MUSIC
An Irishman in Russia
Barry Douglas performs Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto with the BSO at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, June 12, 13, and 15

There’s something particularly satisfying about the Irish-born pianist Barry Douglas tackling Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto—the longest, most difficult, and most thoroughly Russian of all piano concertos. It was another Irishman—Dublin-born pianist-composer John Field—who laid the foundations for the great traditions of Russian piano playing.

In 1802, the 20-year-old Field, already recognized as one of Europe’s greatest pianists, traveled to Russia for what was supposed to be a short visit and ended up staying the rest of his life. Lured both by high teaching fees and the ready availability of vodka and women, Field found that his behavior was tolerated with more amusement in St. Petersburg and Moscow than back in Dublin. The Byronic lifestyle took a toll on his health, but before his death in 1837 Field transformed Russian music. His students included Alexander Villoing (the teacher of the Rubinstein brothers, Anton and Nikolai, who founded Russia’s first great conservatories) and Alexander Dubuque (whose pupils included Mily Balakirev, the founding member of the circle of late-19th-century Russian composers known as “The Five,” and Nikolai Zverev, who taught Scriabin and Rachmaninoff).

Whether or not Irish genes are responsible, Barry Douglas, 48, certainly knows his way around Russian repertory. In 1986, he became the first non-Russian pianist to win an unshared first prize in Moscow’s prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition since Van Cliburn’s victory in 1958. Douglas’ win may have been sealed after his early-round performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition: His command of the work’s characteristically Russian narrative sweep—its demand that a pianist perform it almost as if he were telling a story—resulted in an edge-of-the seat performance not heard since Sviatoslav Richter’s prime, some thirty years previous.

Douglas would seem to be a natural for Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, written in 1909 and at first performed only by the composer himself. It scared off other pianists until Vladimir Horowitz enjoyed great success with it in the late 1920s. Today it is the combat in which many young pianists earn their stripes as virtuosos. The concerto’s subtle construction evolves from a simple opening melody into a work of imposing cohesiveness, held together by careful thematic cross-references; its spacious, richly varied design concludes with the force of a dam burst.

The program concludes with guest conductor Thomas Dausgaard and the BSO performing Sibelius’ tone poem En Saga and his Symphony No. 7.

—Steve Wigler

Feminine Mystique
Rilo Kiley at Rams Head Live, June 7

Some call Rilo Kiley “the new Fleetwood Mac,” thanks to a few key similarities: They’re an L.A. pop band with hook-laden songs (often about sex and/or drugs), deeply confessional lyrics, and two key members who used to sleep together. Ten years ago, singer/guitarist Blake Sennett recruited then-girlfriend Jenny Lewis (like Sennett, a former D-list child actor) to sing for his fledgling indie-rock band. Since then, the couple has split, but their music has graced movies and TV shows like The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy, and Lewis has become a star, complete with solo album, magazine spreads, and speculation about fatal intra-band tension. After all, Rilo Kiley was originally Sennett’s creation; Lewis became the woman usurping male power, a pop femme fatale.

Lewis doesn’t exactly discourage the gawking: With her flowing auburn hair, micro-miniskirts, and inviting sway, she functions as a post-feminist pin-up girl, a sex object for collegiate audiences supposedly above crude sexual objectification. In 2007, the band even cast soft-core adult film actors in the twelve-minute music video for their song “The Moneymaker,” which visually postulated that ogling pop stars is not much different from ogling porn stars.
 
This isn’t necessarily anything new: The female body has always been an essential—and essentially problematic—part of pop music. But it’s still curious to see Lewis receiving the same salacious attention that’s showered upon any MTV celebutante. Lewis’ intimate music artfully accentuates her sexuality and celebrity, with an unapologetic awareness that asserts itself as power. It’s the classic “women admire her, men desire her” situation—rare in pop music, then or now.

—Charles A. Hohman



THEATER
Bardolatry
Baltimore Shakespeare Festival presents Twelfth Night, June 27-July 13, and The Taming of the Shrew, July 18-Aug3
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company presents The Comedy of Errors and the Tempest, June 6-July 13

This summer, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is doubling its output, with two productions on the pastoral grounds of Evergreen Museum & Library. Twelfth Night, named after the revels following Christmas, is filled with cross-dressing and mistaken identity. It’s the story of Viola, who, in search of her brother lost at sea, dresses as a man to confound those around her. In it, moviegoers will recognize elements of She’s the Man and Shakespeare in Love. Viola will be played by Molly Moores, last season’s Lady Macduff.

Twelfth Night’s three-week run will be followed by The Taming of the Shrew, a story best known to movie audiences via Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and to Broadway audiences as the source material for the musical Kiss Me Kate. The Baltimore production will team James Kinstle (who stepped down from his seven-year tenure as the festival’s artistic director in April) as Petruchio with Everyman Theatre company member Dawn Ursula as Kate.

The BSF’s special offer, “Double Date with Viola and Kate,” means savings on the two productions. But an even better deal is catching the free Twelfth Night dress rehearsal on June 26, after wandering through Evergreen’s biennial outdoor sculpture show, which runs May 4–September 28 and is curated by Curator’s Office director (and past Urbanite guest editor) Andrea Pollan. That night, the museum will stay open late for tours of the Garrett family’s art and antiquities collection, including 17th century folio and 18th century quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays.

If you’re looking for a date night with the partner of your choosing, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, which plants stakes among the artful ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City for the summer, reserves a few of its Friday performances for “Fun Formal Fridays,” with candles and linens at select ringside tables. Of course, there are always “Family Days,” when the grounds open early and cast members mingle for storytelling and crafts. (Pitney Bowes provides an annual grant so all kids under 18 attend any performance free.)

This year’s Chesapeake line-up consists of two of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, one from early in his career, and one from much later. The Comedy of Errors, based on works by the Greek playwright Plautus, puts two sets of identical twins (separated long ago, of course) in the same city for a day. Slapstick ensues.

The second production, The Tempest (which film buffs may know inspired the 1956 sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet), is Shakespeare’s only other work to take place in just one day. It’s also his final play, in which the Duke Prospero asks the audience to set him free with applause—a speech that some interpret as the Bard’s farewell.

—Martha Thomas



BOOK
End Notes
A Place Called Canterbury by Dudley Clendinen

Over seven years, Dudley Clendinen shuttled between his Baltimore home and a Florida continuing-care center called Canterbury Tower in his hometown of Tampa to monitor the slow-motion decline of his mother, who was first hobbled by arthritis and then silenced by a series of strokes. The experience is a ritual of what Clendinen, a former New York Times editor and national correspondent, calls “The New Old Age”—the extended final decade of life that medical science has gifted to a not-always-grateful nation. “No generation of children … has been as dazzled and daunted and consumed by the apparently endless old age of parents as we have been by ours,” he writes of his fellow boomers in A Place Called Canterbury, a memoir of his mid-life immersion in caregiving.    

Clendinen was well into his 50s when his beloved mother was stricken, and he shouldered her custodianship with a mixture of horror and humility, spending hours at her bedside as she stiffened and faded away, uncommunicative, year after year. He also took notes, filling the days and nights at Canterbury by poking his nose into the lives of the other residents, many of whom he had known since childhood. “My own life began to be diverted a generation ahead, into the lives of the family members and old friends I had always known as adults, and who had now begun to fall apart—and to fall, in a way, on me.”

The resulting chronicle is as wise, funny, unsparing, and as clinically observational as a Frederick Wiseman documentary. (Perhaps too clinical: If you’ve had any experience with eldercare you may be tempted to skip the chapter called “The Plumbing Problem,” in which Clendinen details “the moment—tender, ghastly, and abrupt—that comes to everyone who lives long enough.”) The Old-South Canterburians are a colorful lot—determined Steel Magnolias who maintain the social niceties of 5 p.m. cocktails to the bitter end—and the book is both a meditation on motherhood and a haunting send-off to the survivors of Auschwitz and D-Day who find themselves losing a prolonged war of attrition against body and mind. Here’s Clendinen inhabiting the perspective of a nonagenarian, dazed by Alzheimer’s, struggling to recall the moment he met his wife: “Wilbur thought he would remember the excitement of that soft morning until the day he died, but he was wrong. Like so many other memories, it had dissolved into blurry fragments and gradually disappeared.”

—David Dudley



FILM
Brief Encounter
The 48 Hour Film Project, June 6-8

If you see a gaggle of red-eyed, unkempt people with camera equipment sprinting through the lobby of your apartment building the weekend of June 6, don’t flip on the news to find out what the crisis is. You’ve just run into the 48 Hour Film Project—a contest of grit, talent, and Red Bull that challenges filmmakers to write, film, and edit a four-to-seven minute film, all in forty-eight hours.

The annual competition, which started seven years ago in Washington, D.C., is now conducted from April to October in cities around the globe, and new venues are added annually, with Athens, Geneva, Anchorage, Singapore, Edinburgh, Key West, and Mumbai filling out the roster this year. (Baltimore has been a contestant since 2005.) Films are reviewed in each city by a local panel of three judges who select the best overall film, considering entertainment value, story, and production values. To make sure filmmakers don’t shoot their films ahead of time, each group is given a randomly assigned genre at the beginning of the contest, plus a prop, a line of dialogue, and a character that must appear in the short film. The deadline for the entries is strict—one second late and you’re out of luck.

2008’s 48 Hour Film Project is set to be the largest ever, with more than sixty cities and 30,000 filmmakers competing. The overall winner gets a Panasonic HVX 200 HD camera and $5,000. Last year, Baltimore entered forty-six teams, and “Blood Money” by Family Cave took city honors. Baltimore’s 2006 winner, “I will not …” by David Butler’s Bargain Basement Films, competed against other city winners and went on to win the Panasonic HVX 200. Baltimore represents!

In addition to the camera and cash, winners get what every aspiring filmmaker wants—exposure. City champs are invited to attend Filmapalooza, the official 48 Hour Film Project Awards Weekend, which is usually held the following March as part of a major film festival—in past years, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and Cinequest in San José, California. City winners then move on to a second round of competition. The overall winning film and selected city winners have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and a DVD of selected winners is distributed internationally.

All entries to the contest get screened publicly—even late ones. This year the shorts will be shown at the Charles Theatre on June 17 and 18. Tickets will be available at the box office for $8, or $9 online through Brown Paper Tickets. Get them early, as they sell out fast.

For more information, go to www.48hourfilm.com/baltimore.

—Mark J. Kilbane



BOOKS
Guilty Pleasures
by Susan McCallum-Smith

The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith (Penguin Books, 2007)
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau (Harper Perennial, 2008)

I hadn’t intended to review the story collection The Book of Other People. It wasn’t on my official “to read” list—I succumbed to temptation. I stashed it in a Wellie boot in my study and gulped nips from its twenty-three short stories, then disguised its illicit fumes by gargling Proust.

Proceeds from sales of The Book of Other People benefit 826 New York, a nonprofit that supports kids in learning to write creatively, and the writers who contributed stories are a roll-call of today’s literary hipsters, including ZZ Packer, Jonathan Safran Foer, George Saunders, and Dave Eggers. Their work ranges from excellent to shallow. Nick Hornby’s “J. Johnson” is an endearing spoof of the self-deluding pretension of one author’s career, which Hornby probably wrote between pulling on his left and right socks, while A.M. Homes’ “Cindy Stubenstock,” about a gaggle of rich women, offers the limited satisfaction of veneered furniture: Good enough as long as you don’t scratch the surface. 

David Mitchell’s “Judith Castle,” however, introduces us to a fascinating character who caustically pigeon-holes everyone she meets— “Winnifred is a lesbian myopic vegan Welsh homeopathic Pooh Bear sort of a woman”—while living a life of romantic delusion. At one moment, Judith stands at the end of Lyme Regis pier in the manner of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, mourning the death of a non-existent lover.

Magda Mandela, too, is a marvelous invention. She has “the air of a woman who has roused herself from some titanic erotic exertions,” says the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s eponymous story. “She has been INTERRUPTED. She has THINGS TO DO.” Magda’s in-your-face humanity proves so overwhelming to her neighbors that they treat her as spectacle and watch her like TV. Kunzru mourns how we fail to empathize with or recognize ourselves in those around us. They are never us, he implies; they are always other people.

The collection’s editor, Zadie Smith, outdoes her colleagues with an unflinching portrait of Hanwell Snr, a “feckless and slapdash man” who darts in and out of his son’s life with the irritating sting of a recurring rash. His story is told with clinical asperity by his granddaughter, the product of a generation who “maniacally pursue their ancestors through online genealogy sites at three in the morning … though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers.” She concludes, with unapologetic self-knowledge, “I will do anything for my family except see them.” Perhaps Smith sensed her responsibility as the editor of this book, and lavished the same care on her contribution she lavishes on her longer works.

I also hadn’t intended to read yet another coming-of-age novel. There are so many of them, and adolescence is so awful; why endure it over, and over, and over again? However, I stumbled across an advance copy of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, and I’m now able to add Jessica Anya Blau to our list of distinguished Baltimore-based writers. Blau sashays down the path of this all-too-familiar genre in her own singular, humorous way, and precisely nails the scorching atmosphere of the summer of 1976, a summer of cut-offs and flip-flops, of American bicentennial celebrations, of The Gong Show hitting peak ratings and Raquel Welch jiggling her assets in Mother, Jugs & Speed. 

I’ve never seen my parents bounce naked on a trampoline—an image that, I’m sure, would stick to one’s retinas with the tenacity of chewing gum to new shoes. Poor Jamie, the 14-year-old heroine of the novel, is not quite so fortunate. Her parents, Allen and Betty, host the coolest pool parties in their Santa Barbara neighborhood, parties at which “all of the adults were naked. All of the kids were in swimsuits,” and the air is thick with the miasma of marijuana. Jamie’s parents trust her not to do anything they disapprove of; Jamie’s problem “was that she didn’t trust them not to do something that she disapproved of.”

“The pool didn’t look the same after the pizza boys had swum in it,” Jamie notes—those beach-bleached, doe-skinned, sea-eyed boys, “the kind of boys who grow only in Southern California.” (Those kinds of boys never grew in Scotland, and we didn’t have swimming pools either, or, come to think of it, much sunshine or decent pizza. My adolescence was geographically challenged, and I’m totally bummed about that, man.) Seventeen-year-old Flip Jenkins, a dishy surfer dude, steers Jamie through the often boring, sometimes cramp-inducing, always icky stages of sexual experimentation. Despite the nearby fault line, the earth stubbornly fails to move. As the summer progresses, a sense of menace compounds in line with the ever-more careless behavior and inattentiveness of both teenagers and adults, until a metaphorical gun planted by Blau during the first act of the novel duly goes off in the third.  

The fallout from this tragedy is remarkable—not for what changes, but for what doesn’t. The victim disappears, as ephemeral in death as in life. The adults retreat to continue their muffled, indefinable existences on the periphery of Jamie’s consciousness, yet the event serves to push her through the necessary and painful purge of adolescence, through the sloughing off of wrong boyfriends and disengagement from catty girlfriends, the peeling away of childish prejudices and the yanking of blinkers from eyes, to reveal, at summer’s end, a rawer, naked, more mature version of herself, more ready to link hands with and value the circle of family. Carelessness has consequences, Blau reveals, but our essential natures define exactly how much, or how little, each one of us learns from life’s harder lessons.



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