Verdant Visions

Verdant Visions

By Tom Wachunas

    “It is Spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

    -Rainer Maria Rilke

    EXHIBIT: Verdant Visions at Gallery 6000, on view THROUGH JUNE 21, located in the University Center Dining Room on the Kent State University at Stark campus, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton. ARTISTS RECEPTION is on MONDAY EVENING, MAY 13, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Please RSVP to Becky DeHart at (330) 244-3518 or rdehart@kent.edu

    Lately I’ve been reminded that it’s possible to over- think and/or over-teach a subject – in my case, the course I teach at Kent Stark called “Art as a World Phenomenon.” Ooooh, such a serious (and somewhat unmemorable) name for what was formerly called “Art Survey” - essentially art appreciation. What, really, was so wrong with the old name of the course? Who comes up with this stuff anyway? But I digress.

    In my passion for communicating what visual artists do and how they do it, perhaps I give too much undeserved glory to the philosophical pretensions and contradictions of Postmodernist art. Such heady attention to contemporary art issues can come at the cost of downplaying the sheer pleasure that can be had in embracing conventional Representation and Naturalism on its own terms. Mea culpa.

     Recently I read a considerable number of papers by my students who apparently thought that every painting of things seen in nature must necessarily be symbolic in order to be valid or relevant, as in having “meaning” or an underlying “message” beyond the visual evidence at hand. But it seems to me that really seeing a masterfully painted flower, for example, can (or should be) an ennobling, joyous experience in itself. Encountering “traditional” art need not be a challenge to solve some presumed mystery.

    So for those bent on finding a message in the current show at Gallery 6000, try this one on for size, with apologies to Gertrude Stein: sunlight is sunlight, shadow is shadow, a rock is a rock, a flower is a flower, a cloud a cloud. Get the picture(s)?

    The exhibit features 18 vibrant works by five highly accomplished artists: Diane Belfiglio, Jim Grand, Irene Tobias Rodriguez, Kris Wyler and Isabel Zaldivar. Their excellent images in watercolor, oil, acrylic and pastel explore the sumptuous textures, light, and brilliant colors of spring through floral and landscape themes.

  

    Stop and smell the roses? Come to think of it, there’s nary a rose to be found in this spectacular celebration of the season. Still, the show is resplendent with a sublime aroma, as it were, of poetry that only Nature can inspire and skilled hands make palpable.

    PHOTOS: (from top) Azaleas’ Song of Spring by Irene Tobias Rodriguez; Passion in Pink II by Diane Belfiglio; North Light – View from my Studio by Jim Grand

Poignant Parting Notes

Poignant Parting Notes from Canton Symphony Soloists

By Tom Wachunas

Mozart, Schubert, Reger: Lauren Roth (violin), Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong (viola), Hyunsoo Kim (piano), Cable Recital Hall, Canton Symphony Orchestra (chamber series), Canton, Ohio (USA), May 3, 2013

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major (1778)

Franz Schubert: Sonata for Arpeggione (Viola) and Piano (1824)

Max Reger: Trio for Violin, Viola and Piano in b minor (1891)

    When violinist Lauren Roth stunned a packed Umstattd Hall last October 7 with her breathtaking performance of Menotti’s Violin Concerto in a minor, it was abundantly clear that the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) had acquired a world-class Concertmaster. Since then, she regularly provided a thrilling dimensionality to programs throughout the CSO’s 2012-2013 concert season.

     The season concluded on May 3 at Cable Recital Hall with a chamber concert that featured Roth along with CSO principal violist Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong and guest pianist Hyunsoo Kim. This was an enchanting program delivered with impeccable technique and inspired readings of the works’ many emotional nuances. 

    Mozart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major (K.301) is a harmonically charming intertwining of the two instruments. The give-and-take exchanges between Roth and Kim during the lilting first movement were crisp and spirited, as were the dance-like syncopations of the second, with just a hint of somber nostalgia in the middle passages.

    There are similar emotional tinges in Schubert’s Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano. Schubert composed the work in 1824 specifically for the Arpeggione, a six-stringed instrument fretted and tuned like a guitar but bowed like a cello. The instrument never caught on. By the time Schubert finally published his work in 1871, he included his arrangement for cello or viola.

    In any event, here violist Wong captivated the audience from the start with the sheer depth of her sound. Her warm sonority is well suited to the plaintive, melancholic character of the work’s opening melody as well as the more sustained, contemplative inflections in the second movement.

    Wong’s tonal subtleties are remarkably evocative, and a fitting complement to Roth’s  soaring clarity and lyricism. It is indeed a charismatic chemistry which has produced numerous magical moments in past CSO performances as well as on this occasion.

    Max Reger’s Trio for Violin, Viola and Piano, somewhat reminiscent of Brahms, is a beautiful and riveting three-movement work, rich with textures, rhythms and color. At times it conjures images of a highly animated three-way conversation. It begins in a brooding spirit and from there hovers alternately between controlled tumult and sustained solemnity. There is a distinct aura of sadness in the music, as if hearing a lingering goodbye, performed here with passionate intensity. 

    This particular mood of the work took on an especially poignant relevance in knowing that it marked the final CSO appearance for both the violist and the violinist. Wong will be moving on to Philadelphia to pursue her graduate studies, and Roth has been recently named Concertmaster of the Tucson Symphony. I wish both of them continued success and my deepest gratitude for their superb artistry.

    That said, I prefer to think of their departure not so much as a CSO loss as it is an opportunity to remain the potent magnet that it is for drawing musicians of their caliber.

 Photos: Lauren Roth (top), Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong

Articulating a Turbulent Era

Articulating a Turbulent Era

By Tom Wachunas

    “…I have come to something that is in the image of America and the American people of my time.” –artist Thomas Hart Benton-

    “I am primarily concerned with the condition of Man.” –Jack Levine, American Social Realist painter and printmaker (1915-2010)

    EXHIBITION: Labor and New Deal Art, at the Massillon Museum THROUGH JUNE 2, 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon  www.massillonmuseum.org

    Here’s a hearty Thank You to the students at Youngstown State University who created this wholly impressive travelling print exhibit. I include here a paragraph from the Massillon Museum web page about the show:

    “The exhibition is held in commemoration of last year's 75th anniversary of the Little Steel Strike of 1937—the epic labor struggle that stretched across the Great Lakes industrial corridor from Northeast Ohio to South Chicago.  Detailing the history of this turbulent event is a banner exhibit created by students at Youngstown State University.” Click on this link for the entire background statement - http://www.massillonmuseum.org/116

 

    More than a commemoration of a singularly important event, however, this gathering of 55 largely black-and-white prints (including etchings, wood engravings and lithographs) is a collectively powerful vision of Depression-era ethos from artists who experienced it directly. And on a strictly formal level, most of these multi-styled representational renderings (nothing here in the way of non-objective abstraction) are  masterfully composed as well as technically stunning.

    Particularly compelling here is the range of narratives - the thematic/ideological content. Yes, these mixed images of grand industrial development and blighted rural life are inextricably entwined with often tragic dramas of economic, political and social turmoil that defined a specific chapter in American history. But the overarching emotional impact of this art – its searing vocabulary of societal angst - is a haunting one. It’s a resonance still evident today in the volatile state of affairs not just in America, but globally. 

    “The New Deal arts programs were intended to expand and strengthen cultural democracy,” we read in the exhibit statement. “Cultural democracy” is an ambiguous enough phrase to make me consider that we do indeed live, now more than ever, in a troubled democracy of cultural dichotomies: poverty and plenty, depravity and dignity, greed and grace, confrontation and celebration.

    Art of the New Deal? Call it “old fashioned” art that’s taken on a sobering if not sad new relevance.

    Photos (from top) – Breadline, New York, wood engraving by Claire Lieghton; Laborers with Derrick and Structural Steel, lithograph by Russell T. Limbach; Give Us This Day, lithograph by John De Martelly; The Strike, lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton     

Soaring Wagner, Savage Stravinsky from the Canton Symphony

Soaring Wagner, Savage Stravinsky from the Canton Symphony

By Tom Wachunas

    The Canton Symphony Orchestra enlisted Thomson Smillie, the acclaimed opera producer, stage director and lecturer, as guest speaker for its April 20 season finale concert at Umstattdt Hall. His observations before and during the first half of the program, consisting of three selections from Wagner operas, were delightfully astute and witty, and it’s difficult to imagine a more excited champion of Wagner’s impactful genius.

    In retrospect, Smillie’s directive to the audience on how to best embrace the first work of the evening, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and the third selection, Brünnhilde’s Immolation scene from Götterdämmerung (Twilight Of The Gods), seems somewhat curious if not counterintuitive. Smillie posited that the dramatic thrust of these works cannot be wholly appreciated via the inadequate (and perhaps even silly) words in the libretto, but rather through the cascading orchestral surges he compared to musical orgasms. While we hear the singer with our ears and see her with our eyes, he explained further, we must listen to the orchestra with our hearts to experience what words on their own could never impart. 

    Here, however, any libretto shortcomings in communicating the emotional scope of Wagner’s grief-stricken heroines were utterly erased by the breathtaking performances of guest soprano and Canton native Amy Yekel. Yes, the orchestra was as magnificent as ever in delivering Wagner’s many polyphonic marvels (including the iconic, thunderous second work on the program, Ride of the Valkyries) under the inspiring baton of Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann. But Yekel’s partnership in performing two of Wagner’s most searing visions of love consummated through death was a phenomenon in itself.

     With sustained muscularity and tonal sensuality, her singing was a thrilling embodiment of all the agony and ecstasy that engulfs the characters of both Isolde cradling the lifeless body of Tristan, and Brünnhilde leaping with steely resolve on to Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Even as I could see the text translation projected high above the stage, I was more transfixed by “reading” the story on Yekel’s intensely expressive face. The powerful, warm sonority of her voice (with no microphone amplification) was of world-class quality and an equal match to the towering drama emanating from the noticeably augmented orchestra (which included four Wagner tubas).

    The evening’s final selection was Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). One-hundred years after its riot-inciting Paris premiere in 1913, the work remains a bedeviling concoction that can still elicit fear and loathing from lovers of more traditional orchestral music. For in this seminal work of 20^th century Modernism, harmony and melody all but disappear into an eerie melange of dissonant instrumental textures and quickly changing, throbbing rhythmic themes wherein the percussion section reigns supreme.

    That said, the orchestra navigated the work, appropriately enough, with a kind of preternatural intensity, as if caught up in a shamanistic conjuring of primal spirits. The performance was a robust reminder of the panache and spirit of daring that makes this orchestra so mesmerizing in its own right.

Exorcising Our Demons

Exorcising Our Demons

By Tom Wachunas

    “To insult someone we call him ‘bestial.’ For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult.” –Isaac Asimov-

    “Cruelty is a mystery and a waste of pain.” –Annie Dillard-

    “…And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.” -1 Kings 19:12-

    Let me take off the formal critic’s hat for a bit and unashamedly tend to the heart on my sleeve. Voices From Hurt Street isn’t a conventional “play.” Physical scenery is minimal, though the production has seared vivid images into my consciousness. There is no linear story line or “plot,” but rather a plight -  the plight of demoralized victims and perpetrators locked in a savage dance of sorts, caught up in the throbbing rhythms of human cruelty.

    The multi-genre production, directed by Brian Newberg, was written by students from the Theatre Department at Kent State University Stark, and consists of true, personal stories of bullying, domestic violence and other manifestations of abusive relationships. For my part, a further description of what transpires on stage would be tantamount to a blow-by-blow account of relentless assaults, both literal and symbolic, physical and spiritual. Dramaturg Robert Miltner characterizes the production in his program note as, among other things, a fusion of “… cuttings, dialogues, monologues, memoirs, lyrical essays, short fictions, parodies, social statements, prose poems, found poems, formal or free verse poems, performance pieces and choral recitations.” 

    Yikes. This stage event, then, is a daunting journey through anguished utterances. While the 12 members of the cast perform their multiple roles with wholly believable and poignant urgency, some theater goers may be put off by the gritty sexual content and strong “adult” language. Putting aside for the moment the cast’s artful delivery of heartrending drama, those seeking the pleasantries of escapist entertainment would not be well-served.

    Willingly or not, we as audience members are participants in this work if only to the extent that by now we’re all acutely aware of the maladies it addresses. Like countless other works of stage literature that present the tragedy of damaged or destroyed lives, this one does an admirable job of identifying (here, like an emotional battering ram) the havoc sown and reaped by corrupted human hearts. A gruesome inventory indeed. But  awareness alone, or a litany of traumas in this context, no matter how powerfully presented, can be unsatisfying if not meaningless unless it invokes lasting change or, at the very least, the possibility of healing.

     Can art do that? Can art be that cathartic? Should it be? This is where things get really personal. “Drama has the power to do so many positive things,” director Brian Newberg tells us in the conclusion of his program note, “and one of those things is to change lives.”  I think it’s crucial to remember that the maladies illustrated in this play are indicative of not only our physical, mental and emotional dysfunctions, but also compelling evidence of the terrible spiritual malaise that increasingly afflicts our culture. It’s an affliction effectively symbolized in one scene wherein an angry, arrogant man asserts that through all the hurt and turmoil in his life, he sees God as detached and laughing at us. For him in this story, and many like him outside the story, that’s a perceived truth, and a sad world view which for me is far from The Truth. 

   That said, the production merits our thoughtful attention to its unflinching declaration of brutalized life experiences. Even as its vision of hope amid unspeakable suffering is understated, it nonetheless conveys a palpable solidarity among determined survivors, a community bound together in its pain.

    In the end I was reminded that really meaningful healing starts with Christ-like compassion for both the victims and those who torment them. Do unto others…Compassion isn’t a feeling. It’s a verb.          

    Voices From Hurt Street, at Kent State Stark Theatre (located in the Fine Arts building), 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton. Shows are Friday, April 19 and Saturday, April 20 at 8 p.m., Sunday, April 21 at 2:30 p.m. Ticket prices are $10 for adults and $7 for non-Kent State students, children under 17 and senior citizens. All Kent State students are admitted free of charge with current student ID. Reserve tickets online at www.stark.kent.edu/theatre  or call the Kent State Stark Theatre Box Office at 330-244-3348, Mondays through Fridays from 1 to 5 p.m.