material dates back further, such as an adaptation of a short story written in the 1890s by Sholem Aleichem, whose work was the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. The piece, "A Restaurant in Kasrilevke," follows a man as he gets off a train in a small, provincial town for something to eat. It slowly unfolds that the restaurant has no food. "I recently saw an episode of I Love Lucy that had the same plot," Didner says.
The troupe is the traveling arm of New York's Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre; it's the only professional Yiddish theater company in the country and, at 94 years old, the longest continuously producing Yiddish company in the world. The show will be performed in Yiddish with super-titles in both English and Russian. This, says Didner, is a feat, as the actors (all in their 20s and 30s) learned the traditional language as adults, and only one came from a household of Yiddish speakers.
The language, he says, "is experiencing a revival. In my parents' generation, being a good American meant assimilating. But these days, people of our generation are picking it up." And the material in the show, Didner promises "is very accessible, even beyond the Jewish community."
—Martha Thomas
For tickets to Mama's Loshn Kugel, call 410-542-4900 ext. 621.
The Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, Dec 7
Judah Adashi was thinking about music—not unusual, since he teaches at the Peabody Institute. He had noticed a lack of concert series and ensembles devoted to the music of living composers. "People are doing everything under the sun," he says, "but if you go to a symphony concert probably one of the latest pieces you'll hear is Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring"—which premiered in 1913.
So in 2005, Adashi, a composer himself, founded a concert series focusing exclusively on living composers. The resulting Evolution Contemporary Music Series has featured an eclectic mix of up-and-coming and established composers, including those championed by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, whom Adashi praises for venturing into new repertoire.
Each concert this season explores whether a composer's national or cultural heritage leaves a discernable mark on his or her music. The series' December offering, Across the Pond, features five composers from the United Kingdom, including Thomas Adès (whose compositions were dubbed "viscerally appealing and intellectually stimulating" by a New York Times critic) and Peabody faculty member Oscar Bettison, whose "Neolithic Airs" (a ten-minute piece for detuned violin) will receive its world premiere. "Does it matter that these are all British composers?" Adashi asks. "Is there something about the music that has an ‘Englishness' to it?"
Across the Pond will be followed by Finlandia in January and When in Rome in March. Last October's concert, New Amsterdam, featured composers and performers based in New York City. "Their music has more pop in it," Adashi says. "It's a little more influenced by minimalism, the pulsing energy. Even if it's not fast, there's a beat."
Adashi's main goal is to introduce composers and performers to audiences who may not be aware of the tremendous diversity of styles in contemporary music. "Definitely there's some music that is atonal and complex, some that is conceptual and abstract, but there is lots of tonal music that is very melodic," he says. "‘Crossover' is a loaded word, with connotations of Pavarotti singing pop songs, but there is a lot of interesting stuff that happens between genres."
—Brent Englar
For tickets, call 410-385-2638 or go to www.evolutionseries.org.
FILM
Small Wonders
Nineteen23 film series at
14Karat Cabaret, Dec 4
Future Shock
The 16-millimeter film gauge was invented in 1923, but the heyday of the format was the pre-VCR postwar period, what one might call the Golden Age of the A/V Club. Every American high school had a few of those industrial-strength projectors in the closet, and educational producers, film students, and enterprising hobbyists cranked out umpteen reels of short films on every conceivable subject. Last summer, Baltimore's Martin L. Johnson, a doctoral student in film at NYU (and an Urbanite contributor in December 2007) decided to open a window on this lost world of non-theatrical releases: He picked up a couple of old projectors on eBay and started the Nineteen23 film series, which combines educational and industrial training films with avant-garde shorts and various arty obscurities, most exhumed from the vaults of the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Sights and Sounds Department and many unavailable on DVD. "The idea was to put together films that would definitely not be seen together," Johnson says.
Each evening's program tackles a different theme. October's "Automatic/Withdrawal: Machines in the Wilderness" mixed a General Motors factory film, a documentary about suburban development, and a Dadaist silent from 1924. This month, Johnson salutes the new year with films about rebirth and the future, headlined by Future Shock, a 1972 doc based on Alvin Toffler's pop-science bestseller. Starring a cigar-puffing, scenery-chewing Orson Welles in his voice-of-doom mode, the movie is also stone hilarious—a Day-Glo slab of grade-A '70s techno-paranoia. As a Moog synthesizer throbs and Welles rumbles ominously about "the death of permanence," we see jittery quick-cut montages of rioting hippies, sideburned scientists, and huge chattering punch-card computers ("This machine makes our lives move faster!"). Sharing the bill is New Architect in Town, also from 1972, an eight-minute experimental short from Baltimore's own George Gipe and George Udel, set in the pre-Harborplace downtown. ("Final scenes of forgotten and neglected structures suggest a possible apocalyptic future," says the Pratt catalog description.)
Johnson's got plenty more where that came from: There are more than 2,100 16mm films in the Pratt's collection. "I've calculated that I've got ten years of material," he says. "Easily."
—David Dudley
For more information on Nineteen23, go to www.normals.com/14k.html
THEATER
Shtick
Mama's Loshn Kugel at the Jewish Community
Center of Greater Baltimore, Dec 13
The Folksbiene Troupe's one-night performance at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore this month is Yiddish Theater 101, according to director Motl Didner. "But we don't talk about it. We do it."
The six-person musical revue, called Mama's Loshn Kugel (a play on words mixing the Yiddish terms for "mother tongue" and "noodle pudding") is a hodgepodge of traditional and updated comedy routines with song and dance. Some skits will be familiar—bits involving bad telephone connections and husbands and wives arguing—reminiscent of the vaudeville and Borscht Belt humor that inspired radio and early television sitcoms. And some of the material dates back further, such as an adaptation of a short story written in the 1890s by Sholem Aleichem, whose work was the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. The piece, "A Restaurant in Kasrilevke," follows a man as he gets off a train in a small, provincial town for something to eat. It slowly unfolds that the restaurant has no food. "I recently saw an episode of I Love Lucy that had the same plot," Didner says.
The troupe is the traveling arm of New York's Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre; it's the only professional Yiddish theater company in the country and, at 94 years old, the longest continuously producing Yiddish company in the world. The show will be performed in Yiddish with super-titles in both English and Russian. This, says Didner, is a feat, as the actors (all in their 20s and 30s) learned the traditional language as adults, and only one came from a household of Yiddish speakers.
The language, he says, "is experiencing a revival. In my parents' generation, being a good American meant assimilating. But these days, people of our generation are picking it up." And the material in the show, Didner promises "is very accessible, even beyond the Jewish community."
—Martha Thomas
For tickets to Mama's Loshn Kugel, call 410-542-4900 ext. 621.
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