Deceptively Simple

A model singer

Posted to Out and About, the Time Out Chicago blog
 

Chicago model Erin Gipson did a turn on the reality show Beauty and the Geek a couple seasons ago, but her interests run more to singing than high fashion. She teaches voice at the Chicago Center School of music, and has an ethereal little slip of a voice herself. For the past three weeks, she’s presented her bittersweet show “Fever” at Davenport’s, and it just closed last night. The course of true love may never run smooth, but a relationship’s trajectory is clearly embedded in the show, starting high with the first flush of infatuation, running through a series of lovers’ arguments, and ending with a tinge of resignation, and regret.

Gipson’s at her strongest when taking on pop material, like Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” and Nina Simone’s “If You Knew.” She seems to channel Jeff Buckley’s well-known version of “If You Knew,” and is so much more relaxed when singing it than with the jazzier songs.

Songs like “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “Love for Sale” seemed to back her into a corner, and her rhythm never quite settled. She also had a disconcerting habit of resting her hand on her stomach when going after a high note, as if she was practicing a technique instead of performing in front of a crowd. Her between-song patter ran along the lines of, “I hope you like this!” and “These songs mean a lot to me.” It sounds counterintuitive, but a little more time spent polishing the spoken words would have added mightily to to the sung ones.

We shouldn’t be too hard on the girl, though. She and music director/pianist Laura Hoffman chose the songs wisely, with an appealing mix of giddiness and despair, and Gipson’s light voice carries as easily as a breeze. Her band included the steady-as-she-goes bassist Bob Lovecchio and drummer Tyrone Blair, and she was warmly applauded by the happy crowd, who surely identified with the sentiments she gave voice to.

Image: Eringipson.com

   

This is just a test

When browsing in a bookstore, I use a simple preliminary test to see if a book is worth reading. I read the first sentence, and if doesn't immediately make me read the next, I feel safe in putting it down. Plot and characterization can come later. John Updike has written a handful of sentences that pull you forward, so it seems like a reasonable test to give a book. And when I came across this from humorist extraordinaire S. J. Perelman:

"If I ever sit down like a retired Scotland Yard inspector to write my memoirs, which I have provisionally entitled Forty Years a Boob, one of the episodes I plan to gloze over is the night of pub-crawling I spent in Hollywood last summer with a beautiful, Amazonian extra player named, for purposes of this indiscretion, Audrey Merridew."

the deal was sealed in Myopic Books, and I dropped $5.50 on his The Road to Miltown, or the Spreading Atrophy, published in 1952.

Opera hot

Passage to India. Time Out Chicago, August 31, 2007.

Stringing us along. Ditto.

A day when two (separate!) pieces of mail from Chicago arts organizations arrive trumpeting laudatory quotations from Time Out Chicago's critics seems as good as any for our Fall Preview issue to become available. We're a force to be reckoned with, I tell you. I talked to hawt soprano Danielle de Niese about her upcoming Cleopatra in Lyric Opera's Giulio Cesare, which also features countertenor David Daniels and Emmanuelle Haim's Lyric Opera debut. Haim will be the first woman to conduct at Lyric, too.

The Chicago Symphony still lacks a music director, you may have heard, so I tracked down an anonymous CSO musician who knows about these sort of things for a brief feature (Stringing us along, above) outlining the pros and cons of the post's most obvious contenders. My personal favorite comment is the one about David Robertson's "geek-run-amok" persona, presumably in reference to his running around the stage shaking hands with every section principal after each performance of Sibelius's Second Symphony recently. Charles Dutoit's hair also comes in for some criticism.

----

CSO New Music Note No. 1: Mstislav Rostropovich had been scheduled to conduct the CSO in April, with Yefim Bronfman playing Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. Some guy named Esa-Pekka Salonen is filling in, and is having Bronfman play his new Piano Concerto, but Bronfman knows it already because he played the premiere, or something. (Devotees of the Prokofiev get their shot in November, when Martha Argerich plays it with the Verbier Festival Orchestra. That isn't Argerich pictured on the Harris Theater's [clunky, poorly laid out] website, by the way.) It's supposed to be okay, and is reportedly shot through with what Salonen's absorbed from John Adams. There are EweT00b clips here, which I'm currently listening to.

CSO New Music Note No. 2: Nico Muhly has a new piece to be premiered on the MusicNOW series in November, and the title, the subject of hot speculation among a few, um, dedicated weirdos, is Step Team. Apparently, he's now bored with Iceland and is turning to his American roots. I kid. The title comes from this, and if the work involves that much dancing, the players may be asked to repeat the piece. More accurately the title comes from step-team dancing—I'm sure I just referred to that totally unidiomatically, apologies—and set theory. Six steps, six pitch sets; put it on your calendar. There's also a secret solo for a member of the brass family.

Other updates: The blogrolls have been growing in fits and starts. Newspapers are demanding more and more of their critics to maintain blogs, and Andrew Druckenbrod in Pittsburgh, Peter Dobrin in Philadelphia, and David Stabler at The Oregonian having been doing just that, and doing it well.  Other additions to the 'roll include the usual suspects San Francisco's the Standing Room and Iron Tongue of Midnight, London's Jessica Duchen, and On an Overgrown Path.

There are whole lot more musician blogs to list, including Amy Dissanayake, who's currently writing one haiku every day for 365 days, Brian Sacawa's Sounds Like Now, Lisa Bielawa's The Quotidian, which may actually be titled Chance Encounter (it's hard to tell), Nico Muhly, and Jeremy Denk. I've said it before, but once upon a time, before he was Mr. King of the Classical Blogosphere, Denk taught at Indiana University, and I heard a recital he gave. I'd have to dig out the program, but I recall a Bach Partita of exquisite care, and I wish he would've stuck around another year or so and left Bloomington when I did.

It's not just Venezuelan kids

My post calling attention to the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra was but one of many that noticed those kids' enthusiasm. Youth isn't wasted on the Venezuelans, though: Take a look and listen to this clip from 1995 of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. They're in the middle of the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony, under Bernard Haitink, and the string players display some splendid lyricism. Now to track down that recording.

Manly

Time Out Chicago's newsstand sales manager T.C. O'Rourke is an avid cyclist, and also one tough dude. He just finished the Paris-Brest-Paris Radonneur. This four-day cycling race requires its entrants to finish in under 90 hours, and T.C. clocked in in 87. Cycling for 87 hours is hard enough, but the length of the race is 1,200 kilometers, or 746 miles for us non-metric types. Pictures of T.C. can be found here.

It's safe to say that T.C. has won bragging rights for all eternity over the fleet of bike messengers he dispatches laden with boxes of Time Out each week. Way to go, stud.

Passionate defense

Attic Fantasist, a blog maintained by a PhD. student at the University of Sheffield who's writing a dissertation on W.G. Sebald, has a passionate defense of classical music against the charge of elitism. Taking his or her start from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary's definition of elitism, the author works their way around hip-hop and arena rock, and ends up linking to Pierre Boulez's and Daniel Barenboim's quote-unquote efforts at outreach. We part ways when the author writes that "it's their fault" if adults don't like Bruckner, but any fan of classical music who doesn't have a professional investment in the music is always welcome to ride to the rescue. Give it a read.

Playlist

Miranda Cuckson Music of Ralph Shapey. Cuckson, violin; Blair McMillen, piano (Centaur)

Christopher Taylor William Bolcom, 12 New Etudes; Derek Bermel, Turning. Taylor, piano (JDR) (2000)

Andrew Manze, Richard Egarr Schubert: Violin Sonatas. Manze, violin; Egarr, fortepiano (harmonia mundi, available September 11)

Freiburg Baroque Orchestra Mozart: Wind Concertos (harmonia mundi, available September 11)

Jonathan Plowright Paderewski: Piano Sonata, Op. 21; Variations and Fugues, Opp. 11 and 23. Plowright, piano (Hyperion, available September 11)

Monroe Golden Alabama Places (Innova)

Virgil Moorefield Things You Must Do to Get to Heaven (Innova)

Trio Settecento An Italian Sojourn: Tartini, Handel, and more. Rachel Barton Pine, violin; John Mark Rozendaal, cello; David Schrader, harpsichord (Cedille, available mid-September)

Late summer thoughts

"Just use the old noodle. Stay alert for the obviously weird, attend your senses, drink and eat nothing, identify exits. I've, in fact, never really feared anything worse than being bored to bits."—Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land.

What I know

And what I don't, to answer your recent queries.

Alex Ross has written about John Adams's Nixon in China. I do not know if Piotr Anderszewski or Rory Stewart are gay. No knee pain song here. I also have no Helmut Lachenmann mp3s. (The whispery, rustling wing of the avant garde will not be given away for free on this site, buster.)

It's Friday. Go take Soho the Dog's quiz. There are no wrong answers.

Ritz, putting it on

The greatest regeneration. Time Out Chicago, August 23, 2007. Anybody who digs the Andrews Sisters will dig the Puppini Sisters, who do a swell job of updating the sister-group act for our era. This is also MG in fey, club-hopping voice, not high-road-aesthete voice.

The Anat Cohen Quartet. They will be here in one week.

The Silk Road Ensemble and Chicago Symphony have a new CD. That disc includes Osvaldo Golijov's Night of the Flying Horses transcribed for the Silk Road Ensemble. An orchestral piece of music, with soprano, intended to evoke Gypsy music has now been transcribed for an Eastern/Western amalgam of instruments. Therefore, it's a copy of a copy of an unnotated Gypsy original, if I have the chronology correct. Wrap your multicultural head around that.

This weekend, I put put on my cabaret critic attire, which includes spats and a cane with a silver tip, to hear model/singer Erin Gipson, the Puppini Sisters, and Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone, together again, as well as the much-covered Mark Morris Dance Company's Mozart Dances. (Working our way up the ladder of fame chronologically among the singers.) Gipson has appeared on the TV reality show "Beauty and the Geek," which somehow escaped my notice, but after hearing a couple songs, she sounds as if she and her teeny voice may have some potential. She also teaches voice at the Chicago Center School of Music.

Playlist

Los Angeles Philharmonic Ravel (Left-Hand Concerto), Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet), Salonen (Helix). Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (DG)

Dan Kaufman/Barbez Force of Light (Tzadik, available September 23)

Luba Mason Collage (PS Classics)

Brian Sacawa American Voices (Innova) (And congratulations on that engagement!)

Peabody Trio Beethoven: Piano Trios. Violaine Melançon, violin; Natasha Brofsky, cello; Seth Knopp, piano (Artek)

Available August 28:

Kate Royal Debussy, Canteloube, Granados, more (EMI)

Evgeny Kissin Mozart: Concerto No. 23, Schumann: Piano Concerto. London Symphony Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis, conductor (EMI)

Available September 11:

Isabelle Faust Beethoven: Violin Concerto and "Kreutzer" Sonata. Prague Philharmonia, Jiri Belohlavek, conductor; Alexander Melnikov, piano (harmonia mundi)

Katia and Marielle Labèque Stravinsky and Debussy works for piano duo, with videos by Tal Rosner (KML CD + DVD)

Olga Kern Brahms: Variations, Opp. 21, 24 (Handel Variations), 35 Books I and II (harmonia mundi)

Marc-André Hamelin Alkan (Hyperion)

Available October 23:

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Brittania: Elgar, Maxwell Davies, Turnage, Britten. Donald Runnicles, conductor (Telarc)

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique"). Paavo Järvi, conductor (Telarc)

Or, "How a mambo is supposed to go"

Holy Hugo Chavez! Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra showed up every orchestra everywhere that's ever played the "Mambo" from Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story when they played it at the Proms on August 19. (That sentence seems to capture well the hysterical hyperbole attached to almost every published word about this conductor and group.) If only every orchestra played the movement with that much natural swagger, and just watch those kids dance! GTL Torn T has the video, and thanks to Opera Chic for the tip. (Great headline, too, Ms. Chic.) If only every orchestra was tricked out with that much Latin percussion, a lead trumpeter on loan from the Ellington band (is that Cat Anderson's little brother?), and jackets flying the colors of Venezuela's flag, too. Performance for the ages, that is.

Update: I have fond memories of hearing Simon Rattle conduct Bernstein's Wonderful Town at the Proms in 1998, with the likes of Audra McDonald, Kim Criswell, and Thomas Hampson, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. There were a couple Nancarrow player-piano studies that had been orchestrated and conducted by Thomas Ades on the first half, if I'm remembering it right, and the Bernstein was later released on EMI. There's a conga in Wonderful Town, and the London Voices reprised it as an encore and snaked off the stage in a full-blown conga line. Rattle could not have looked happier. But even that performance is obliterated by the Bolivar orchestra.

Photo: Radio 3 Italy