Timing is everything in music, especially if you’re the pianist leading a trio bearing your name. But the namesake of the Fred Hughes Trio found that timing is even more crucial when you try to establish a charitable foundation to preserve and promote the art form you love.

Jazz pianist Fred Hughes endeavored to launch Jazz Alive early last year, just in time for COVID to shut down everything from indoor dining to March Madness. So what chance did the debut of a jazz concert series stand? None, the music educator and resident of Royal Oak quickly realized. So, switching nimbly to “lemonade out of lemons” mode, Hughes created an online-only series called Jazz Tales, in which he interviewed and musically collaborated with fellow jazz musicians of note. While the 25 Jazz Tales videos, running an hour and a quarter each, was viewed by a virtual audience from anywhere the Internet is accessible, Hughes made a point of recruiting 130 music students from Easton High and Easton Middle School.

The live concert series had to wait until this year, with the third and final performance on Saturday night, Sept. 18, at the Waterfowl Building in Easton. “We also had plans for an autumn-to-spring series,” Hughes said. “But I’m worried about COVID and the Delta variant. We’ve already had some of our trio concert dates in the fall canceled.” So Hughes will wait and see about more live Jazz Alive.

The novel coronavirus has already put the kibosh, hopefully just temporarily, on Hughes’ goal of forming a peninsula-wide Delmarva Youth Jazz Orchestra. “We wanted to hold auditions last year, but music teachers weren’t even seeing their band students in person. We hope to get auditions started this year if schools can stay open.”

Hughes is eminently qualified for such a mission, having served as a consultant for 25 years to the Maryland All-State High School Jazz Band. “But in all that time, I noticed we had only one kid from the Eastern Shore audition,” he recalled. “With Jazz Alive, we can bring this original form of American music to kids who’ve probably never seen a live jazz concert.”

Although his Jazz Tales video series was aimed, in part, to reach music students who were learning exclusively online, Hughes also reached a broad adult audience. “As we got a lot of comments from jazz fans from all over, I started pitching a weekend in St. Michaels or Easton to people from as far away as upstate New York and southern Virginia. Some of them turned up at our concert series this season.”

The Waterfowl Building was transformed on each of the three nights into a cabaret nightclub with 45 tables seating up to 150 jazz fans. “We’ve drawn about 125,” Hughes says. The series finale featured harmonica virtuoso Hendrik Meurkins, best known for his samba swing style of Brazilian jazz. He was joined by master guitarist Paul Bollenback, described by legendary jazz-blues recording artist George Benson as a “dynamo whose approach to jazz and blues has a uniqueness unto itself.” Completing the trio, Paul Langosch’s all-star credentials include 20 years as bassist for Tony Bennett, performing on 10 of his albums and hundreds of concerts and TV appearances.

Hughes did not perform in his just-concluded concert series. “I want it to be about all the jazz masters I can present,” he says. “It’s not about me.”

Keep up with what’s next on its website, jazz-alive.org

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

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Except for the sound and fury part, that line might have come from “Much Ado About Nothing.” But it’s from “Macbeth,” written in 1606 and indeed “full of sound and fury,” six years after the Bard penned “Much Ado.”

Thankfully, the Brown Box Theatre Project chose comedy over tragedy for its 10th annual free Shakespeare in the park tour coming to Cambridge Wednesday evening, Sept. 22. The highly polished and professional Boston-based troupe drew a bring-your-own-lawn chair crowd of 150 or so to St. Michaels’ Muskrat Park just as a rising full moon was adding the perfect accent to the splendid scenic design by Abby Shenker. She took full advantage of the location by placing the two-tier period set immediately in front of the park’s gazebo, lending its cupola to the home and garden of Leonata, governor of Messina on the island of Sicily.

Her ladyship is hosting a formal dinner celebrating the return of soldiers from war, formally outfitted in deep purple uniforms with golden epaulets and brass buttons–costume designs by Chelsea Kerl, whose sheer ladies’ gowns are fitting for a midsummer night’s dream occasion. Here, the occasion is a mixer for eligible young ladies and gentlemen, whose repartee turns quickly among themselves and later in mixed company to romance. Some are pro, others stridently con. Played by Chelsea Titchenell with a sense of decorum in knowing what’s best, Leonata is keen on marrying off her daughter Hero and niece Beatrice.

Hero, charmingly naive as portrayed by Debbie Aboaba, falls quickly for like-minded Claudio (Christopher Ho), who, while exuding confidence, is too easily fooled by those with their own agenda. Meanwhile, Hero’s cousin Beatrice (Margaret Clark) finds that her mismatch in Benedick (Cam Torres) disdains the prospect of marriage with equal measure to hers. Together they trade some of Shakespeare’s fiercest lines regarding or disregarding the opposite sex. With Hero and Claudio already engaged, they conspire with Leonata and Don Pedro (Spencer Palitew), a prince and senior officer, to convince Benedick and Beatrice that they are meant for each other. They set up an eavesdrop on conversations making up effusive praise of Beatrice to Benedick and vice versa. The physical comedy, first with Torres and then Clark scurrying up and down the staircase and behind every garden shrub to hear what’s said about their characters, is as rich as it is implausible in that the plot works.

With an impending double wedding, Don John (Drew Cleveland), the prince’s bastard brother, is feeling left out. He recruits Borachio (Abuzar Farrukh) to help convince Claudio that Hero is unfaithful as he mistakes handmaiden Margaret (Emma McGill) for her lady.

Enter the idiot who began telling this tale, the clown constable of Messina given the name Dogberry by Shakespeare. Dressed in garish striped socks over floral print shorts and jacket, Bree Perry lets us know from the top that it’s comedy tonight, tragedy some other time.

We can thank director and Eastern Shore native Kyler Taustin for bringing Brown Box to the underserved, theatrically speaking, Delmarva Peninsula. This romantic farce with a touch of intrigue is just the free ticket we need these days—two hours of nothing heavy to think about as a professional company entertains us. Meanwhile, Broadway has opened again. Let’s hope we can keep COVID at bay and let the good times roll again.

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

“MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING”
Performed for free by Brown Box Theatre Project on Sept. 22, Loge Wharf Park, Cambridge; Sept. 22, J. Millard Tawes Museum grounds, Crisfield; Sept. 23; Northside Park, Ocean City, Sept. 26. Bring lawn chairs or blankets. Details and online program at brownboxtheatre.org

 

I am in mourning today, though the only black I wear is a Rolling Stones T-shirt that I might well have worn on any day, with its red-tongue logo sticking out to whoever gets in my way. But no one between ages 30 to 80 takes it that way. “Love your shirt,” almost everyone who notices says, reminding me that I’m wearing one of my half-dozen or so Stones T’s that still fit me.

But on this day, I heard from my daughter, who knew I’d break out in tears at the news:

Charlie Watts is dead.

My life as I’ve known it for all but 16 of my 74 years is left without his artistry anchoring the genius of indisputably the world’s most remarkable–certainly longest-surviving–rock and roll band in the history of the world. But his legacy lives on into perpetuity. 

If you don’t know who London native Charles Robert Watts was, my sympathies. But I reserve mine principally for Charlie and his mates, personal and professional, on this sad day when news of Afghanistan evacuations, COVID-19 resurgence, and climate calamities overshadowed acknowledgment of his passing. He is the unsurpassed drummer beloved by generations of Stones fans, of which I am a member of the first generation. 

I got hooked on the Stones with a 1963-64 recording of “Mona (I Need You, Baby)” spun late-night on WCAO 60-AM. What a revelation. Rhythm and blues sung by Brit boys with an accent. But what further distinguished them was the guitar-and-drum syncopation. Brian Jones, who formed the band, didn’t survive its first decade. Now Charlie is the second of this remarkably resilient band to exit permanently.

What I noticed from the beginning is the punctuation of Charlie’s percussion, just a millisecond after guitar riffs that often drowned out the drumbeat of lesser artists. He always seemed to be within an instant of coming in too late on “Satisfaction” and each of their greatest and lesser hits. Especially when played live. Keith Richards, the legendary Stones guitarist, knew to keep his ear or feet attuned to Charlie’s beat. If he could not hear it, he could feel the vibrations from the stage floor rattling his spine. (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”!)

Charlie Watts, though, was more than a rock-and-roll drumming genius. Married to Shirley since 1964, just after the band covered “Mona,” he was the Stones’ rock–stone, if you will–when other distractions might have dissolved the band led by star-power personalities. Mick Jagger will never be confused with a wallflower, and Keith takes no guff from his songwriting partner. Brian Jones couldn’t handle this dynamic and was found face down in a swimming pool in 1969, the first of serial rock stars who died at age 27. 

But Charlie, along with Bill Wyman, the band’s bassist and archivist, were its elder statesmen. (Wyman retired in 1993, though he still records solo.)

I’m not sure the Stones can survive without Charlie. He absented himself from the current completion of the band’s 2019 tour, which I was thrilled to catch at FedEx Field in Landover, MD. It was–who’s counting?–at least my 25th time seeing them play live. Ironically, that July 3 concert was delayed from Memorial Day due to Jagger’s unspecified heart procedure. The Stones renewed the tour after a year of COVID cancellations. But this time, Charlie announced his absence, likely due to throat cancer that first surfaced in 2004. 

More than a drummer, Charlie Watts, 80 at his death, was an artist who made his mark within and without the Stones. His first love was jazz. Rock was an opportunity. He took advantage of both, producing a catalog of jazz-standards CDs, often with back-up singers from Stones concert tours. And his eye for what might project a Stones concert to a distant stadium- or arena-sized crowd created an accessibility impossible without his visual instincts. 

Charlie was also a collector of vintage cars. He could afford them, of course. But the curiosity is that he didn’t even drive them. Charlie appreciated art and design when he saw it and, undeniably, when he heard its percussive expression.

Though I have never met you in close proximity, Charlie,  I love you. Your former bandmate, Bill, who I have met, sends his love, too, I’m certain. Without you, the Stones would never be who they became and may never be quite the same again now that you’re gone. Your beat will never die. Ever. Rest in peace, anyway, Charlie.

Steve Parks is a retired arts writer and still-active rock fan now living in Easton.

 

The 17th annual Plein Air Easton Festival is history. The competition paintings by the 58 artists have been taken home by buyers or the artists whose work went unpurchased, although most fetched a price either in sales, prize money, or both. But you can still enjoy plein air paintings of local scenes in a small but well-focused exhibit at Easton’s Academy Art Museum, some by artists who also participated in the festival.

“Beauty and Bounty: The Eastern Shore Plein Air Agriculture Collection” in the Selections Gallery of the museum is appealing to both the eye and the mind as you may learn something about farming–the No. 1 vocation among fellow Shoremen and women. Fourteen paintings by 13 artists, including oils and watercolors, present still-life representations of agriculture as an industry in some depictions or as life-sustaining staples produced by man and nature in others. Some paintings are a little of both. 

As you ascend to the first landing toward the second-floor gallery space, you’re greeted by Greg LaRock’s rendering of a familiar scene in the Eastern Shore countryside. Titled “Elevated,” the large oil on linen painting focuses on grain elevators from the vantage point of a shed stacked with bales of wheat straw from a recent harvest of the grain. LaRock is a seven-time Plein Air Easton award winner, including the grand prize in 2008.

At the top of the stairs, my eyes were at first drawn to Jeremy Sams’ “Morning Grace.” Sams captures sunrise shedding a shaft of light over a cornfield on the farm of Bill and Doris Nielsen near Sherwood. This painting was one in a series of oil-on-linen paintings lining one wall of the hallway gallery. Next to it is Jill Basham’s “Field to Bay,” with its blue-sky/puffy-clouds canopy above emerald vegetation, which is planted to filter out algae blooms that invade creeks edging the Chloras Point Farm near Basham’s home in Trappe. 

Stewart Burgess White, who won the 2019 Plein Air Easton award for best Maryland painting, sticks close to home with “Mutt and Marti Do a Full Pull,” starring a pair of Belgian draft horses competing in the popular Tuckahoe Steam and Gas Engine Show. “A Day in the Life” by Suzie Baker brings farm machinery to the fore as a tractor pulls a dairy wagon on Trisha and Jarred Boyce’s Chapel’s Country Creamery in Cordova. Fittingly, Baker is the 2018 winner of PAE’s “Life on the Farm” award. Stacked boxes containing honeybee hives anchor Kathie Odom’s “Spread the Love” homage to pollination. The accompanying wall label reminds us that bees travel up to five miles to spread their pollen, making it possible for flowering fruit and vegetables to grow into edible produce. The farm also produces honey extracted by Peachblossom Aviaries on Oxford Road.

Tarryl Gabel’s “First Light” focuses on one of the highest-yielding farm industries on the Delmarva Peninsula: poultry. The morning light of this oil on canvas illuminates chicken houses just across Dover Road Bridge in Caroline County. Richard Jewell’s vibrant watercolor, “Life Line,” features a flowering garden in bright yellow and green, with a barn and farmhouse in the distant background. Another watercolor, “Triple Creek Farm” by David Csont, delineates a long irrigation sprinkler on wheels. It stands idle as a lone pickup passes by on a rural road bordering the parched brown field. Csont won this year’s PAE award for best watercolor. Best marine painting winner Zufar Bikbov has an aptly titled nocturne, “Ready to Launch,” in the agriculture show. His oil on linen captures what looks like a nighttime Cape Canaveral countdown to lift-off as two giant grain elevators dwarf a red barn at Mountaire Farms north of Trappe.

Nancy Thomas’ “Kingston Landing View” centers on curving rows of budding soybeans in the foreground of a farmhouse with towering deciduous trees in the yard. The wall label informs us of a technique known as “double-cropping.” Wheat had just been harvested in this same field on a Matthewstown Road farm, making the most of its limited acreage. Meanwhile, “Three Generations” working side by side in an oil painting on a muslin panel is one of two by Nancy Tankersley that complete this ag-art collection. The second is “First Planting,” on Counsell Farms off U.S. 50 north of Easton. This autumn wonderland for families and children is made possible by planting pumpkins, field corn, and gourds in the spring. In her oil-on-canvas painting, we see four members of the Counsell family aboard a tractor or the attached cultivator spreading seed, while another walks behind, inspecting the tilled earth at his feet. Tankersley, a founder of Plein Air Easton, won this year’s prize for best Maryland painting, “All Is Peace.” 

Aside from the simple beauty and practical nature of these artworks, there is a bounty–yes, beauty and bounty–of basic education about farming and the miracle of agriculture. Seed the earth, pray for rain, but not too much, and you can feed the world.

‘BEAUTY AND BOUNTY: The Eastern Shore Plein Air Agriculture Collection’

Paintings by thirteen artists related to farm life on the Shore. Selections Gallery upstairs at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton; Tuesdays-Sundays through July 29. Admission: $3, children free; 410-822-2787, academyartmuseum.org

Steve Parks, a retired arts critic, and one time native farm boy, now lives back home in Easton.

 

The Plein Air Festival is out and about in a way that almost makes you forget about the pandemic, if that’s possible.

At last Saturday’s Meet-the-Artists preview party, there was hardly a mask in sight for this outdoor soiree, as well as all the active painting events in the festival. After all, “Plein Air” translates from French as “painting in outdoor daylight”—even though some among the 58 artists competing in this 17th annual art happening are concentrating on nocturnes.

Those meeting the artists were 90 or so contributing supporters: Friends of Plein Air Easton. The artists were all at work painting scenes at Forrest Landing, the sprawling horse farm estate property of Cynthia Rickman and Joel Texter. The dress code was “country club” casual. Ladies were attired in summer dresses ranging from full-length diaphanous gowns to bare-shoulder cutaways; men in sports shirts over khakis or Bermudas.

Paintings by each festival artist went up in a tent on the long, sloping lawn from the Colonial Revival-style mansion down to the headwaters of Pickering Creek. Many were snapped up via credit card as soon they were mounted. Others were sold even before framing, plus a few while still receiving finishing touches on the artist’s easel.

A live band serenaded artists and guests alike who availed themselves of an open bar and chilled gourmet take-out dinners on their way out.

Here are a few of the creative artists and their processes we witnessed:

Leonard Mizerek keeps returning year after year to Plein Air Easton from his home in Westport, Conn. This summer marks his 12th competing in this open-air paint fest. “I love this event because of the community that supports it,” he says. He appreciates how welcome he feels during the weeklong festival and the three or four days in advance taken to get a head start on scouting out scenes to paint for the various opportunities to display and sell his art. When not prepping, painting, or polishing up his finished product with a snazzy frame, he has a cottage all to himself.

Each artist is expected to produce at least two paintings for the competition, which will be judged after Wednesday’s deadline by Daniel Weiss, president, and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Mizerek and 57 others participated in the Meet-the-Artists painterly reception Saturday afternoon and evening at Forrest Landing amid mile after mile of cornfields and waterfront mansions that have replaced farmhouses northwest of Easton.

Before toiling all afternoon painting a scene at the edge of Pickering Creek, Mizerak spent a couple of days in Bellevue. He was looking for just the right early morning light to paint workboats heading out on the Tred Avon River at the ferry landing to Oxford for his competition entry.

Although he has yet to be a winner at Plein Air Easton, Mizerak says he has no regrets. “I may not be a winner, but I’m a seller.” Sure enough, he sold his meet-the-artist painting of the creek, glistening in the afternoon sun beneath a blue sky with cotton-puffy clouds, grounded by a weathered boathouse to one side of his canvas and bright yellow lilies at the bottom.

Among others choosing this fetching view was Alison Barry of Lusby in Southern Maryland, who brought her own shade in the form of a tall, heavily anchored tent. This is just the second festival for Barry. The first was truncated by COVID last year. “But the sales were good,” she recalls. Although there was little contact between artists and the public, even if masked, their paintings were displayed for sale in the commercial space in TalbotTown, formerly occupied by the NewsCenter. Barry arrived two days ahead of Meet-the-Artists to figure out where in Talbot County she will paint this year’s competition entries. “I don’t plan ahead,” she said. “I want it to be spontaneous.”

Other painters were arrayed beneath the line of sycamores lining either side of the quarter-mile lane leading to the mansion. The dean of this assembly of painters was John Brandon Sills of Cockeysville. This is his 15th Easton festival. He won the grand prize in 2014 but still vividly recalls his first plein air here. “The first guy I met just flew in from Colombia” (South America),” he said. “He wasn’t even in the competition, though he was a painter. He was here because he heard such good things about it.” Like Leonard Mizerek, Sills has found this to be a very welcoming community for artists. “I’ve had a place to stay here for the last ten years,” he said. “We’ve become very good friends. I have a key to the barn guest house.”

Sills was painting a scene anchored by triangle-roofed stables with a field of soybeans in the foreground and a “dramatic” blue sky above. As for his main competition paintings, Sills says he plans to return to his nocturne specialty at a so-far undetermined location.

Nearby his smallish canvas, Crista Pisano of Nyack, NY, stood over her even smaller panorama (5⅛ x 1⅛), adding brushstrokes to the linear forest that defines the landscape’s horizon demarcating the bright sky from rows of soybeans below. A past winner of the Small Painting Sunday competition, Pisano has been coming to Plein Air Easton since 2015. She favors an unusual framing technique. Each side of her rectangular frame–this one the color of shimmery charcoal–is a bit wider than the art itself. The painting adheres within the frame by way of Velcro.

Stephanie Amato of greater Atlanta, Ga., took a larger take on the scene with a portrait-shaped canvas conveying a sky that seems to go on forever with the stables as a focal berth. In this her fourth Easton festival, Amato says she “loves coming here,” having been somewhat intimidated by her first time. “I was a newbie as a painter then,” she said after hanging her painting in the tent with 50 or so others. “Now I have a better idea of what to paint. It’s so beautiful here.”

Ben M. Young of San Diego, who heard about the festival from a college friend who lived in Annapolis before moving to California, is making his Plein Air Easton debut. Rendering his take on the Pickering Creek scene, Young was one of the artists who sold his painting before it was completed.

Among the oddities under the exhibit tent were two paintings of the outdoor bar. Each was colorful, at least. But both were unsold as we left for the evening.

As expected, many Talbot artists were in the mix, led by Nancy Tankersley, a founder of the festival. She titled her Meet-the-Artists painting “In the Clover,” portraying horses on the estate chowing down in a meadow. She won a blue ribbon for best architectural painting in 2018.

Other local artists in this year’s fest are Tim Beall of St. Michaels, the grand prize winner in 2006 and 2018; Jill Basham of Trappe, a Small Painting Sunday honorable mention in 2018; Stephen Griffin, a 10-time winner in varied categories; Diane Dubois of Easton, an Academy Art Museum painting instructor; Sara Linda Poly, the grand prize winner in 2016 and first place in Small Painting Sunday in 2017; Mary Veiga of Tilghman Island, and Stewart Burgess White of Easton, a grand prize winner in 2009.

COMING UP AT PLEIN AIR:

Road Trips: Tips on buying art, visiting galleries in Tilghman, Oxford, St. Michaels, and Easton. Tuesday and Wednesday, July 13-14.

Nocturne Paint Out: 8:30-10:30 p.m. Everybody and anybody get to paint alongside the Tidewater Inn. Wednesday, July 14.

Collector’s Preview Party: 5:30-7:30 p.m., Academy Art Museum, Waterfowl Building, Easton. Get a jump on seeing all the paintings in competition before they are open to all for purchase on Saturday. $250 admission applies to any art purchases, including at PAE exhibits in Oxford, Tilghman, and St. Michaels’ Chesapeake Maritime Museum. Friday, July 16.

Quick Draw competition: 10 a.m.-2 p.m., all over downtown Easton. Registration $10. Saturday, July 17

Plein Air Kids Korner: Avalon Theater, register for art activities for kids on Saturday and Sunday, July 17-18, art exhibited for sale Sunday afternoon.

Small Painting Sunday:10 a.m. Exhibit and sale of paintings 6×8 inches or smaller. Sunday, July 18.

Plein Air competition paintings on exhibit for sale: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, July 17-18. Free admission. Details at pleinaireaston.com, 410-822-7297.

Steve Parks is a retired arts writer and critic now living in Easton.

 

The return of the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival to live concerts after a 2020 virtual series of prerecorded and livestream performances is reason enough to celebrate. But the impeccable elegance of the Chesapeake Music’s new home made the evening a visual and musical sensation starring, among others, cellist Marcy Rosen and violinist Catherine Cho, the festival’s co-artistic directors.

Downtown Easton now has a resplendently restored performing arts venue in a space formerly known as the Prager Auditorium. But that space has been renamed Ebenezer Theater and transformed by inspired taste and rich refinement. No doubt, the inspiration derives, in part, from the building’s original purpose as a house of worship. Built in 1856-57, Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal remained a church for more than a century until Ebenezer and two other Easton congregations merged to form St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in the early 1960s. Six new stained-glass windows reflect a faith in culture and the arts.

You enter the theater from an unprepossessing Washington Street entrance. Up one flight of olive-green carpeted stairs brings you into what was once a sanctuary, redesigned with features suggesting the church’s early period. Patterned carpeting complements the stained-glass colors; each window draped in gold fabric matching the stage curtain. Gold Victorian-style wallpaper flanks the stage, which itself frames a Gothic celestial arch. Overhead, nine sleekly modern chandeliers adorn an intricately embossed gold-leaf ceiling. Seating is by movable plush chairs in grape-green upholstery, both on the concert hall floor and balcony at the back of the theater.

For this COVID restricted concert, chairs were grouped in pods of two to four seats together, totaling no more than half the Ebenezer’s expected capacity of about 180. Masks are still required of those attending the festival, including the musicians. 

The evening opened with brief remarks by Chesapeake Music director/founder Don Buxton, who called attention to the stage’s centerpiece–a restored Steinway grand piano. Fittingly, the inaugural piece played in the grand new concert hall was Mozart’s “Piano Trio No. 2,” written at a time in his career when the pianoforte, forerunner to the modern piano, emerged as an instrument displacing the harpsichord. Mozart, himself a keyboard virtuoso, wrote this trio in part to showcase his own performance skills. The piece opens with a bright and lilting solo performed Friday night by Ieva Jokubaviciute. Catherine Cho quickly joins her in a sparkling violin turn bolstered by Marcy Rosen’s cello underpinning. Together they create a lyrical dream sequence followed by mood-shifting movements indicating discord, regrets, and hopeful resolution.

From the comfort food of Mozart, the program turns sharply to Webern’s piece that undercuts the key structure of every piece Amadeus and other grand masters wrote. Webern’s early 20th century “Langsamer Satz,” roughly translated as Slowly with Feeling, gives equal measure to all 12 notes on the chromatic scale. No E-sharp, C-flat, or whatever. A quintet–violinists Cho and Francesca dePasquale, violist Molly Carr, cellist Peter Stumpf, and Peggy Pearson on oboe–incrementally build “Langsamer” to a searing emotional crescendo abetted by a throbbing cello vibrato, mournful violins, and a piercing woodwind that ultimately relax their grip into a placid and somewhat anticlimactic resolve.

Intermission provides a break to prepare us for Dvorak’s “Piano Quartet No. 2,” performed by pianist Diane Walsh with dePasquale, Carr, and Stumpf on strings. From the lush four-instrument opening to march-like cadences and staccato interludes, the quartet takes us on a roller-coaster of moods that might be interpreted as psychotic episodes. Indeed, Dvorak wrote the piece in a fevered stretch of a few summer weeks after one of his benefactors complained that he had not delivered the promised piano quartet in 14 years. It would be Dvorak’s last quartet, but well worth the wait.

Kudos to Chesapeake Music’s adventurous program, delivering both a splendid portion of meat and potatoes (Mozart) and exotic fruit and vegetables (Webern and Dvorak). Kudos also to Paul and Joanne Prager for this Ebenezer jewel. There is more to come in future restoration as the name atop of the former church suggests: The Prager Family Arts Center.

Full disclosure: Because of COVID restrictions and the early sellout of the opening concert, I am reviewing the music via livestream, although I did observe a pre-concert rehearsal by the musicians. Second disclosure: I attended church services and Sunday school at the Ebenezer until St. Mark’s opened when I was in junior high. Although I vaguely recall the organ music and choir, it’s doubtful that either was as artfully inspiring as the new Ebenezer’s opening night, justifiably billed as “Extravaganza.”

By the way, the name Ebenezer has nothing to do with Scrooge. It stands biblically for “stone of help,” of which Easton’s Ebenezer was and could be again by virtue of arts inspiration. 

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

 

36th CHAMBER FESTIVAL OPENING NIGHT

Mozart’s “Piano Trio in G Major, K. 496;” Webern’s “Langsamer Satz” (Slowly with Feeling); Dvorak’s “Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, Opus 87.” 

Ebenezer Theater, 17 S. Washington St., Easton. Festival continues at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 5, with “Dynamic Duos,” Sunday, June 6, “Summer Nights,” Tuesday, June 10, “Masterworks,” Friday, June 11, “Piano Spotlight,” and Saturday, June 12, “Festival Finale.” Tickets $50, live-streaming $15 (viewing available for one week, including Friday’s opening night). chesapeakemusic.org, 410-819-0380

 

You could say without exaggeration that Miro in New York 1947, the new exhibition at Easton’s Academy Art Museum, was centuries in the making–preceding by one year the inauguration of the first president of the United States. Much of the printmaking derived from works by Atelier 17 artists now on display until just past the Fourth of July are rooted in a relief-etching technique invented by poet William Blake in 1788.

Blake dubbed it “illuminated printing,” by which some of his written masterpieces were published in book form. Works by artists-in-residence at the New York-based atelier–many of them refugees of war and genocide–adorn illustrated texts of then-living poets, principally Ruthven Todd, whose first name honors a Norse clan of Scottish noblemen. An early 1947 Miro print enhances Todd’s verses, translated from Spanish:

“Once he had a country where the sun shone,
Through the enchanted trees like lace.
But now it is troubled, and happiness is gone.
For the bombs fell in that fine place
And the magician found we he had woken
His people killed, his gay pots broken.”

Literal words meld progressively into visual art as one moves through the two galleries of about 70 Miro, Hayter, and Atelier 17 works. Although Miro–Joan Miro of Spain–is the headliner of this exhibition, British artist Stanley William Hayter was the seminal printmaking artist whose spark and glue held the transplant school together through the early postwar years that drew them to New York in the first place.

Notably, Hayter created a welcome environment for women artists, a dozen of whom are represented in this show–principally Czech-French printmaker/painter/sculptor Terry Haass, but also Norma Morgan, whose artworks are featured in a companion solo exhibit in AAM’s two smaller first-floor galleries initiated and curated by Mehves Lelic, the museum’s new chief curator. Lelic also completed curation of the “Miro” exhibit planned by the administration of museum director Benjamin Simons, now directing Telfair Museums in Savannah, Ga., and Anke Van Wagenberg, currently curator at Vero Beach (Fla.) Art Museum. Sarah Jesse, formerly deputy director of California’s Orange County Museum of Art, is now Easton’s new director.

Among the stars of the main AAM exhibit, besides Miro and Hayter, is American artist Fred Becker, whose wife, fellow American Jean Morrison, was also an Atelier 17 mainstay when it relocated to New York City after the Nazis marched into Paris in 1940. Around this time, Miro also arrived in America as fascist troops overthrew government loyalists in his native Spain’s civil war. Miro joined Hayter’s group of artists in refining a method of printing in the cursive style of handwriting deployed by Blake a century and a half earlier. These largely text-driven prints resemble a printed page–including copper-plate etchings. Others by Miro feature a more vibrant intaglio technique embroidered with imagery that offers a glimpse into his later Surrealism period–primitively expressive and free-flowing.

Atelier 17’s printmaking explorations stretch far beyond text in the next gallery. Femmes et Oiseau Devant  la Lune (Women and Bird in Front of the Moon) from 1947 captures the Miro we’ve come to know in paintings that succeeded this experimental phase in a long career. (Miro lived to survive his 90th birthday by several months.) 

Haass’ Breaking the Vicious Circle engraving of three highly abstract figures is more painterly than etchingly–if that’s a word–more brush-stroked than carved out. Becker’s Aerial Jungle series progresses from three copper plates to earth-toned flyover views suggesting an untrammeled rainforest. Hayter’s Falling Figures series represents a stark departure from poet Blake’s plate-making that originally launched the Atelier 17 mission. Waxy “soft-ground” etching facilitates drawing by pencil point, offering a free hand for artists to experiment with abstractions bringing to mind, for instance, works by Yves Tanguy, foreseen in text-anchored Slender Dignity of Isolated Bones. 

The best works of Norma Morgan are saved for her Enchanted World exhibit. So, don’t skip the galleries just down the hall from the museum’s new Harrison Street courtyard entrance. Her hand-colored engraving of Harriet Tubman in a biblical-miracle setting is not to be missed. Nor is her Sojourner Truth, Spirit of the Mountain, a celebration of the ongoing civil rights struggle. 

And now that spring is no longer threatening snowstorms (we hope), as in the upper Midwest, it’s an ideal time to take in the outdoor Waterwall installation by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann before it comes down in June. The mixed-media enclosure of acrylic, silkscreen, and collaged vinyl-over-glass evokes the artist’s interpretation of Chinese cave murals transformed minute to minute by sunlight and passing clouds. 

Indoor and outdoor art. Masks are still part of our collective viewing experience. But at least we have one now. And these works are well worth any trivial inconvenience. 

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

 

MIRO IN NEW YORK, 1947: Miro, Hayter and Atelier 17

Through July 8, Academy Art Museum, 106 South St. Easton, online viewing available through Aug. 1. Zoom conversation with Carla Esposito Hayter, art historian, and daughter-law of Atelier 17 founder Stanley William Hayter, led by AAM curator Mehves Lilic, 10 a.m. May 8, $20-$24.

NORMA MORGAN: ENCHANTED WORLD

Through Aug. 1, Academy Art Museum; 410-822-2787, academyartmuseum.org. Admission: $3, free for children 12 and younger. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon-4 p.m. Sundays, closed Mondays. 

WATERWALL: Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

Through June 6, an outdoor installation on museum grounds, South and Harrison streets

 

 

“This was,” as Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra board president Jeffrey Parker said, “the most unconventional season ever.” And the season finale Thursday night, performed live in Easton–like each previous MSO concert in this pandemic-infected season–was no less ‘unconventional.’ Only more so. 

The concert, available on live-stream through April 29, opened with a world premiere commissioned by the Mid-Atlantic orchestra–its first commission in 12 years–by Baltimore-based composer James Lee III. (Full disclosure: I viewed this concert by live-stream, not in person.) 

The MSO has a close connection with Lee, a professor of music at Morgan State University, where its general manager and lead percussionist, Dane Krich, is the director of percussion studies. With little demand for new work during the artistic desert of the pandemic year 2020, Lee wrote a piece for one of the few orchestras performing throughout the current season. Lee said his Restored Images, written specifically for a string orchestra of 18 players, is his response to the challenges of 2020. “After Minneapolis,” he said, referring to the George Floyd murder at the hands–or rather, knees–of convicted former cop Derek Chauvin, “not that many people were in the mood to celebrate. Various tensions were always arising. Amid all the darkness and sadness, there are notes of hope. And you have these bell tones of things becoming much calmer.”

Restored Images begins solemnly with slowly ascending lines growing more urgent as the challenges we can imagine or vividly recall lead to hope and joy over what was once considered normal life. The word ‘Hopeful’ plastered across edifices all over downtown Easton comes to mind. Whether the joy anticipated in Lee’s piece comes to fruition is for the listener to accept or deny. To me, hopefulness is left in doubt, perhaps as it should be. Still, something of a downer.

A similar musical throughline is evident in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Before he graduated from what was known as High German Romanticism into atonal modernism–young Schoenberg was a disciple of Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss. He wrote music for operettas, including this piece composed for a string sextet, later transcribed for string orchestras. Inspired by a Richard Dehmel poem, it tells the story of two lovers alone in the woods. The woman confesses that she’s pregnant by another man and, after some hesitation, her current lover says he will accept the child as his own. The nocturnal mood is carried by cellos, picked up by lighter tones of violas before growing agitated as news of her expectancy is revealed. Confusion and emotional chaos ensue before a resolution of forgiveness is suggested by mellow cellos and violins. Still, the ending feels almost indifferent, certainly unresolved. Life may well be like that, particularly in arenas of romance. But musically, Verklarte Nacht is a bit like a therapy session curtailed too soon. 

With no intermission, the third piece comes as a stark break from the previous two—almost a mood-altering nullification. To me, having reviewed tango-based musicals in Queens, New York, for Newsday, Astor Piazzolla’s Aconcagua Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra was a welcome break from moody strings of lockdown and love-lorn recoveries. 

Argentinian soloist Rodolfo Zanetti proved to be, as advertised, a virtuoso on the bandoneon, a concertina/accordion-style instrument essential to tango ensembles popular all over his homeland. While the bandoneon can hold its own when matched with a string orchestra, it is usually performed with other bandoneonistas playing together or in isolated solo riffs that draw applause often associated in other contexts with drum or sax solos. The opening lassitude of Piazzolla’s 1979 piece, named for the highest mountain in South America, gives way to tango-laced exuberance in which you can almost, but not quite, hear the stomping feet of women in spike heels. If only the MSO had dancers in its bandoneon budget.

Nevertheless, the orchestra deserves high marks for performing an unlikely repertoire on a symphonic stage, deftly led by maestro Julien Benichou. You may never hear such a range of largely obscure works again. Enough meat-and-potatoes Beethoven, OK? It’s been a quarter of a millennium since his birth. What difference will a year make if we don’t hear him again until the next season or so. Roll over, Ludwig.

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

MID-ATLANTIC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA SEASON FINALE

 Restored Images, a world premiere by James Lee III commissioned by the MSO; Verklante Nacht by Schoenberg, and Aconcagua Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra, by Piazzolla, featuring soloist Rodolfo Zanetti. Thursday night, April 22, at Easton Church of God. Available on live-stream video through April 29, midatlanticsymphony.org; $15, 888-846-8600.