PERFORMING ARTS

Monday, March 31, 2008

East Village Opera Company

Opera purists, unlock your doors -- it's safe to come out. But if you missed the East Village Opera Company's high-octane show at Lisner Auditorium on Saturday, you missed a chance to hear opera in its wildest new incarnation. The New York-based band turns classical arias into headbanging rock anthems, complete with electric violins, screaming guitar solos and a pair of amped-up singers. And amazingly enough, it works.

The show got of to a desultory start, though, as if the East Villagers had all just rolled out of bed. Keyboardist Peter Kiesewalter, who founded the band with lead singer Tyley Ross, opened with works by Verdi ("Questa o Quella") and Puccini ("Che Gelida Manina"), and soon singer AnnMarie Milazzo joined Ross for the touching "Flower Duet" from Delibes' "Lakme." And though it was all pleasant enough (Ross and Milazzo both have engaging pop voices, sexed up with a lot of growling and breathiness), they didn't exactly pull out all the stops. Even the fog machine seemed to be bored.

But midway through the show, things suddenly caught fire. Guitarist Ben Butler woke up and began turning in solos that started out searing and got more intense when Pauline Kim joined him on her electric violin. Ross, who'd been floating vaguely around the stage, began to swagger in true rock style, turning in a ferocious account of the Queen of the Night aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute." The fog machine began cranking out huge clouds of the stuff (and really, what is rock without fog?) and pretty soon, the whole house was clapping along to Handel's 1743 hit "Where'er You Walk." Not something you see every day.

Did the arias take a beating? Well, sure. You're not going to hear the nuance and delicacy that you hear in a traditional operatic performance. But that didn't matter; by show's end, the crowd was on its feet. With its over-the-top emotions and soaring melodies, opera, it turns out, translates beautifully into rock.

-- Stephen Brookes

Ghostland Observatory

By this point, both punk rock and synth-pop have been retooled many times. So how about mixing them together? Well, that's also been tried more than once. But an electro-punk tradition that stretches all the way back to Suicide's 1970 live debut doesn't stop Ghostland Observatory from strutting as if it's forged something brand-new -- and Saturday night at the 9:30 club, the Texas duo's swagger was pretty convincing.

Ghostland is singer Aaron Behrens, who sometimes plays guitar, and keyboardist-producer Thomas Ross Turner, who occasionally plays drums. When both turned to their more traditional instruments, the resulting sound recalled '70s punkabilly. But when the backing was all electronic, the music veered toward '80s house music. There were also hints of the two men's pasts: Behrens's in a metal band, and Turner's as a Beatles disciple.

The group didn't entirely convey the funk of its recordings; such potentially slinky songs as "Freeheart Lover" and the vocoder-enhanced "Stranger Lover" were pushed toward, respectively, thumping rock and pounding techno. Ghostland sometimes let a groove linger past its bedtime, and the show's latter half got stuck in the dance-music mode, without the variety of the earlier part. But the duo compensated with a diverse set of encores, notably the punchy "Silver City."

Behrens and Turner's principal miscalculation was to present themselves as spectral silhouettes, obscured by smoke and backlighting. Although the former's braids and the latter's cape were visible, their faces were largely hidden. Ghostland's music isn't sufficiently distinctive for such distancing effects; a little more visibility might have humanized the set's more mechanical passages.

-- Mark Jenkins

The Hooters

A lot of babysitters nabbed overtime pay Saturday night. That's because a swarm of NoVa moms and dads in faded jeans, white Reeboks and casual blazers stayed out late at the Birchmere to relive their concertgoing 1980s with the Hooters.

The band reciprocated the crowd's period sensibilities by busting out double-neck guitars, making jazz faces during solos and playing all the hits that made the Hooters mid-'80s phenoms.

The Philly fivesome also delved into several songs that frontmen Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman penned for others, including a rocked-up "Time After Time" (Cyndi Lauper) and a strait-laced "One of Us" (Joan Osborne). The Hooters also recast Don Henley's boomer anthem "The Boys of Summer" as a lighter ballad for the aging Gen-Xers, who gleefully if awkwardly danced throughout the night.

The Hooters played 20 tunes, including "Time Stand Still," the title track from the group's 2007 CD, as well as "All You Zombies," "Day by Day" and "And We Danced," the last of which featured violinist Ann Marie Calhoun -- a Virginia native and recent Grammy talent-contest winner -- who joined the Hooters for a large chunk of the set.

After nearly two hours, the band closed its concert with a romp through Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding." The Hooters finished the song with a synchronized flourish befitting their former arena-rock status, then took to the front of the stage for a glorious group bow before sending the invigorated parents back to their young.

-- Christopher Porter

Stephen Malkmus

One could argue that the better Stephen Malkmus gets on guitar, the less interesting his music becomes. But as he demonstrated at the sold-out 9:30 club on Friday night, the former Pavement mastermind is no Jimi Hendrix . . . yet.

Malkmus seemed most engaged when his guitar was doing the talking, spraying woozy, distorted runs -- something he did frequently during the occasionally tedious 90-minute-plus show. Backed by the Jicks -- now anchored by indie rock royal Janet Weiss on drums -- Malkmus played the guileful slacker, babbling distractedly between songs about everything from snipers to d.c. space and singing with minimal commitment. For the majority of the night, the crowd reaction was utterly soporific; the liveliest interlude might have been the band intros, on which Malkmus broke a guitar string, which is probably some kind of first.

But surrounding gems with junk has always been a favorite Malkmus gambit. At its best ("Gardenia," "We Can't Help You"), the group cruised like a muscular version of circa-'69 Fairport Convention, not only proving that SM still writes compact, abstruse indie-pop, but also offering respite from such dross as "Hopscotch Willie." That back-and-forth (good: "Post Paint Boy"; bad: "Elmo Delmo") continued for the duration. So, it was a shock to hear the overlong encore conclude with a growling version of Mungo Jerry's "Alright, Alright, Alright," which felt bracingly direct. Or maybe that was just because there was no guitar solo.

-- Patrick Foster

Sharna Fabiano Tango

For someone who established her own dance company only as recently as 2006, Sharna Fabiano has a remarkably strong and well-developed choreographic voice. In her company's performance Saturday at Dance Place, it was evident that her style and movement vocabulary are clearly defined and refreshingly distinctive.

Fabiano's work melds traditional tango steps with contemporary dance. She takes tango -- a genre often characterized by smoldering glances and assertive, unabashed dancing -- and dials it down, imbuing it with a quiet, meditative feel and indirect, subtle movement. Fabiano also disregards traditional notions of partnering, sometimes having women partner with women and men dance with other men.

In the program's opener, "Tangos From Here," the dancers occasionally struggled to capture the work's tone. In trying to appear calm and reflective, they sometimes drifted toward uninterested and aloof.

In the second work, "Tangled," choreographed by Fabiano and Francesca Jandasek, the dancers manipulated a long, thin piece of white fabric. Swathing and wrapping one another in the fabric as they moved, they created a number of intriguing tableaux, particularly when one dancer wrapped it around another's throat and pulled backward. As striking as they were when observed individually, however, all these intriguing images did not add up to deliver a discernible meaning.

"Uno" began with a dancer entering the stage, removing a pair of high heels and sitting to read a letter; after doing so, she dropped the paper and danced in place with it underfoot, producing a crinkling sound. A pleasingly curious opening, it gave way to a rich, emotional work about longing, love and desire.

-- Sarah Halzack

Tego Calderon

Tego Calderon performed for only 50 minutes Friday night at El Boqueron II, but that didn't prevent his show from being largely a success, as the Puerto Rican rapper cleverly packed many songs into his set.

It helped that Calderon's DJ offered a well-mixed taste of music from the rapper's albums. And despite the occasional DJ enhancement of his live vocals with the artist's studio versions, Calderon's onstage lyrical flow stood out. Although many Spanish-language rappers vocalize only over the danceable Latin reggaeton beat -- and others use only American hip-hop rhythms -- Calderon, 36, used both approaches and more. He was raised hearing his dad's salsa records, listening to a spectrum of tropical and American sounds while in high school in Miami and then returning to Puerto Rico. With the aid of producers both known and unknown, he offers more than just cliched chanted verse and a generic, steady drum machine pulse.

At El Boqueron II, Calderon let fly with quick stanzas over the merengueton of "Metele Sazon," and leisurely verbiage with the loping reggae rhythms of "Chillin.' " As his two female dancers energetically swirled, Calderon confidently yet coolly paced the stage, never letting his self-assurance turn into an over-the-top cartoonish swagger. Although he has eclectic music tastes, he emphasized his more straightforward reggaeton cuts and more pop-friendly songs, including a reggaeton take on Akon's R&B-pop hit "I Wanna Love You."

All his songs kept the crowd moving, but his finest ones possessed distinctive instrumental touches. This pioneering island vocalist used sampled klezmer clarinet and snake-charmer synth effects on "El Caballito" and a looped salsa cymbal beat on "Llora, Llora." Even without Oscar D'Leon's guest vocal from the latter, this innovative cut still beautifully melded 20th- and 21st-century Latin styles.

-- Steve Kiviat