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| Charlene Baldridge Photo by Ken Howard |
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an Extraordinary Master Class
It was 5:30 on a hot night (September 25) and I had a challenge getting out of Hillcrest; two cars had crashed on Washington, which narrowed to one lane just before the I-5 on ramp at San Diego Avenue.
All I missed were some crackers and cheese prior to the opening of Mozart & the Mind at the fine auditorium at TSRI, the Scripps Research Institute off Genesee Avenue (formerly known as the fine auditorium at the Neurosciences Institute). The program, September 25-27, focuses on prodigy this year and takes place at numerous locales, including the Qualcomm Institute at CaLit2 at UCSD. Curated by Dr. Tim Mullen, M&M is presented in collaboration with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.
First up was a speech by the eminent neuroscientist Dr. Antonio Damasio, titled “Creativity and the Human Brain.” Thank God he was prepared with charts and graphs, because it was a new vocabulary and a whole new world of ideas about how the brain responds to our human need to discover and create. Dr. D had a wee voice and a weak amplification system, so I winged it most of the way and came up with one stunning take home line: “Even the loveliest dog does not create music.” Amen.
A few other thoughts I gleaned from Dr.D., perhaps a bit more profound: I believe that music was the first of the arts. Creativity confronts pain, allows us to flourish when we are without the means to confront pain (in the usual ways). Ergo, apparently, without pain creativity would not exist.
In other words, science busily creates nomenclature and discovers the brain regions and processes responsible for helping us to lead a life of relative wellbeing. A poet, on the other hand, perseveres by naming and identifying what sustains her despite adversity. This process, which keeps her alive, is possible without knowing scientific vernacular, which merely identifies what every truly creative person already knows. Granted there is some mystery involved, but do accept that it happens.
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| Gavin George Photo courtesy Mainly Mozart |
Science is investigating prodigy as pertains to Mozart and others prodigiously and mysteriously gifted, such as 12-year-old Gavin George, who played a blistering recital of Beethoven's Sonata No. 21, (“Waldstein”), Rachmaninoff’s Variations on the Theme of Corelli in D Minor, Op. 42, and Chopin Etudes, Op. 10 (Nos. 3 though 6, 8 through 10 and 12).
Each time George rose from the piano to bow it was a shock, for one was reminded he is just a boy. An affable boy with a sense of humor, as was shown in a brief Q&A with George, Damasio, and Dr. Joanna Ruthsatz, author of The Prodigy’s Cousin: The Family Link Between Autism & Extraordinary Talent.
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| Anton Nel Photo courtesy Mainly Mozart |
In remarks following the concert, Nel said he often wonders how differently music would have advanced had Mozart lived into his 40s and more. He certainly played these two harbingers wondrously, and with elaborate detailed nuance, relishing in and capturing their unique qualities while rocking TSRI all the while and showing us what treasures are there when we look more deeply.
Then composer/researcher Eduardo Reck Miranda presented his extraordinary composition for four brain-computer interfaces and string quartet (The Hausmann String Quartet). Using the computers and the flesh and blood brains of four technicians and the string quartet, the work is composed in real time, the interfacing apparatus having been invented to assist patients with severe motor impairment, who can think but have no means other than their brains with which to communicate. In other words, as Miranda explained, for these individuals there is no way back.
The future is amazing to ponder. Dr. Miranda’s invention is part of a long project. I was both informed and awe-struck.
Terrence McNally’s Master Class in Good Hands at ion
Anyone who loves opera, vocal technique and bitchiness will adore this close look at a vocal master class. Renowned artists give them all the time, coaching serious students in fine points of interpretation and stage technique to help them achieve and sustain an operatic career. The play is based on such an event at the Juilliard School toward the end of the Greek soprano Maria Callas’s career in the early 1970s.
“I’ll call you Manny,” she says to her master class accompanist. “You call me ‘Madame’.”
That sets the tone of the evening and tells us with whom we are dealing. As one sits in the dark, once can’t help comparing Callas to a certain Republican presidential primary candidate. The ego is that large. So is the insecurity. It’s the kind of bravado an opera singer must wear as a second skin.
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| Sandy Campbell as Callas Photo courtesy ion theatre |
No one who saw a live Callas performance will ever forgot it. Her fans were and are still rabid. McNally is among them and wrote an earlier play, The Lisbon Traviata, about opera fans and a pirated tape of Callas’s Lisbon performance in Verdi's La Traviata.
The diva’s major contemporaries and contenders for the greatest were Joan Sutherland and Sills. In the play she has a few words to say about them and others in her monologues.
The diva’s major contemporaries and contenders for the greatest were Joan Sutherland and Sills. In the play she has a few words to say about them and others in her monologues.
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| Sandy Campbell as Callas Priti Gandhi as Sharon Photo courtesy of ion theatre |
The center of the show, as it should be, is Callas herself (the character does not sing at all, save for one heart-breaking, half-croaked phrase). I can’t imagine a more intense or more deeply poignant performance. And incidentally Manny’s got the goods, too, as played by Daniel James Greenbush. Colleen E. Keith has just the right amount of shrug for the Stagehand.
Ion associate artistic director Kim Strassburger stages the work faithfully and affectingly. It is not to be missed, especially by opera fans and by those who saw the piece in the cavernous Civic Theatre. The intimacy here at ion makes for
a telling study of what we do for love when we have no choice but to follow our calling.
a telling study of what we do for love when we have no choice but to follow our calling.
Thursday-Saturdays at 8pm and Saturdays at 4pm through October 17 at ion’s BLKBOX Theater located at 3704 6th Avenue, 92103, on the corner of 6th and Pennsylvania Avenues.
For tickets: Iontheatre.com