A Ravishing Anniversary Concert from the Canton Symphony

A Ravishing Anniversary Performance from the Canton Symphony

By Tom Wachunas

     On February 16, 1938, the newly formed Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO), conducted by Richard W. Oppenheim, gave its first-ever concert at the Canton City Auditorium before a sold-out crowd of 3,300 listeners.  Seventy-five years to the day after that rousing debut, the CSO re-created the same program in Umstattd Hall with a clearly impassioned Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann at the podium, conducting an equally inspired orchestra.

    The program consisted of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony No. 94, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slave. So while this was a concert of very familiar works which have endured as international audience favorites, there was nothing “old hat” or phlegmatic about Zimmermann’s reading of the material. As always, he effectively ignited this orchestra’s riveting unity of purpose and youthful capacity for investing the familiar with startlingly fresh aural fire. What was old became new again, wholly meriting repeated jubilant ovations from an enthralled audience.

    Much of the CSO’s signature charisma is rooted in the astonishing string section, which on this occasion was as warmly sonorous, technically impeccable and powerfully emotive as I’ve ever heard, beginning with the Beethoven. It is no small feat to make the dramatic tensions and spirit of triumphal heroism of Egmont a palpable, heartfelt reality. And that is precisely what the orchestra achieved here with an edge-of-your-seat intensity.

    Though certainly less stormy in nature (and indeed lightweight by comparison), Haydn's Symphony No. 94 is nonetheless sweetly engaging in its overall lyricism and vigorous effervescence – qualities which the orchestra rendered with jaunty confidence. As for the so-called surprises in the work, I think that (excepting for those listeners who may have never before encountered the piece) the sudden fortissimo chord with accompanying drum whack in the lilting second movement, and the unexpectedly loud timpani roll in the spritely final movement, retain their appeal in much the same way a classic joke does. You know the punch line and when it’s coming, yet it still brings a smile every time.

    For the second half of the evening, everything that makes this musical body a true cultural treasure was in glorious form. From the precisely balanced aural dynamics of all sections working together and depth of color and texture, to the many flawless passages from soloists, the entire orchestra brought breathtaking thrust to the complex musicality of the exotic Scheherazade and the relentless, thundering panache of Marche Slave.

    Throughout Scheherazade, Concertmaster Lauren Roth poured an unforgettable and otherwise larger-than-life dimensionality into her soaring violin cadenzas. The intense sensuality of her bowing brought to mind a sorceress wielding her magic wand to entrance us with intriguing tales of love and adventure. Her playing often exuded a mournful urgency, at times beautifully echoed in the solo passages from principal cellist Erica Snowden. Roth’s inspiring virtuosity is a vital asset to this orchestra, already rich with unassailable artistry. 

    According to a recent article in The Repository, Canton’s daily newspaper, at one point during the original 1938 concert, the vice-chairman of the Canton Symphony Association said to the audience, “We have sown musical seeds in Canton. Now it is up to us to keep the soil fertile and cultivated.” Seventy-five years later, it is eminently clear that Canton has reaped a sumptuous, bountiful harvest.  

    www.cantonsymphony.org

Some Assembly Required

Some Assembly Required

By Tom Wachunas

    “…a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.”

-        Clive Bell -

    EXHIBITION: Assembled Contemplations: Site-specific Installations, featuring work by Sarah Burris, Corwin Levi, Lorri Ott and Erica Raby, THROUGH FEBRUARY 28, Gallery at Main Hall, Kent State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton. Gallery hours are 11:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10:00 a.m. to Noon Saturday

    In the context of “alternative art,” the term installation art emerged during the 1970s to describe unconventional, interdisciplinary works. Additionally, such non-traditional marriages of materials and processes can be fairly sprawling affairs intended to encompass entire gallery spaces, often incorporating multisensory encounters for the viewer. Moreover, the term typically refers to content wherein deeply conceptual concerns trump purely formal ones.

    By these criteria the exhibit, curated by Erica Raby, is a bit sparse, though certainly not without its intellectually compelling moments.

    All That Glitters and Pearls, by Sarah Burris, is a visually striking wall piece comprised of small, colored yarn pom-poms clustered together to suggest flower patches wherein glitter-winged butterflies rest and strings of pearls are embedded. Via sweeping arcs of roping between the patches, the piece joins two gallery walls where they meet in a corner. More decorative than mysterious or inaccessible, the work exudes a domestic preciousness.

    In a raw, totemic sort of way, Lorri Ott’s untitled wall piece seems decorative and floral too, reminiscent of the vertical configurations of Foxglove blossoms. Her ‘flowers’ are made from clear plastic drinking cups that obviously once held variously colored paints.  At the risk of sounding like an overbearing stickler for precise nomenclature, this isn’t really an installation work per se so much as it is simply a mixed media sculpture. If there’s a viable thematic connection to the other works in the show (not that there has to be), it might be in the realm of recycled consumer trash, an element very present in Erica Raby’s piece.

    Of the four pieces in the show, Raby’s Oh, little trees comes closest to the idea (as communicated in the show’s title) of site-specific installation in the purest sense. Which is to say that such works are in some way tangibly and/or conceptually connected to the particular place where we encounter them. In this case, the visual scope of the work is unified by the inclusion of string lines that connect the floor elements to a wall. It’s an interesting complement to the directional roping that Burris employed in her work situated on the opposite side of the gallery. Further enhancing the diverse components of Raby’s installation are the web-like graphite drawings executed directly on the gallery’s white pedestals (strewn with dead twigs “planted” upright in metal bottle caps) and continuing on to the nearby wall where the strings converge.

    The floor is littered with dozens of plastic bottle caps and lids placed atop drab colored paper shapes that might symbolize pollutant spillages. Several yellow plastic light bulb cages (the kind you’d see at construction or industrial sites), containing mysterious wads of something, are hanging from the ceiling. It’s a quietly ominous work, evoking associations with distressed natural environments.

    And speaking of mysterious somethings, there’s the intriguing Instants from the Void, by Corwin Levi, who evidently works under the alternate name of Radio Sebastian. Strewn about the floor is a collection of paperbound poetry volumes. Suspended from the ceiling above are a dozen airy spheroids, each made from what appears to be a continuous, very thin strip of paper coiled in on itself. There’s a wondrously meticulous if not obsessive quality about all the tiny colored texts – presumably poetry -  printed on those paper strips.

    Levi left a note, inviting viewers to leave a poem at the site. Maybe it’s a matter of sighting or citing the ethos of literature present on the floor, or encased in those hovering paper spheres like so many thought clouds ready to rain down cogent verses. Assemble your thoughts. Construct your own possibility.

    PHOTOS (from top): Oh, little trees by Erica Raby; Instants from the Void by Corwin Levi (Radio Sebastian); All That Glitters and Pearls by Sarah Burris; untitled by Lorri Ott    

Invoking a Culture

Invoking a Culture

By Tom Wachunas

        “…art deepens my person, indeed it is the color of my emotional exuberance.”  -Martin Bertman-

    EXHIBITION: Kings, Prophets, Angels and Poets: Judaism Through the Lens of Martin “Mich’l” Bertman / at TRANSLATIONS ART, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton / THROUGH FEBRUARY 23 / Viewing hours are Wednesdays from Noon to 9p.m., Thursdays – Saturdays Noon to 5p.m.  www.translationsart.com   

    I can certainly relate to the daunting task undertaken by Translations director Craig Joseph in selecting works for this show, having engaged the same process for Martin Bertman’s exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art late in 2011. Martin – Mich’l being his Hebrew name – died in July, 2012. Along with Bertman’s widow, Marilena, Joseph recently sifted through the hundreds of paintings stored, stacked and otherwise squirreled away throughout the Bertman home.

    The resulting show is a marvelous look at Bertman’s remarkable journey through many stylistic phases as a painter. If you’ve yet to encounter the man or his work, make it a point to read the three texts hanging from the ceiling (my own presented here in a slightly expanded version), which include beautifully articulated personal thoughts from Rochelle Haas and Nancy Stewart Matin. They impart a moving overview of the richness and depth of Bertman’s impact on all who were fortunate enough to know him.    

    In varying degrees, Bertman’s oeuvre recapitulates many of the ideas put forth by the most challenging Post-Impressionist European painters of the late 19^th century – ideas which in turn constituted the thrust of early 20^th century Modernism. There was Cezanne’s radical flattening of the picture plane and simultaneity of perspectives, which was a seminal influence on Cubism. Van Gogh’s psychically charged color was the rallying cry of the Fauves and Expressionists, as was Gauguin’s exoticism.

    But enough of the truncated history lesson. While he did, on more than one occasion, acknowledge to me his solidarity with these and other aesthetic developments, he was no mere imitator of historic styles in any superficially academic sense. He instead synthesized and hybridized them into a uniquely captivating pictorial dialect. His was a personal visual syntax, if you will, which described and identified both physical and spiritual realities.

    The dominant spirit in this particular gathering of works is a deeply Hebraic one, and emblematic of an artist wholly connected to Judaism’s many faces – philosophical, religious, and secular. He clearly understood the lyrical power of color and organic form to invoke either ecstasy or suffering, to excite or subdue, to suggest the soulful or the mundane.

     Bertman’s technique as a painter – a maker of marks on a flat surface –  was not one of sleek, refined illusionism in the classical sense, but rather a more visceral sort of immediacy born of a pure, gestural spontaneity. As the paintings here so effectively demonstrate -  ranging from the vibrant fluidity of Burning Bush, the hauntingly surreal symbols in Purim, and the electrifying drama of Angel with Sarah and Hagar, for example, to the raw honesty of Gas Chamber and Unidentified Men, he drew directly from the numinous mysticism of the Torah itself as well as the compelling resonance of the Jewish culture, both tortured and tender. 

    I continue to think of him ever immersed in a wondrously palpable yet ephemeral moment, as if chasing and securing the essence of a vision lest it slip from his impassioned grasp.

    PHOTOS: (from top) Angel with Sarah and Hagar; Burning Bush; Gas Chamber; Unidentified Men

Printed Matters

Printed Matters

By Tom Wachunas

    EXHIBITION: Printed Matters: Unique Visions from Printmakers Anna Rather, Nicole Schneider, Lesley Sickle, and Emily Sullivan / AT GALLERY 6000 THROUGH MARCH 22 / Located in The University Center Dining Room, Kent State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, OH. Viewing hours are variable due to pre-scheduled events, but usually best from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm Monday – Friday. OPENING RECEPTION is TUESDAY, FEB. 5, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.

    Beyond the engaging pictorial content itself, especially rich here is the inclusion of some relatively unique applications of printmaking methods.  And though the number of participating artists may be modest, the show offers a nonetheless expansive cross-section of approaches ranging from the traditional to the multi-dimensional.

    In the relatively ‘traditional’ realm of relief woodcuts and intaglio prints, Anna Rather’s swirling fantasies of oceanic life have a delightfully spontaneous, child-like fluidity about them. Intensely energetic and organic, they pulse with vividly saturated colors and all manner of expressionistic linearities and shapes. She calls them collectively “an emotional diary realized in imagery.”

    Emily Sullivan presents a fascinating hybridization of photography, screen printing and sculpture. Particularly noteworthy are two digital photographs of what might best be called intimate, highly textured sculptural environments comprised of glittery, cut-out printed paper forms loosely arranged in piles. Both Lumen and Sloughed emit an eerie glow, suggestive of irradiated biomorphic structures.

    The relief prints by Nicole Schneider are from her abstract series, Parameters #4. Formally, these explorations of relationships between variably-scaled shapes (mostly geometric), line and soft color are certainly compelling enough in their elegant precision. But in many ways they’re also very effective metaphors, evoking the idea of forces that are at times balanced in serene stasis, and at other times caught in a delicate if not precarious tension between opposites. 

    A similar intimacy, elegance and precision are at work in the abstract pieces – titled Shadow Play 1, 2, 3, and 4 -  by Lesley Sickle. Here, though, her superbly designed ensembles of layered lines and shapes (all screen prints on frosted mylar in gently iridescent colors) are more overtly sculptural, mounted in pristine white shadow boxes. Some of the juxtaposed visual elements – a melding of natural with man-made forms – are folded outward, away from the picture plane so as to cast subtle shadows on the surrounding white backgrounds. Delicate, playful and, like this show, wholly intriguing.

NOTE: Special curatorial thanks to Professor Carey McDougal, Fine Arts Faculty at Kent Stark, for recommending the inclusion of Nicole Schneider, Lesley Sickle and Emily Sullivan for this show, and also to Brennis Booth, co-owner of Second April Galerie, for connecting me with Anna Rather.

PHOTOS: (from top) Lumen, ink jet print, screen-printed papers, super fine glitter by Emily Sullivan; Whirlpool, intaglio by Anna Rather; Parameters #4, 1/8 by Nicole Schneider; Shadow Play, screen print on frosted mylar by Lesley Sickle.