Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Patti LuPone

You don't want to miss it when Patti LuPone throws a party, which is essentially what the Broadway diva did with her relaxed and engaging "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda" Friday night at Strathmore.

How else to characterize her carefree, doo-wop version of "The Way You Look Tonight," or her puckishly envious glance at "West Side Story"?

"Hell, I could have played two of those parts," LuPone declared. Sure enough, she managed both roles at once in the Maria-Anita duet "A Boy Like That," singing with her patented, brassy energy while having deadpan fun switching between the characters.

Ostensibly, the act is a tour of roles and songs that the original Broadway Evita would like to have tackled at some point in her career. But despite a bit of catty early patter, the show is less a consideration of what LuPone coulda been than a celebration of the singular stage force she is. Behold as she cocks her hip, extends a hand yearningly toward the audience and sings from her heels. Many try, but few have the knockout punch of LuPone.

It landed with particular oomph during her moxie-fueled "Don't Rain on My Parade," but it was hardly the only weapon she used in this eclectic concert. "Trouble" from "The Music Man" might have been a slurred throwaway, and the happy "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " had a curious tough edge . . . and to wrap up the quibbles, the bland "How to Handle a Woman" from "Camelot" isn't much to listen to in the best of circumstances.

But a Sondheim sequence found LuPone in supple, sublime form. She illuminated the witty lyrics of "I Never Do Anything Twice" with clever gestures and intelligent phrasing, delivered a poignant "Anyone Can Whistle" and added a brisk, ferocious and memorable "Ladies Who Lunch." LuPone and accompanist Chris Fenwick kept the tempos fast but not quite rushed, and they seemed to be having a ball during a second act, which LuPone said was largely new. The show felt fresh from beginning to end, whether LuPone was delivering the obligatory "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" or breezing joyfully through Stevie Wonder's "If It's Magic," handling it all with infectious high spirits and casual command.

-- Nelson Pressley

Only conductor Lorin Maazel could pull this off.

On Sunday at the beautiful, intimate concert space on his 500-acre retreat in Rappahannock County, the New York Philharmonic music director brought together an elite group of musicians to play chamber music on a set of priceless Stradivarius instruments.

Look, there are virtuoso violinists Viviane Hagner and Akiko Suwanai, one gorgeously playing the Sasserno Stradivarius and the other doing wonders with the Dolphin, widely considered one of three finest examples of the Cremona master's art. Now comes the Tokyo String Quartet on the matched Paganini set, playing some poetic music of Webern with calibrated balances and searing emotion. How else would you cap off a concert like this other than a wonderfully refined and joyous account of Mendelssohn's great Octet in E-flat, Strads emitting mellifluous melodies here, rich colors there?

The afternoon was a birthday celebration for the Chateauville Foundation, an endeavor that Maazel and his wife, Dietlinde, started a decade ago to encourage promising young musicians. The concert was also a fundraiser for the foundation's resident program. A seat at the concert came at a minimum of a $500 donation, according to the group's Web site.

The big underwriter was an obscure but critical organization in the classical music world, the Nippon Music Foundation. This generously endowed Tokyo-based group makes long-term loans from its Stradivarius collection to renowned musicians like those onstage.

When you stripped away the air of exclusivity, what was left was fine musicmaking. The octet reading rose on superb contributions from the Tokyo Quartet and violinists Erik Schumann and Tamaki Kawakubo, as well as cellist Danjulo Ishizaka. Arabella Steinbacher and Sayaka Shoji had fun in the pyrotechnics of Pablo de Sarasate's "Navarra for Two Violins," Op. 33, with rhythmic accompaniment from pianist Yumiko Urabe. Suwanai and Hagner both movingly took the violin parts in two of Mozart's duos for violin and violas. After hearing Hagner's deeply soulful playing in the B-flat piece (K. 424) there was little wonder why this student of Pinchas Zukerman has become a favorite of many eminent musicians.

-- Daniel Ginsberg

The world of baroque music is a volatile, action-packed place, rife with subversive ideas and aggressive, hard-driving players. You were thinking periwigs and dainty little minuets? Not anymore. Over the past two decades, a new generation of musicians has been putting blood back into the veins of the baroque -- unleashing music that, it turns out, can be almost shockingly fierce.

One of the best new groups is the New York-based Rebel (emphasis on the second syllable) Baroque Orchestra, which put on an extremely exciting concert at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Sunday night. Building around two of the remarkable collection of concertos by Vivaldi known as "L'Estro Armonico," the group explored the work of several lesser known composers, including Angelo Ragazzi, Giuseppe Valentini and Alessandro Stradella, and found some intriguing connections among them.

But it was the playing -- fiery, alive and beautifully controlled -- that made the evening. The ensemble's leaders, violinists Jorg-Michael Schwarz and Karen Marie Marmer, set the tone, paring ornamentation to a minimum and letting the raw power of the music emerge. The ensemble work was impressively tight -- things can get a bit messy when you're playing with this much passion -- and many of the 11 players turned in eloquent solos. Schwarz's handling of Telemann's "Concerto in D" had a gripping, almost savage edge, while violinist Christoph Timpe gave an intensely personal account of Ragazzi's "Sonata XII in G." And it was a rare treat to hear David Kjar on the valveless "natural" trumpet, bringing a singing tone and impressive virtuosity to this diabolically difficult instrument.

-- Stephen Brookes

Chamber music satisfies best when the expression of the ensemble appears to issue from a single head and heart. Violinist Robert McDuffie and pianist Christopher Taylor displayed such a rapport in their Terrace Theater recital on Thursday.

Both artists created the feeling of starting or finishing each other's sentences in Schumann's rapturous Violin Sonata No. 1 and Beethoven's turbulent Sonata No. 7. Each piece was treated as a continuous, ever-evolving stream of thought, with the music's surging romantic rhetoric shared as if by one voice. Taylor's playing -- emotionally volatile yet scrupulously weighted and voiced -- worked hand-in-glove with McDuffie's, which alternated restless, big-toned ardor with phrasing of tender restraint. Most affecting was the sense of emotions barely held in check, which McDuffie brought to the opening movement of the Schumann.

Following a rapt, superbly balanced reading of Arvo Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel," the duo dived headlong into the pungency and hammering rhythms of Bartok's Rhapsodies Nos. 1 and 2, "Folk Dances." It's hard to imagine the works being played with more earth-stamping vigor or attention to detail. McDuffie conjured plenty of boisterous peasant color and entered fully into the spirit of the dance -- as did Taylor, who delivered (especially in the tumult at the close of No. 2) an astonishing mix of rounded tone, percussive assault and razor-sharp clarity. Once again, the performers' singleness of phrase and purpose was remarkable.

-- Joe Banno