We’re halfway through the EGOT season now. EGOT, of course, stands for the top four performing arts prizes. T.V.’s Emmys aren’t awarded until September. Of local interest, the recent Grammys included a triumph for Michael Repper, music director of Easton and Delmarva’s Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. The Oscar presentations passed without a major incident. So that leaves the Tony Awards with the top prize of Best Musical. It will be announced on May 2, with the awards show on Sunday, June 11.

If you haven’t already, you can catch up on the big winner from the 2022 Tonys.

“Hadestown,” with music, lyrics, and book by Anais Mitchell, inspired by one of Greek mythology’s greatest hits, “Orpheus and Eurydice.” It tells the story of a hungry girl who seeks nourishment by working in Hell’s underworld, from which her equally impoverished lover tries to rescue her; his ardor expressed in moving songs and ensuing dancing. It’s a love story burnished in Hades. Whether you believe in Hell or not, it’s a damn good tale and has been for a thousand years.

You can still catch the reigning Best Musical Tony winner at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. But the national tour arrives closer to home – downtown Baltimore – with eight performances April 11-16, starting at 8 Tuesday through Saturday, plus a 2 p.m. Saturday matinee and shows at 1:00 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday at France-Merrick Performing Arts Center’s Hippodrome Theatre.

france-merrickpac.com

***

“In the face of severe economic dislocation, widespread civil disorder, and Prime Minister [Margaret] Thatcher’s controversial policies, these artists declared: ‘This is Britain!’”

That’s the concluding statement posted at the entrance to the National Gallery of Art’s photography exhibition, which takes its title from a generation of artists’ symbolic declaration. These are images from the “Iron Lady” period – 1975-1900 – when Thatcher served first as leader of Britain’s Conservative party (the Tories) and, beginning in 1979, as the U.K.’s first female prime minister and its longest-serving PM of either gender in the 20th century. But today, these still images bring to mind current news videos we see from France. 

The National Gallery photos are primarily of people coping with poverty, discrimination, but also resentment by a white working class against immigrants of color or neighbors of a different race or religion and even women of their own kind or sons and daughters who don’t believe in love, marriage, and a baby carriage. Sound familiar? 

The Thatcher era covered the Catholic v. Protestant “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, record unemployment due to parliamentary cancellation of the “welfare state,” along with mining closures, nuclear power plants, and urban riots. These profound changes inspired such artistic responses as punk rock and a photographic revolution advancing free speech through visual expressions that cannot be censored this side of pornography.

Examples: Vanley Burke’s 1970 black-and-white “Boy with Flag” shot in Handsworth Park, Birmingham, England, site of hellfire riots 15 years later. He’s a black male child sporting a Union Jack on his bike. He could even be one of those pictured strolling down the street in Birmingham with a white friend, passing an overturned burning truck as if it were an everyday occurrence. Apparently, it was in this 1985 shot by Pogus Caesar. Meanwhile, life goes on amid chaos, as suggested in Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s “Young Couple in a Backyard on a Summer’s Day.” A naked man approaches a woman known to him who appears apprehensive, perhaps because a child standing next to them tries to look away.

Other images are accompanied by long titles that give away the photographer’s intent, such as a black-and-white image of a man of privilege seated disconsolately in an exclusive members club with a news rag in his lap. It’s Karen Knorr’s 1981 “Newspapers are no longer ironed. Coins are no longer boiled. So far have Standards Fallen.” 

Moving on to color photography, Sunil Gupta’s 1988 “Untitled #1” presents a gay couple posing across the Thames from Parliament. Text imposed in a break separating part of the image states: “I call you my love though you are not my love, and it breaks my heart to tell you.” Guess which guy is thinking that to himself. I say the one on the right.

My favorite photo commentary on the Thatcher rule is Chris Steele-Perkins’ color sight gag titled “Hypnosis Demonstration: Cambridge University Ball,” 1989. All those gathered look like standing-dead zombies. Speaking of the truly dead, the most evocative of the wasted lives from “The Troubles” is Pogus Caesar’s 1985 “Belfast Mourners & Press at the Funeral of 3 Republican Servicemen,” a black-and-white of a casket being lowered into a grave. For what? Christians at war with one another? No different, we suppose, than Muslim Shiites and Sunnis.

May France fare better in its current “troubles.”

“This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s” through June 11, National Gallery of Art’s West Building, Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C., nga.gov

                                                                                                             ***

April will bloom with premieres and major concerts, digital and live, for most of the national and regional classical music orchestras near home or within relatively easy driving distance.

* The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra wraps up its 2022-23 season with three concerts beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 27, at Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center on the Wye Mills campus, followed at the same hour on April 29 at Cape Henlopen High in Lewes, Delaware, and 3 p.m. on April 30 at Ocean City Performing Arts Center. The program for all three concerts opens with Grammy-winning music director Repper conducting Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major with solo cellist Dominique de Williencourt. Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 from “The New World” follows intermission.  

midatlanticsymphony.org

 
* The Annapolis Symphony Orchestra’s Masterworks’ subscription season resumes at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 31 and April 1 at Maryland Hall in the capital city, and 2 p.m. April 2 at North Bethesda’s Music Center at Strathmore. The “Two Romantics” concert features guest violinist Esther Yoo performing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Opus 19, followed by Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Opus 73.

annapolissymphony.org

* The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents blockbuster concerts promoted as “Joshua Bell Plays Mendelssohn,” owing to the superstar violinist’s highly deserved reputation for eloquent interpretation of the 19th-century German composer’s poetic concerto. The concerts – 8 p.m. Friday, April 21, and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 23, at Baltimore’s Meyerhoff Hall, and at the BSO’s second home, the Strathmore, at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 22. Russian-born conductor Anna Rakitina leads the orchestra in a program that opens with “When the World as You Know It Doesn’t Exist” by Pulitzer-prize winner Ellen Reid who, at 40, is young for such an accomplished composer. Next, Bell performs the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto ahead of the concert finale: Elgar’s “Enigma,” Variations on an Original Theme.

bsomusic.org

* The National Symphony Orchestra presents a special family concert: the world premiere of “This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration” at 2 and 4 p.m. Sunday, April 2, at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Written and narrated by Jacqueline Woodson on commission by the NSO, it’s the story of a little African-American girl who finds a rope under a tree in South Carolina before the family migrates north. She later learns the history behind the rope that will be handed down from generation to generation.

kennedy-center.org/nso

* In a concert that could not be closer to home, the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra performs Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece “Pathetique” (also known as his Symphony No. 6). Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the program that opens with another Tchaikovsky, Polonaise from his “Eugene Onegin” opera. The concert – recorded at the 2022 Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado is offered on the orchestra’s Digital Stage. Streaming starts at 8 and 11 p.m. Wednesday, April 12 through April 19.
phil.orch.org

                                                                    ***
For an altogether different musical vibe, Easton’s Avalon Theatre brings award-winning blues and soul artist Shemekia Copeland to its main stage at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 8. Winner of the 2021 B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Blues Music Award, Copeland is up for four 2023 Blues Music nominations, including Album of the Year for her Grammy-nominated “Done Come to Far.” Hailed as her generation’s “Queen of the Blues,” Copeland’s 2019-22 album trilogy, culminating with “Done Come to Far,” was preceded by “America’s Child” and “Uncivil War.” In them, she tackles sobering human rights issues while mixing in bits of enlightened humor and a sense of hope. The 44th annual Blues Music Awards will be presented on May 11 in Memphis. 

avalonfoundation.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

It was an evening for celebrating winners and also of remembrance at the opener of the penultimate concert series of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) 2022-23 season.

Chief among the winners in Easton Thursday evening was Michael Repper. Repper was making his first appearance conducting the MSO since being awarded the Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance last month for the album he recorded with fellow Grammy winners – New York Youth Symphony (NYYS) musicians.

Featured on this opening night was Elizabeth Song, the 13-year-old New Jersey violinist who won first prize in MSO’s Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition in January. The three concerts Song performs with the orchestra through Saturday, March 11, are part of her prize, along with a $2,000 cash award.

First up in Thursday’s concert was Brahms’ circa 1880 Tragic Overture, a stand-alone symphonic movement, somber in sharp contrast to another he composed near the same time – the high-spirited Academic Festival Overture. This Brahms piece opened with a bombastic D minor temperament urged on by an animated Repper dressed all in black. Intermittent F major passages were more flowing, with an emphasis on strings led by concertmaster Kimberly McCollum, punctuated by clarion calls with Mark Hughes and others in the brass section taking the lead.

Repper next introduced violinist Song by her preferred nickname, Poppy. Song performed the same concerto she played in the competition finals on January 12 at Easton’s Avalon Theater. But this time, she was making her debut with a full orchestra instead of piano accompaniment. Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5, published in 1861, was all but forgotten until rediscovered by 20th-century orchestras and solo musicians. It has become a favorite in competitions because of the technically challenging and listener-friendly phrasing that gives violinists ample opportunities to show off their virtuosity.

After peering back at the orchestra during its celebratory opening, Song took every advantage of her opportunity, deftly diving in and out of rapid changes in pace and mood, from sweet to urgent. During a tumbling stretch of demands on her prodigious skill, she mastered the vicissitudes of the concerto as if it were child’s play. From attack mode to lullaby, she induced weeping-for-joy-or-sorrow glides of emotion while wielding see-saw strokes up and down – almost making her instrument chatter with excitement. Astonishingly, Song has improved on her winning performance just two months ago, though credit must also go to the maestro and the 38 orchestral musicians who made her debut such a smash.

MSO’s concerto competition was named in memory of Elizabeth Loker before the inaugural event in 2019-20. What was to be the second annual competition was delayed three years by COVID. Loker, better known to friends, colleagues, and loved ones as Beth, died of cancer in 2015. Retired from the Washington Post as vice president of publishing technology, Loker moved to Royal Oak and became a board member of both the MSO and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Next year’s competition will accommodate three finalists, who will each get to perform with the orchestra.

Song’s performance was a tough act to follow. But after intermission, Repper conducted the MSO in Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, which won the previous Best Orchestral Performance Grammy for its recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The four-movement symphony begins with a modest passage drawing from African folk tunes, quickly building to a strings-and-percussion crescendo before settling into a hymn-like gospel pastoral. The second movement features a melody inspired or borrowed from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, with horns and reeds joined by strings and drums for a gratifying conclusion. Movement three breaks out in a party mood to a cowboy theme not out of place on “Yellowstone.” Trumpets, led by Josh Carr, declare that it’s time to dance and have fun. The final movement enlists every corner of the orchestra toward a frenzied but disciplined race to the finish.

Price has become a programing favorite of American orchestras – long after her 1953 death – in both February’s Black History Month and March’s Women’s History Month. As the first African-American woman to have her classical music composition performed by a major orchestra – Chicago Symphony in 1933 – Price’s works, most recently discovered in what was once her summer home, deserve attention in both months and all the other 10. That first-ever piece was her Symphony No. 1.

This year’s Grammy-winning album, with Repper conducting the NYYS, includes two other Price compositions – “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and her Piano Concerto in One Movement – as well as pieces by Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery, two living African-American female composers.

Personally, I look forward to the day when neither black nor women’s history needs a special recognition month but are broadly recognized throughout the year.

Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s March Concerts
Opening date in the series was Thursday night, March 9, Easton Church of God
7:30 p.m., Friday, March 10, Community Church, Ocean Pines
3 p.m. Saturday, March 11, Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach
midatlanticsymphony.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.

 

John Waters is the celebrity headliner for the seventh Ocean City Film Festival, featured in a live performance on Saturday, March 4, which he calls The End of the World. Let’s hope he’s kidding. 

But if you want to see one of Waters’ explicitly recallable films, look for them streaming somewhere. The OC Fest showcases movies, shorts, and documentaries from around the world, including the Delmarva Peninsula, most of them from the last two years. John Waters’ most recent film was a 2007 remake of his hit Tony-winning musical Hairspray, based on his 1988 film of the same title.

So before we get to the films you can see at various Ocean City venues March 2-5, allow me to share my favorite John Waters quote from an interview with him for Newsday on Long Island around the time of Hairspray’s 2003 Broadway opening.

“That’s the most subversive thing I’ve ever done,” he said of creating Hairspray. 

“Why’s that,” I asked. 

“Now every time someone who’s seen Hairspray on Broadway and then finds one of my films listed on late-night cable, they’ll say, ‘Oh, a John Waters film. That must be cute.’ ”

Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), with its literally filthy ending, and Female Trouble (1974), starring his favorite onscreen accomplice Divine (from a movie of the same name), aka Glenn Milstead, were anything but cute. Funny, yes, if you share Waters’ warped sense of humor and irony. Of his first-ever live performance in Ocean City, he says his monologue will be an irreverent but insightful riff on “all of today’s despair and disease, desires and desperation.”

Baltimore native Waters also recalls Ocean City summers as a teenager living under the Boardwalk and “dreaming of making weird films,” adding: “Now I’m back,” at age 76, “having done just that.” As for the film festival, the outlier who now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame says, “That’s what these festivals are all about – inspiring creative lunacy.”

Which brings us to the films surrounding Waters’ End of the World show.

Among the feature films: Against All Odds: Surviving the Holocaust, Isatis, an archeological travelog to the ancient desert city in central Iran; Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, the true story of Roger Sharpe who in 1976 helped overturn New York City’s ban on pinball; Worst Laid Plans, three tales of vacation-themed horror, and The Automat, a documentary on the once-maligned, now-extinct commissary-style urban eateries fondly remembered by Mel Brooks and the late Carl Reiner. So it’s gotta be funny. Then there’s The First Step, a political docu-commentary about black activist Van Jones, whose attempts to be a “bridge builder” during the Trump presidency predictably fails in divided America, and The Innocents, a supernatural thriller taking place in the long days and short nights of a Nordic summer.

Among opening night highlights are a pair of films of local origin: Hedgehog, produced by Dave Messick of Unscene Productions, focusing on Stephen Decatur High School graduates in nearby Berlin. Biggest Little Farm: The Return, a 30-minute documentary directed by Ocean City native John Chester, is a follow-up to his award-winning feature that debuted at the 2019 OC festival tracing the farm’s transformation.

In addition, dozens of showcase shorts under varied themes ranging from Maritime Life to Sex, Love, Romance & Intimacy will be screened nightly at venues including Ocean City Performing Arts Center, Flagship Cinemas, Fox Gold Coast Theater, and Ocean City Downs Casino.

Ocean City Film Festival

For tickets, dates, and times to these and other events, parties, and awards night presentations, go to OCFilmFestival.com
                                                          ***
Music director Michael Repper conducts his first Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra concerts since winning the Grammy Award with the New York Youth Symphony for Best Orchestral Performance. 

The opening night of the three-concert series is 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 9, in Easton at the Church of God, followed the same time the next evening at the Community Church in Ocean Pines, and at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 11, at Epworth United Methodist Church in Rehoboth Beach. The program for each concert opens with Brahms’ Tragic Overture. Next is Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor, featuring the winner of MSO’s recent Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition, violinist Elizabeth Song as honored guest soloist. After intermission, the orchestra performs Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1. 

As the first African-American woman to have a composition performed by a major classical music orchestra – the Chicago Symphony – Price has been an in-demand Black History Month choice by orchestras across the United States. All the music on the Grammy-winning album recorded by the young musicians Repper nurtured during the height of the COVID pandemic was by African-American women – Price and two living composers, Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman. 

“My entire mission as a conductor,” Repper said just after his February 5 Grammy triumph, “is to connect people through music. I’m so proud that this project brought people together during the challenging time of the pandemic, and thrilled to have been able to share this tremendous music by Price, Montgomery, and Coleman.”

At 13, violin prodigy Elizabeth Song is about the same age as the younger musicians in the Repper-led youth orchestra. Song will play the piece that won her the $2,000 top prize at her live performance at the competition finals on January 12 in Easton. 

Song played 19th-century Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor, recognized in competition circles as a challenging concerto that allows performers to display their virtuosity. Young Song played it with beyond-her-years confidence and expressive nuance. 

Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra Concerts
7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 9, Easton Church of God; 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 10, Community Church, Ocean Pines; 3 p.m. Sunday, March 11, Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach. midatlanticsymphony.org
                                                                   ***
“Don’t let it be forgot, that, for one brief, shining moment there was Camelot.” Jacqueline Kennedy recited that emotive lyric shortly after her husband’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas and for months and years after that. It was from her husband’s favorite Broadway musical that opened the year he was elected president. The 1960 Broadway musical encapsulates the fleeting idealism of a fictional court and castle in the 12th-century legend of King Arthur. 

Years later, Clint Hill, Jackie’s Secret Service agent (who climbed out of the vehicle trailing the presidential limousine to push Mrs. Kennedy back in her seat) wrote that Jackie purposefully cultivated an immortal myth about her husband’s presidency. “Camelot” came to represent the youth, hope, and optimism of JFK and his thousand-day administration.

Previews of a Broadway revival of “Camelot” in a new version created by Aaron Sorkin and Bartlett Sher begin March 9 toward an April 13 opening. I can’t imagine it’s an accident that this “Camelot” debuts on the 50th anniversary year of the JFK assassination. If it runs through November 22, which I fully expect it will, there’s a matinee on that date beginning within the hour, Eastern time, when those of us who remember first heard the awful news.

Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot
Aaron Sorkin and Bartlett Sher collaborate on a new version of the classic musical. Previews begin March 9, Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Lincoln Center, Manhattan, opening April 13. broadway.com and discount sites such as seatgeek.com and stubhub.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.

 

The matinee performance is billed as a “Stars of the Next Generation” concert. But these three young musicians are already stars of their own generation.

On Sunday, February 5, Chesapeake Music presents violinist Randall Goosby, violist Natalie Loughran, and pianist Zhu Wang — all in their mid-20s — in a program of works by Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, and Florence Price at the resplendent Ebenezer Theatre concert hall in downtown Easton.

Randall Goosby has performed with big-name orchestras from all over the United States and Europe – including the Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and London Philharmonic. And this year, he will stretch his performance map to another continent with concert dates in Japan and South Korea. His precocious resume includes his debut with the Jacksonville Symphony at age nine and the New York Philharmonic at 13. He is the youngest winner ever of the Sphinx Concerto Competition and later a recipient of Sphinx’s Isaac Stern Award. A graduate of Juilliard, Goosby continues his studies for a distinguished Artist Diploma under the tutelage of Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho, co-artistic director of Chesapeake Music’s annual chamber music festival.

Goosby will perform Florence Price’s Two Fantasies, accompanied by pianist Wang and, after intermission, in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for Violin and Viola, with Loughran and Wang.

Natalie Loughran won first prize in the 2021 Primrose International Viola Competition and the BIPOC (Biracial Indigenous or People of Color) Composer’s Prize for her arrangement and performance of “Mother and Child” by African American composer William Still Grant. In addition to her work as a concert soloist, Loughran regularly plays with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. She will pair with Wang on Schumann’s Fantasiestucke, Opus 73.

After his Carnegie Hall debut, pianist Wang’s recital was named “The Best of 2021” by New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini. And as the 2020 Young International Artists Audition winner, he earned the Stern Young Artist Development Award in the name of the Linda and Isaac Stern Foundation.

All three will perform together on the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante.

“Stars of the Next Generation” concert, 2 p.m. February 5, Ebenezer Theater, 17 S. Washington St., Easton; chesapeakemusic.org

***

The annual Annapolis Film Festival doesn’t return until March 23. But in the meantime, the festival screens a very timely and important documentary – “The Educational Divide: The Story of East Side High” — highly relevant to Black History Month. After a federal judge ordered the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, to merge its two separate but unequal high schools, found to violate Brown Vs. Board of Education, the community is faced with how to deal with the ruling. Until very recently, we may have thought that Roe v. Wade was “settled” law. Now we’re left to wonder if Brown is the law of the land. Are our public schools allowed to continue racial segregation or not? Can we put our faith in the U.S. Supreme Court to do the right thing? How long does a precedent have to exist before it is unassailable? Your guess is as good as mine.

This high court decision came down in 1954 – nearly two decades earlier than Roe Vs. Wade. What’s next? Abolishing same-sex marriage? Interracial marriage? How about making only white male landowners eligible to vote? That’s how it was in states-rights interpretations of the original Constitution. Even free black men who may have owned land counted only as three-fifths of a person. Personally, I’m not sure bigots who might favor this could do the math.

“The Educational Divide: The Story of East Side High,” 7 p.m., Feb. 8, Maryland Hall’s Bowen Theatre, Annapolis, annapolisfilmfestival.com

***

Imagine. An emerging Impressionist artist you never heard of – much less seen any of his art. I confess. I didn’t know anything about Giuseppe De Nittis until I read about him in the Washington Post. And now I can’t wait to see his under-discovered paintings at the venerable Phillips Collection museum in D.C. De Nittis was born into a wealthy family in largely impoverished southern Italy. Making his way to Paris as a young man, he hobnobbed with the likes of Degas and Manet before making his debut in the historic first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He died of a stroke at age 38, just ten years later.

From the few online images of his art, I say with some assurance that he had great facility as a painter with an eye for capturing scenes that inspired him to paint them. I love Impressionists and their fellow travelers I’ve seen at the Phillips – especially Pierre Bonnard, who helped bridge Impressionism to Modernism. But there is that impression – forgive the word assimilation – that you’ve seen it all before. And while I never tire of seeing, for instance, certain favorite movies, I am looking forward to discovering for myself an accomplished Impressionist painter whose work I have never experienced in a museum. 

“An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis,” Through February 12, Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., NW, Washington, DC.,

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts and editor now living in Easton.

 

The word ‘Labor’ in the title of the companion exhibits that open the new year for the Academy Art Museum (AAM) takes on very different meanings upon viewing. Although there are no depictions of women delivering babies in any of the etchings or paintings that make up the slender but charming Mary Cassatt exhibit in AAM’s Lederer Gallery, there are plenty of mother and child together.

Across the hall, in the Healy Gallery, the “Labor and Leisure” show drawn from the museum’s permanent collection is long on images of men at work. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the 1945 watercolor of a shirtless man powering a “Drill,” the title of a Robert Riggs print.

Taken together, the two exhibits have little to do with each other except that they are mostly of prints, etchings, and engravings with scattered oils or watercolors here and there. Plus, in the case of Robert Rauschenberg’s conspicuous, if enigmatically titled, 1986-87 “Tibetan Garden Song,” there is a cello bathed by scrub brush in a gleaming metal tub. Who knows – I don’t – what to make of it? But it’s really cool.

Cool is not the word that comes to mind while taking in Cassatt’s prints and paintings in this interpretation of “Labor and Leisure.” Her images are warm and reflective of a life observed but not experienced first-hand. She never bore nor raised children of her own. Several of her models are children of her siblings, in many cases described in titles you can discern without reading them, such as the loveliest oil painting in the exhibit, “Mother Resting Her Cheek on Her Daughter’s Blond Hair,” from 1913. Apparently unrelated to her is a little girl and her mom in a preparatory sketch for Cassatt’s 1893 painting “The Child’s Bath,” seen in a drypoint drawing resulting from her study of Japanese printmaking.

From a period in her career largely realized in Paris with the help of her mentor Edgar Degas, are two images depicting leisure-time diversions: Cassatt’s delicate multi-plate color etching “The Banjo Lesson” and her tender aquatint print of mother and daughter in the shade “Under the Horse-Chestnut Tree.” Other images of ink or pencil on paper, executed in sublime detail, leave the impression of not-quite completed works. Perhaps it’s indicative of her near blindness in the last decade or so of her life, which ended in 1926. It reminds me of Beethoven, all but deaf in his last years. Cassatt might have been drawing, almost, from memory.

Supplementing the labor/leisure theme – very much needed as this purview of Mary Cassatt’s career as a pioneering female artist is somewhat limited – the accompanying exhibit of works from the museum’s collection makes this survey well worth your attention. It’s all over the place – from the aforementioned Rauschenberg to Rembrandt, represented here by an exquisitely etched if minor, 1647 portrait of fellow painter Jan Asselyn.

You can hardly miss David Hockney’s text-driven “Old Rinkrank” panel standing in stark contrast to Thomas Patton Miller’s “Summer in Baltimore” and “Maryland Crab Feast” screenprints juxtaposing bright poster colors against black-face figures. And don’t overlook the 1799 Goya etching “Tantala” mounted next to Emily Lombardo’s “Tantalus” after Goya from 2013 when she was an AAM artist-in-residence,

In the end, there’s a lot to see here. All for free admission.

Just don’t try to pluck the strings on the Rauschenberg – what do you call it? – an instrumental construction. Leave it to a cello virtuoso. Personally, I nominate Yo-Yo Ma. Book him to play that cello, Sarah Jesse, and I’d guarantee a sellout worth covering your budget for a year or more.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.

‘Mary Cassatt: Labor and Leisure’
‘Labor and Leisure in the Permanent Collection’
Both exhibits run through April 15
Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton academyartmuseum.org

 

Elizabeth Song, a 13-year-old violinist from Haworth, NJ, won the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition Thursday evening in performances by seven finalists in front of a live audience and panel of judges at the Avalon Theatre in Easton.

Ethan Nylander, a flutist from Townsend, DE, was awarded the runner-up prize and pianist Emma Taggart of Brooklyn, NY, was recognized with an honorable mention. First prize includes a $2,000 cash award plus performances as a violin soloist with the MSO in three concert programs March 9-11 in Easton, Ocean Pines and Rehoboth Beach. Second prize is a $500 award and a concert performance in the orchestra’s ensemble series next season. 

Song played 19th-century Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor, widely known in competition circles as a complex and challenging concerto that gives performers a chance to display their virtuosity. Young Song played with beyond-her-years confidence and expressive nuance. 

Nylander performed with a piano accompanist 20th-century French composer Jacques Ibert’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra. Playing solo, Taggart chose the Piano Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price, the first African-American woman to have her composition performed by a major American symphony orchestra.

The other finalists included three pianists: HaozhouWang of Philadelphia playing a Prokofiev concerto and Valerie Wellington of Kansas City, MO and Philina Zhang of New York City, both performing pieces by Rachmaninoff. James Kang of Newark, DE, played Paul Hindemith’s “Der Schwanendreher” viola concerto.

The three judges seated before a live audience of about 40 were MSO music director Michael Repper, concertmaster Kimberly McCollum and principal bassoonist Terry Ewell. The competition is named for the late board member of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra and a supporter also of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

Michael Repper, the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s new music director, is now a Grammy-nominated conductor.

Repper, who also serves as music director of the New York Youth Symphony through the end of this season, led the Manhattan-based student orchestra on its debut album, which has been nominated for the best orchestral performance. The Grammy will be presented on February 5 at the 65th annual Grammy Awards ceremony. The untitled New York Youth Symphony album likely never would have been recorded were it not for the COVID pandemic. During that time, live performances were canceled for both the spring and fall semesters for his student musicians, and Repper embarked on creating some sort of virtual performance. 

With the lockdown in New York occurring just a week before the orchestra’s March 2000 Carnegie Hall concert, Repper says, “I was looking for an educational experience for these young musicians that would be energetic, rewarding, and safe. So I thought of an album. All you have to do is get the whole orchestra together in a room and hit the record button. But obviously, that was impossible.”

Not so, it turned out. Together they proceeded, playing safely distanced, masked where possible, and remotely in some cases. Not one of the 120 musicians, including Repper, got infected with COVID. As for the Grammy nod – the first ever for a pre-college ensemble in the orchestral performance category – Repper says, “To get the nomination was a big cherry on top of the whole amazing experience.”  

Besides the New York Youth Symphony’s performance of works by African-American composers Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, and Valerie Coleman, the other Grammy orchestral nominees include Dvorak’s Symphonies No. 7-9 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by maestro superstar Gustavo Dudamel and “John Williams – The Berlin Concert,” with the Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of the composer famed for his movie scores. Also nominated are performances by college musicians. One of which is John Adams’ “Sila – The Breath of the World” with Doug Perkins conducting University of Michigan chamber ensembles. The other is “Eastman: Stay on It” – Christopher Rountree leading his Wild Up contemporary chamber orchestra in an improvisational piece by the late Julius Eastman.

Besides COVID, also dominating the news at the time were issues of social justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Together, Repper and his young musicians shaped a music program by African-American women composers, who had long been underrepresented in terms of both gender and race. “We need to promote music that deals with these issues,” Repper says of their choice of works. 

To that end, including Price on the album was a no-brainer. Born in 1887, she is recognized as the first African-American woman to have her composition performed by a major classical orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Price’s Piano Concerto in One-Movement, performed with pianist Michelle Cann, and “Ethiopia’s Shadow on America” are featured along with pieces by contemporary American composers. “Umoja: Anthem of Unity,” by Coleman, 52, was the first orchestral work by a living African-American woman performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which also commissioned the piece. Montgomery, 40, who is represented on the album by “Soul Force,” played violin with the New York Youth Symphony in her teens. She’s now the Chicago Symphony’s composer-in-residence.

Fitting right with his penchant for working with young musicians, Repper’s next appearance for his new orchestra is as judge of the MSO’s Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition. The live-performance finals of the national competition are at the Avalon Theatre on January 12. The finalists are flutist Ethan Nylander (Townsend, DE), violinist Elizabeth Song (Haworth, NJ), violist James Kang (Newark, DE), and pianists Philina Zhang (New York City, NY), Valerie Wellington (Kansas City, MO), Hoazhou Zang (Philadelphia, PA), and Emma Taggart (Brooklyn, NY).

The $2,000 top prize winner will perform with the full Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra in Easton, Ocean Pines, and Rehoboth Beach March 10-11. In addition to a $500 prize, the runner-up will play in the MSO Ensemble Series sometime next season.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition 

Finals

January 12, 7 p.m. Avalon Theater, Easton, midatlanticsymphony.org

Concerts featuring the winner: 

March 9, 7:30 p.m., Easton Church of God, Easton

March 10, 7:30 p.m., Community Church, Ocean Pines; 

March 11, 3 p.m., Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach

65th Grammy Awards Show
8 p.m. Sunday, February 5, on CBS from Los Angeles

 

The upcoming show of the new year at the Academy Art Museum marks another step toward greater access to notable works by not only emerging artists but also masters from centuries past.   

“Mary Cassatt: Labor and Leisure,” opening Jan. 19, accompanied by a tandem “Labor and Leisure” show drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, includes oils, aquatints, and other etchings by one of the premier 19th-to-20th century American-born artists. And certainly, among women who were then disparaged in competing with males in any form of visual art, Cassatt stands as one of if not the most accomplished female American artists of her time. 

Besides pieces from AAM’s own collection – including works by Cassatt, as well as Cezanne, Rauschenberg, and David Hockney – art on loan from the New York Public Library, Adelson Gallery New York and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art signals a serious glimpse into Cassatt’s career, progressing from Impressionist painter to painterly printmaker.   

These loans follow AAM’s collaboration with Art Bridges, a fine-art nonprofit that helps small-to-medium museums gain access to critically acclaimed artworks. The late-summer/early-fall “Fickle Mirror” exhibit was enhanced by a loan of Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “I Refuse to Be Invisible,” among other paintings and related live events.

While Cassatt disdained being pigeonholed as a female artist, her subjects were often mother and child as reflected in the labor of homemaker and the leisure of parent-and-progeny playtime. But she did so mainly as an observer. Cassatt was never a mother. Nor did she marry. Art was her passion.

New for 2023, Academy Art Museum admission will be free for all, starting Jan. 3.
academyartmuseum.org

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Speaking of free admission, there are only a few days left to absorb the National Gallery of Art’s extraordinary “Sargent and Spain” exhibition. John Singer Sargent, another American-born painter, was regarded as the preeminent society portraitist of his time (1856-1926). But here, more than 120 oils, watercolors, and drawings – many rarely seen anywhere – capture his personal fascination with Spain that inspired this remarkable collection documenting his travels through the country – north to south and the island of Majorca. The show reflects a rich Spanish culture through lush landscapes, shimmering marine scenes, and depictions of everyday life with candid portraits of people he met in his travels. Don’t overlook the 28 photographs very likely taken by Sargent himself. The last day to catch “Sargent and Spain” is Jan. 2.
  

Also closing soon – Jan. 8 – is the compact “Vermeer’s Secrets” exploration of works by or attributed to the revered 17th-century Dutch painter. There are only about 35 paintings by Johannes Vermeer as far as we know, of which the National Gallery has four that are by or credibly attributed to him. Featured are “Woman Holding a Balance,” “A Lady Writing,” “Girl with the Red Hat,” and “Girl with a Flute,” along with two others ranging from highly questionable to ridiculously fake. But this is no mere display of masterpieces and forgeries. Decades of research by conservators, curators, and scientists are revealed in examples of image sleuthing and technology. The popularity of this exhibit, especially as it closes soon, makes it necessary for visitors to sign up upon arrival to receive a text with the time to show up for a walk-through. You may have an hour or more to spend on checking out the Sargent show or “Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice,” which remains open through Feb. 12. And, yes, it’s all free, except for the Bay Bridge toll and maybe Mall parking (free on Sundays). 
nga.org

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The “British Invasion Experience” dinner and show, long postponed from its original Oct. 1 date, has been rescheduled for Jan. 14 at Salisbury’s Wicomico Civic Center. The British Invasion Experience tribute band pays live concert homage to this historic rock-and-roll genre. For baby-boomer popular music fans, it all began in the early ’60s with The Beatles, followed closely and to this day by the still-rockin’ Rolling Stones. But there were so many more–from The Who to the Hollies, the Kinks to Cream, The Animals to The Yardbirds. The show begins at 7 p.m. on Jan. 14, with doors opening at 6 for dining choices from a menu of Irish stew, fish and chips, baked ham, chicken tikka plus sides, and dessert. Cash bar alcohol beverages available. Ticket sales close at 4 p.m. on Jan. 11.
thebritishinvasionexperience.com

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The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) second annual Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition moved toward its live phase, with invitations going out on Dec. 19 for finalists to perform before a panel of judges on Jan. 12.

The first prize is $2,000, and performances with the orchestra are on March 9-11. The second prize is $500 and concert gigs in MSO’s Ensemble Series (dates to be determined). Finalists are selected by blind judging of audio recordings. The finals, before a public audience as well as judges, will be at Easton’s Avalon Theatre. The winner of the inaugural competition was alto saxophonist Joseph McNure, a University of Maryland graduate music student.

The late Elizabeth Loker, for whom the competition is named, was a retired Washington Post executive who moved to Talbot County and, as a classical music aficionado, became a Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra board member and benefactor 
midatlanticsymphony.org

“Mary Cassatt: Labor and Leisure”
Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton

“Sargent and Spain” & “Vermeer’s Secrets”
National Gallery of Art, 6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.

The British Invasion Experience
Wicomico Civic Center, 500 Glen Ave., Salisbury

MSO Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition Finals
Avalon Theater, 40 E. Dover St., Easton

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.