In the latest cute video care of the Seattle Aquarium, the gang’s all here: the now month-old female otter pup, mom Aniak, and dad Lootas. Because who wouldn’t want to laze about in a kiddie pool full of ice? At the Aquarium’s blog, there’s another clip of the little one playing with an ice cube, if you need more cuteness to kick off your Friday.
Meanwhile, today’s the last day to vote on the new pup’s name. The name with the most votes will be announced on Monday, and the smart money’s on Shi Shi. Unless you want to punish the pup by naming her Sequim.
And if so-ugly-it’s-cute is your thing, check out this video of the brand-new baby aardvark at the Brookfield Zoo:
Legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman is back in Seattle this week for two concerts with the Seattle Symphony. It’s always inspiring to watch Perlman in action, whether as a violin soloist or conductor. This time, Seattle audiences get to see Perlman in both roles. Last night’s concert featured a grab-bag of favorites including Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Perlman and the Symphony will repeat the program tonight.
Itzhak Perlman
Despite its ubiquitous presence in classical compilation CDs and car commercials, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was a treat with the world’s foremost violinist at the helm. Perlman and the orchestra performed the “Summer” and “Winter” concertos, with Perlman playing the solo part and conducting from the ranks of the first violin section. Both concertos are full of drama. Slow, languid solo melodies provide stark contrast with rapid, buzzing textures that involve the entire string section.
In the fast movements, particular the frantic final movement of “Summer,” Perlman and the orchestra maintained a high level of excitement despite a few rough spots, particularly involving the contrasting timbres of the violins and harpsichord. Perlman’s violin sung out best in the slower movements, especially in the sweet and sorrowful middle movement of “Winter.”
The audience got its first glimpse of Perlman solely in a conducting role with Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, known as the “Prague” Symphony. Perlman’s clear direction brought the orchestra together, particularly in the fine ensemble playing in the fast third movement. Also of note were interesting and unexpected harmonies between the strings and winds that rose to the surface in the slow second movement. Unsurprisingly, Perlman’s conducting occasionally mimed the playing of a violin–only natural for one who has achieved international fame as a concert violinist.
The evening’s performance concluded with Beethoven’s beloved Symphony No. 7. Here Perlman seemed to take a step back as a conductor, letting Beethoven’s writing speak for itself. The result was enthralling, from the somber, stately second movement to the joyous horn calls of the fourth movement.
If last night’s near-capacity crowd was any indication, tickets will likely be scarce for tonight’s performance. Arrive at Benaroya Hall early if you’re hoping to grab a seat.
Curtains for You play, harmonize, and jump around like crazy men tonight at Neumo's. (photo by Tony Kay)
Curtains for You, The Pica Beats, and Tomten play Neumo’s tonight. Doors at 8pm, show at 9. Tickets, $8 advance, $10 at the door.
Headlining at Neumo’s has always been a Holy Grail for Seattle bands, so the fact that Curtains for You are anchoring a slot there tonight is kind of a big deal. The Capitol Hill venue’s been an inestimable buzz club for years, solidly drawing hot national acts while always keeping a prescient finger on the local scene’s pulse. When a local combo headlines Neumo’s, so the local parlance goes, they’ve arrived.
The gig’s a great validation for one of this ‘burg’s hardest-working (and best) bands. For the rest of us, it’s a thrilling opportunity to catch Curtains for You once more holding their own. At risk of thumping a tub I’ve pounded a lot in the last two years, you won’t see pure pop delivered in a live setting with a more perfect synthesis of peerless harmonizing, swoon-worthy melodies, and kick-in-the-pants energy.
They’ll likely be trying out some new material this evening, and if this all-around awesome number penned by keyboardist Peter Fedofsky is any indicator, the creative streak that began with 2009’s What a Lovely Surprise to See You Here and continued with last year’s After Nights Without Sleep continues unabated.
The bill’s bolstered by two other great local bands, so (repeat after me…) get there early. Tomten richly ply many of the same influences as the headliners (Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, Beatles, Zombies), with a stirring of Morrissey-esque baritone bittersweetness. And Pica Beats sound like Interpol’s Paul Banks reconciling vintage pop sounds with here-and-now indie sensibilities. In non-music-geek-speak, that means it’s all good.
The Auburn Symphony takes its friendly tone from its conductor and founder Stewart Kershaw, who gives the preconcert lectures, often in a discussion with orchestra cellist and KUOW-FM radio host Dave Beck, and also gives a brief introduction of the concert works to the audience from the podium.
Ernest Chausson, photo by P. Frois, Biarritz (France), ca. 1885, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Saturday night was a case in point. Beck and Kershaw between them gave us a thumbnail sketch of 19th-century composer Ernest Chausson, with slides, and it was clear that the composer holds a place of great affection in Kershaw’s pantheon. Chausson composed only three big works, which aren’t that often played, and Kershaw has programmed them all for Auburn, the Symphony in B Flat being last Saturday’s contribution.
I’m not sure that I agree with Kershaw of the importance of Chausson, who died at 44, but Kershaw led the orchestra in a performance luminous with the work’s meaning and subtleties, with details which might have bypassed someone less enthusiastic.
Somewhat earlier in the century, composer Hector Berlioz (a man of often unsuitable passions) became fascinated by the idea of the noble pirate, and wrote his ideas into the overture, The Corsair. He’s a composer whose musical idiom is so singular that it takes only a measure or two of any of his music to identify him as having written it. Corsair is typical. It’s a lively piece, full of color and vitality, and as usual, the excellent ASO gave it a fine, crisp, musical performance.
It is worth noting that there were at least two teenagers on stage. Kershaw has always encouraged talented local kids and given them the opportunity to experience playing in a professional orchestra. Without there being any fanfare about them, cellist Justin Kim and trumpeter Natalie Dungey performed with the orchestra Saturday night.
The final work, truly a Valentine, came from the pen of Franz Liszt, the 19th-century pianist who could play like an angel and was perhaps the first classical musician to gather swarms of adoring fans around him, fainting and grabbing bits of his clothing.
Craig Sheppard was the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 2. Any Liszt work has an extroardinary number of notes, and though Sheppard dropped a few, he played with plenty of energy where it was due, and with beautiful smooth soft passages rich with expression and melody, or dreamy and musing. You could call it a work of romance personified, and the two Liszt encores he played after reinforced the impression.
The piano itself left something to be desired in its topmost and bottommost note ranges. Here the rich tone quality of the rest of the instrument became noticeably flattened out with little reverberance. Perhaps a local benefactor could contribute the use of a really good piano next time around.
A house of fans, friends, family, and the merely curious filled On The Boards’ Studio Theatre Monday night for the 2011-2012 season’s fourth and penultimate edition of 12 Minutes Max. This OtB institution offers twelve regional artists a twelve-minute slot of lab time for testing new material on audiences, and “testing” is no euphemism. While the crowd was enthusiastic there were no obligatory standing-O’s at this show; the performers earned the responses they received, and more often than not those responses were positive.
The evening was heavy on dance, light on theatre and music, and featured a pair of performance pieces incorporating movement and declamation. Sarah Burgess provided the musical act playing low-key pop piano under a smoky Norah Jones knock-off vocal. She’s a pleasant and comfortable performer who, one hopes, may aspire to greater achievements in her future lyrics.
Dances included a solo, a duet, a trio, and a quintet. Kaitlin McCarthy and Kiplinn Sagmiller danced McCarthy’s choreography using a precise vocabulary of movements to create a narrative of tenderness and aggression that escalated steadily with acts of kindness subverted to violent ends, resulting in the total division of roles between the empowered and the subjugated.
Shellie Gravitt gave the audience a go-go dance by way of Beckett (perhaps that’s go-go of Godot’s Didi and Gogo). The clown act consistently resolved into a vainglorious reassertion of dignity, enacted in the astonishing beauty of the dancer’s torso slowly rising up over squatting thighs, perched on massive high-heeled shoes only to launch once more into the impossible and ludicrous contortions of the act. After an unperformed transition, masked only by the proscenium wall, but revealed in shadows and the unmuffled sounds of costume and prop transitions, Gravitt reemerged, freed of footwear and with a therapeutic rocks glass at hand. This dance was free and easy, instead of striving to achieve an impossible task.
The other dances included one of transitions between mechanized and organic qualities in a nuanced dynamic of encounters received and compelled within Vancouver’s three-woman ensemble Triadic Dances Works. The other involved Geoffrey Johnson’s ensemble of five performers in athletic and grounded movement, often arranged around a still center with a motif of hand flutters punctuating the sequences. The costuming was remarkable for including a variety of faded t-shirts printed with lettering and images, which helped place the experience of the dance in a very accessible and informal world.
William D. Brattain, or TIT: The Irrealist Theatre, gave the audience a strong performance piece spiraling off from the Fibonacci sequence and conceptions of gender and language that was supported in the physical work with well-integrated form and content and enough authentic personality to win the audience’s sympathy. Meanwhile, Joyce Liao’s Llevame Contigo was a more obtuse piece involving childlike play and ruminations on horses, intermixed with prerecorded voiceovers and followed by primitive and simple dances.
This sort of an evening can be a technical nightmare and the transitions between scenes deadly. I’ve long been of the opinion that scene changes must be totally fascinating or completely invisible. Given the large percentage of dance pieces in the evening, the transitions were relatively smooth and quick, but the slow transition into The Town Theater’s Missed Connections was slow and fascinating, a dance piece unto itself. Unfortunately, the rest of this piece didn’t compare as favorably. The set consisted of a pair of triangles in blue painters’ tape laid out on the floor in a formal choreography seemingly borrowed from the preceding dance.
Nick Hara and Ciera Iveson performed their composition derived from Seattle Missed Connections postings, a forum with which other groups, such as NYC’s Royanth Productions and Ars Nova, have had success. The performance of the text was often engaging. Iveson and Hara committed to their characters, calling out into the theatre for affection and connection, though never so much to suggest that they expected a response. This was all very nice, but the actors were locked onto those triangles. What might have happened had they broken free and had an interaction with one another?
At the end of intermission, The SunBreak’s Arts Intern Emeritus Leah Vendl’s name was chosen out of a glass vase full of entries, which won her the responsibility of guest-curating the next edition of 12 Minutes Max (April 8-9, auditions March 11). If it’s anything like this latest edition, there will be plenty to like—and anything you don’t like will be over soon enough. That and the $8 admission are a small price to pay for the chance to contribute to local performance development and possibly to be the first to see the next big thing.
A couple weekends ago, I was surprised to see a man bringing a puppy into the Safeway on 15th. He was entering the store right behind me, so I turned around and asked, “Are you bringing that dog into the store?” This of course led to a confrontation, with me pointing out the sign on the door indicating that only service animals are allowed in the store, and him claiming that the dog was a therapy dog and putting it in the grocery cart, you know, where customers after him would put their food.
A few things: First off, that’s bullshit (which I told him in those exact words), and the kind of bullshit that hearkens back to this CHS post, where someone in the comments suggested that dog owners lie and say they have a service animal in order to bring dogs into food establishments. It’s a dick move and an utter abuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Besides that, even if a dog is a “therapy dog,” that’s still a step below a service animal as the ADA defines it: “Service animal means any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability.” (And of course, they’re going by the legal definition of “disability” as well.) Sorry, but just being there for “emotional support” doesn’t count as a service as per federal law. Further delineation of this distinction can be found in the ADA FAQ and this edition of the USDA Animal Information Welfare Center newsletter. It’s pretty clear that a seeing-eye dog or a hearing-ear dog or a walking-leg dog counts as a service animal, while a feeling-fine dog does not.
A bigger problem: When I tried to get a Safeway employee to back me up, he shrugged and said that they generally turn a blind eye. So I took my complaint to the store manager, who stated that he wasn’t able to ask what the dog was for, because they could be sued.
Which is wrong. Again, from CHS:
We spoke to Hilary Karasz, an Information Officer with Seattle & King County Public Health, who confirmed that per state statute, animals are not allowed in eating and/or drinking establishments (nor grocery stores), with the exception of service animals. Karasz advised that employees are able to inquire as to what functions a service animal serves but cannot ask for proof of disability and/or that a pet is indeed a service animal, per federal statute (the Americans with Disabilities Act).
In this case, he wouldn’t have even needed to ask if it was a service animal, because it was an off-leash puppy in a shopping cart and obviously not a working dog. Stop being scared of lawsuits and grow some balls, Safeway. Enforce the law and keep non-service animals out of the store. I can’t do all the work for you.
(No more dogs in restaurants or bars either, but we’ll leave that for another time.)
