By Mary Jane Leach

Saratoga Springs
The Saratoga Chamber Players presented “Music for a Promise of Spring” Sunday afternoon in the United Methodist Church in Saratoga Springs to an almost full house. The music and a window at the back of the stage with a view outside more than made up for being inside on a spring afternoon.

The concert opened with Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio in D Major (Hob. XV:16), with flute replacing the usual violin, which lent an airiness and lightness to the texture. Susan Rotholz (flute) and Margaret Kampmeier (piano) matched each other in phrasing and quality as they traded melodies and then played fast passages in remarkable togetherness.

Cellist Eric Bartlett rounded out the trio, adding a fullness to the sound that wasn’t at first apparent, but added greatly to the color of the sound. The opening movement had some surprises — sudden stops and abrupt modulations, foreshadowing some of Franz Schubert’s more daring harmonic escapades.

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By Mary Jane Leach

Albany Symphony Orchestra presented a colorful concert Saturday night at the Palace Theatre, using visual art as inspiration for instruments to create aural images for our ears.

The Palace’s large stage was ideal for the concert, as each piece used large sections of brass and woodwinds, as well as a full complement of strings, with many percussion instruments spread around the periphery of the stage.

The first piece, “Trama” by Gabriela Ortiz, while not inspired by a specific painting, was nonetheless pictorial, creating a tapestry of images and events from Mexico, weaving in different genres of music: folk, jazz, and classical. “Trama” is the orchestral version of a movement from “Altar de muertos,” a string quartet by Ortiz. With its skillful and expansive orchestration and its use of color, it’s hard to imagine its origin as a string quartet. Continue reading →

SCHENECTADY — Modern dance is an abstract art, with bodies moving through 3-dimensional space creating lines that appear and disappear in a snap.

The centerpiece of the British troupe Motionhouse’s performance Saturday night on the Mainstage at Proctors, however, was something very concrete: a large curved wall like a skateboarder’s quarter-pipe that stood in the middle of the stage and rose more than 12-feet.

In “Scattered,” a crowd-pleasing 65-minute piece, that wall, which was designed by Simon Dormon, was not only a screen for projected images — such as glaciers, ice floes, the inside of a freezer, drops of water, a pools of water, a desert landscape, snowfall and avalanches — but also the point from which dancers launched their bodies or to which they threw themselves.
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ALBANY — Sure, it’s only the second week of January, but Saturday night’s Albany Symphony Orchestra performance with Yo-Yo Ma may go down as the concert of the year.

What the sold-out crowd of 2,851 witnessed at the Palace Theatre was a magical combination of “the world’s greatest concert musician,” according to conductor David Alan Miller, and a hometown symphony that continues to be on fire. Over the course of four diverse pieces, audiences were given top-notch musicianship replete with lusty playing by both soloist and orchestra, especially in the three movements and 40 minutes of Antonin Dvorak’s of the immensely crowd-pleasing Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, B. 191.

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By Mary Jane Leach

TROY — The Albany Symphony and Albany Pro Music, two stalwarts of the Capital District music scene, combined forces Saturday night in a thoughtful and well executed concert to a full house of enthusiastic and appreciative concert goers.

When evaluating a musical composition, it’s always a pleasure to notice recurring motifs or ideas. It’s even nicer when these concepts can be extended to an entire concert program, which this concert fulfilled. In this case it was the musical line, or thread (chain). It’s also interesting to see how a decision on one piece can affect the rest of the program. I had been wondering how the ASO would deal with the instrumentation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Magnificat,” the last piece of the night, and was relieved to see that it had streamlined the string section, which was then reflected in the rest of the program.
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COHOES — C-R Production’s charming “Guys and Dolls” at Cohoes Music Hall proves that this is a troupe that deserves to stay alive.

Karin Mason’s spot-on costume designs — of sharp-suited gamblers, slinky floozies and uptight do-gooders — brilliantly evoked 1940s New York. Christopher George Patterson’s dazzling choreography — and the accuracy and energy of the ensemble — filled the stage with vitality and fresh, vivid movements. But the stand out of this production is LoriAnn Freda’s Miss Adelaide.

Every time she’s onstage, she commands it with her wonderful presence, great comic timing, her screechy Brooklynesque nasal voice (that, somehow, was never annoying), and her obvious talents as a singer and dancer, especially in the show-stopping numbers “A Bushel and a Peck” and “Take Back Your Mink.” Continue reading →

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – Can Bradley Cooper, aka the sexiest man alive, really pull off playing the hideously deformed title character in Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production of “The Elephant Man”?

Yes, he can. His John Merrick — a man with hideous deformities who goes from being a sideshow freak to the toast of the town – succeeds with the right amount of intensity to maintain his contorted posture and the right amount of charm to reveal Merrick’s humor and humanity.

Cooper’s transformation into Merrick is one of the strongest moments of theatricality in the production. Cooper stands onstage dressed only in shorts while a screen shows photographs of the actual John Merrick and Merrick’s caretaker Dr. Treves (ably played by Alessandro Nivola) describes the images. As Treves details Merrick’s deformities, Cooper undergoes a stunning transformation by twisting his fingers together, lifting his arm, turning in a leg, thrusting out a hip and sliding his lips to one side of his face. Continue reading →

Grief can take myriad and unexpected forms, making it ripe for both comedy and drama. In the world premiere production of “The Blue Deep” at the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s smaller Nikos Stage, playwright Lucy Boyle dives into both with mixed results.

The comic bits are clear, as in the slapstick moment when the mother, Grace, and her 20-something daughter, Lila, find themselves superglued together. Or when Lila, a smoker, catches her mother, who often douses Lila’s cigarettes, smoking pot with her longtime friends, Roberta and Charlie. In a gently clever play on words, Lila says, “Look who’s calling the pot — pot.”

Roberta and Charlie are the best characters in the play. They are lively and funny, and, unfortunately, almost completely irrelevant to the muddled mother-daughter drama.
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