The esteemed poet Natasha Tretheway will be reading at the Hopwood Awards Ceremony tomorrow Jan 30 from 6-8:30 PM in the Rackham Auditorium. Her work has won many accolades from the Pulitzer Prize to longlistings for the National Book Award. Tretheway seamlessly merges traditional and non-conventional styles in her poetry and powerfully comments on history as a contemporary poet. The even will also announce and celebrate its student writers who won the 2019 Hopwood Awards. I look forward to a delightful evening of literature with the creative writing community on campus. This event is free.
PREVIEW: Icons of Anime: Your Name
The Center for Japanese Studies presents the next installment of their Icons of Anime lineup: Your Name! Come see it at 7 PM Wednesday, January 30 at the Michigan Theater (if you can stand the cold!).
The film tells a tale of two highschoolers who have the magical ability to switch bodies with each other. Complications inevitably arise, and we follow the two on a deeply emotional journey to meet eachother. Your Name is beautifully animated and deservedly critically acclaimed, earning an impressive 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Student tickets are $8.50, and 10.50 for adults. Please make sure to dress in lots of layers, as temperatures will be far below zero, especially in the evening. Be sure to limit exposed skin, including your face and hands.
REVIEW: Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Technically flawless is the only way to describe Friday evening’s performance at Rackham Auditorium by pianist Wu Han, violinist Daniel Hope, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist David Finckel of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Each of the performers are highly accomplished musicians in their own right – just to give you an idea, Mr. Neubauer was appointed principal violist of the New York Philharmonic at age 21, and Mr. Finckel was the cellist of the Emerson String Quartet for 34 seasons. As a group, their music-making demanded the audience’s attention from the very first note, refusing to relinquish it until the concert’s conclusion.
The program consisted of piano quartets, which, counterintuitively, consist of a piano, violin, viola, and cello.
The first piece, Quartet in a minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 1 by Josef Suk, was written by the composer when he was a seventeen-year-old student of Antonín Dvořák. With a dramatic first movement, ethereal and dreamlike second movement that fades into nothingness, and a third movement that is jarring, the piece concluded to rapturous applause.
The second piece, Johannes Brahms’s Quartet No. 3 in c minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 60, was one filled with an underlying tension that never quite left the music, even during the sections that could be described as more tranquil. It was during this piece that I specifically noted Ms. Han’s skill on the piano – her fingers seemed to dance across the keys with extraordinary lightness.
The final programmed piece was Quartet in E-flat Major for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 87 by Antonín Dvořák. However, the audience, thoroughly captured by the evening’s performance, called for and was granted an encore of Dvořák’s Bagatelles, Op. 47, V. Poco allegro. The piece was announced from the stage. It was noted, to the audience’s amused laughter, that Dvořák composed it when his publisher insisted that he work on something more popular than what he had been working on (he had been working on his Slavonic Dances, which are famous even today).
After the concert, the performers came out into the lobby of Rackham Auditorium to sign albums and interact with audience members. It is always fascinating to hear artists discuss their work, which is not usually an opportunity after classical performances!
Overall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presented an evening of music of impeccable quality that was greatly enjoyed by the audience!
REVIEW: NT Live: Hamlet
“Hamlet,” written almost 400 years ago, is a timeless piece of work by Shakespeare, performed thousands of times with hundreds of different Hamlets. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the lead character in the National Theatre Live 2015 production of this play, and the Michigan Theater played two showings of this performance. I didn’t know I needed Benedict Cumberbatch to be Hamlet until I saw this production. Cumberbatch nailed Hamlet’s anguished soliloquies and acts of madness with great humor and delivered his lines with great position. When he pretends to be mad when confronted by Polonius and dresses up at a giant toy soldier, he humorously tiptoes across the line of sanity, something he seems to cross by the end of the play.
Horatio, dressed in a simple flannel and a simple backpack, offered a simple alternative to Hamlet and the life in the palace, just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern returned from his childhood as colorful characters. Polonius, the ever-verbose lord, rattled off his lines with such breathlessness that makes his pompous character memorable. Ophelia’s presence onstage seemed brief and disjointed, just as the constant presence of her camera and her love for photography was a detail seemingly overplayed with little significance.
The stunning of the visuals of the blue-lit stage set the mood beautifully, providing a foreboding edge to this great tragedy. The bursts of intense sounds and quick scene changes adds to the disorienting sense from the scene. Though the play ran for 3 hours and 20 minutes, the performance honestly flew by. No one seemed bored or restless, completely captivated by this once-live performance that grandly executed one of Shakespeare’s greats.
REVIEW: Yule Ball
I attended the Michigan Quidditch Team’s Yule Ball with the idea of evaluating how well it brought the magic of Hogwarts into a Muggle college world. As a result, this post is not about the success of the ball as a social event and fun excuse for dressing up; it is about the success of the ball as an artistic interpretation and translation of Hogwarts.
As I understand it, the purpose of the Hogwarts Yule Ball was to provide a formal setting for the students to enjoy themselves and interact with other students. I think the UM Yule Ball could have done better on all three fronts – my overall comment is that it was a little disjointed. For one, instead of producing a Yule Ball experience, they attempted to provide a more generic Hogwarts one. Their decorations included a chess set with knee-high pieces, a Sorting Hat photo booth, and two sets of Quidditch hoops festooned with string lights. While successfully evocative of Hogwarts, these pieces didn’t do much to convey the sense of elegance I would have expected of a Yule Ball. Naturally, the Michigan Quidditch Team doesn’t have the same budget Hogwarts presumably has, or the ability to create decorations out of nothing. However, having planned similar events myself, I do believe it would absolutely have been possible to come up with an equally photograph-worthy set of elegant decorations that didn’t exhaust the budget, especially since this is something the Quidditch team holds every year and therefore the purchases they make could be seen as long-term investments.
In accordance with that, I think it was unclear exactly how formal the ball was intended to be: while most people did dress formally, there were others wearing casual clothes and even within the formal clothes there was a wide range of formality. I rather imagine Professor McGonagall would not have approved.
It was interesting to note, however, that teenagers have not changed much. I was reminded of Harry and Ron sitting on the side refusing to dance with their dates, partially courtesy of the number of phones that were being looked at while their owners slouched at the periphery of the League Ballroom, completely disengaged from the rest of the happenings. So as a venue for “fraternizing,” as Ron put it, there was very little of that happening either. Even in Hogwarts people were more willing to ask other people to dance (recall both Parvati and Padma Patil being asked to dance by boys from Beauxbatons), whereas here there wasn’t even that much dancing. The only real enthusiasm came with the select few songs people obsess over (like “Africa”). A major contributing factor to this was probably the fact that the playlist appeared to have been crowdsourced, so nobody had curated a list of dancing-appropriate songs in an order that made sense. This added to the overall disjointed nature of the event – at the Hogwarts Yule Ball, the Weird Sisters performed for the entire duration of the ball.
For a more faithful interpretation of the Hogwarts Yule Ball, the UM Yule Ball could have done with a little more vision. A cohesive conception of how they wanted the ball to go, and some added structure in how they set about achieving that conception, would have improved the experience of the Yule Ball considerably.
REVIEW: Folk Festival Night 2
An amazing 5 hour show deserves a review that is long and hefty, but I understand those that only want to read about certain artists so I will number the paragraphs.
1 RFD Boys
2 AHI
3 Pokey LaFarge
4 Joan Osborne’s Dylanology featuring Jackie Greene
5 I’m With Her
6 Rufus Wainwright
7. Peter Mulvey
1. The first band to take the stage was the RFD Boys. The RFD Boys play bluegrass, which is the folk music you think of when imaging hillbillies playing banjos in Kentucky. The group has been playing together for 50 years and still has three of the original members. One of the new members and also the lead guitarist for the band is the son of one of the original lead singer. The son was outstanding. His voice had a thick country accent when he sang that fits bluegrass perfectly. He sang better than his father. The group sounded best when they were singing together, usually in the humming and refrains of the songs. The fiddle player (I usually say violinist, but after seeing a folk festival I realize there is a huge difference between a violinist and fiddle player) was also a great bass singer that wove all the voices together. He was a perfect accompaniment for the rest of the group. My favorite song they played was Turkey in the Straw. In this song I was able to hear all the different instruments they were playing (violin, guitar, and banjo) play over the same riff.
2. The next group to take the stage was AHI. AHI isn’t anything like a bluegrass band. They describe their style as a mix of Marley, Michael Jackson, Tupac, but I thought they sounded like a christian rock band. His lyrics were Gospel and made me think of God, the Crescendo’s were slow and uplifting, and the drum beats reminded me of contemporary christian rock groups like Hillsong. I loved the lead singer’s voice, it was rough and rocky like Rod Stewart. The guitarist played solo’s on acoustic and electric guitars. Electric guitar solos are always king, but something special about the acoustic solo is the “clang” sound you can get from a strong pluck. I think folk music really loves “clanging”. My favorite song they performed was a Sam Cook cover A Change is Gonna Come. They had a great slide guitar for this song.
3. Pokey Lafarge was like a 1940’s performer came through a time machine to perform for us. His clothes, hair, guitar, music style, way of talking, jokes, all of it was from a previous century. He’s a character like his name implies. Pokey had a showman’s personality and great stories, he should part-time as an MC. My favorite song he played was Arkansas, in this song he sounded like Bob Dylan from the album Nashville Skyline. For his last song, Pokey did something I really appreciated. He went of his mic and unplugged his guitar. Sound engineering is really amazing, but folk music doesn’t need so much reinforcement, it was nice to dial it back a little and hear the guitar naturally. This also showed how powerful Hill auditoriums acoustics are. One man with a guitar, and I could still hear crystal clearly up in the mezzanine of an auditorium that seats 3,500 people. Pokey had a line that really stuck with me “Even bums get lucky sometimes”. I think this will be the new motto of my life.
4. The show hit a new level of wonderful when Joan Osborne’s Dylanology featuring Jackie Greene came on. These are special artists that took upon the task of only playing covers of Bob Dylan songs. Joan Osborne has a voice with a lot of emotion, perfect for slow songs and folk music. Jackie Greene was the only real guitarist of the night combining folk and rock & roll into powerful riffs, chords, and solos. I would say I’m a Bob Dylan fan, but most of the songs they played I could not recognize. Songs that I did recognize they altered so much that I could only recognize them from the lyrics. They radically changed Bob Dylan’s song and turned his folk sound into a dramatic jazz feel, or bluesy funk feel, or grand concert feel. The sound was different depending on whether the pianist was on the electric piano or grand piano. Some great songs they played were Highway 61 Revisited, Gotta Serve Somebody, and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
5. I’m With Her is an up and coming group comprised of three young women. Contrary to what I first believed, they came up with the name before Hillary Clinton. This group was on after intermission and brought the night back to a more traditional folk sound. For their age they sounded very experienced. I enjoyed their formation, all three huddled around one mic with the lead singer always in the middle of the trio, and the fact they all played multiple instruments. All three singers had their own attributes. Sarah Jarosz had the most authentic country twang to her voice, Aoife O’Donovan had the most melodic voice great for hitting softer notes, and Sara Watkins had the most powerful voice that provided the best base to harmonize around. However, this group was my least favorite performance of the night. I thought the fiddle playing was pretty weak, it sounded amateurish with a lot of missed notes. The rest of the instrumentals was nothing special. My favorite song of theirs, and also the debut of the song, was Call My Name.
6. Rufus is the singer of Hallelujah in Shrek, making him forever a legend. Rufus has the voice of an angel, it is simply his voice that makes him so special. The level of clarity and resonance in his voice is something I have never heard before. It’s a gift from God and Rufus used this gift well. His voice has a boyish sound to it and he hits every high note with a natural strength that he can hold in a note for over 30 seconds. I was excited when he walked out on stage because of how crazily he was dressed. It reminded me of a homeless person, but it is how I would expect someone who is a genius and crazy (in his case crazy genius and crazy) would dress. He is a great piano player whose fingers fly around the keyboard, but his voice doesn’t need anything accompanying it to sound magnificent. Rufus obviously knows this because he performed an entire song just singing with his voice. His style is something I would never associate with folk, it is like a eerie beautiful style I expect from the Phantom of the Opera. I appreciated that Rufus didn’t like pauses between his songs and as soon as he finished a song would go on to the next; he didn’t even wait for the applause. I think that he was in a bit of a rush because it was his husband’s birthday and he probably wanted to Skype him. My favorite song he played was Early Morning Madness.
For the encore Rufus brought out all the magicians to join him in singing Hallelujah. Rufus sang the first and last chorus, in-between choruses were sung by other artists, and the refrain was sung by everyone. I thought this was mean of Rufus. No one can compare to him when singing this song, and even Jackie Greene and Joan Osborne sounded like amateur’s in their choruses. This song brought my friend, who I made at the show, cry, and he was older man.
7. The last musician was actually the MC for the show. Peter Mulvey didn’t just talk like most MC’s, he sang songs. This is the best kind of MC. Peter has an extremely soothing voice and is sneakily very good at guitar. I thought of Peter like ginger with sushi. I eat ginger between every piece of different fish to clean my palette for the next piece of fish. My favorite song he played was a stream of consciousness song called Pigeons.
I attached some photos below (sorry they aren’t too clear).
