This month is full of wild and wacky happenings in the Seattle classical music scene. World-famous violinist Hilary Hahn skips over Benaroya Hall and plays a show at the Neptune. Seattle Opera broadcasts a live stream of one of their productions to a crowd of 8,000 (screaming?) fans at KeyArena. An instrument called the “fire organ” anchors an opera at On the Boards. You’ve got to hear it to believe it!
Trimpin (Photo: Toni Gauthier)
May 5 — Seattle Opera hosts its first ever simulcast at KeyArena. Watch Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on the big screen while the action unfolds at McCaw Hall. Tickets to this event are free.
May 15 & 17 — Head to Benaroya Hall for Seattle Symphony‘s production of Bartok’s deliciously dark opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. With lavish sets designed by Dale Chihuly, this staging is one you won’t want to miss.
May 18 – 20 — Notorious sound artist, sculptor, and composer Trimpin presents The Gurs Zyklus at On the Boards. Half opera, half performance art, this production features vocalists and a kinetic sound sculpture called the “fire organ”.
May 18-19 — Celebrated violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg joins the Seattle Symphony for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Also on the program is Mozart’s Requiem, the composer’s haunting final work.
May 19 — Seattle Modern Orchestra‘s final concert of the 2011-12 season, “Music on Paintings”, features pieces inspired by works of visual art. Experience their performance of Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” in the atmospheric Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center.
Hilary Hahn & Hauschka (Photo: Mareike Foecking)
May 29 — What happens when one of the world’s best classical violinists collaborates with one of the world’s greatest champions of the prepared piano? Catch violinist Hilary Hahn — famous for her interpretations of Bach — at the Neptune Theater with German experimental tunesmith Hauschka. The pair is on tour promoting their genre-bending album SILFRA.
May 30 — Wash down your opera with a cold pint of tasty local brew. The singers of Opera on Tap take over Ballard’s Conor Byrne Pub for an evening of sudsy, operatic fun. Cheers!
Another weekend, another cracking-great Visqueen live show. No big deal, except for the fact that it sorta was a big deal.
After a decade of jolting this town with some of the best sugar-buzz power pop in memory, Visqueen called it a day with a Fare-thee-Well show Saturday night at the Neptune. The capacity crowd sent much love the band’s way, and in return got one hell of a great show to go with the last hurrah.
Rachel Flotard, lead singer/guitarist/principal songwriter/Queen of Visqueen, richly earned the title of Superwoman by playing a blistering set of Visqueen pop gems while extremely pregnant–and in high-heeled boots. Punchy directness has always been Visqueen’s stock in trade, so the first half of the set was just Flotard, bassist Cristina Bautista, and drummer Ben Hooker driving it home.
That energy swelled to bittersweet levels as past Visqueen alumni jumped onstage, beginning a little over halfway through the show. Kim Warnick (Visqueen’s first bassist and a woman with a rock resume way too lofty for this brief scribbling) piped in with chirpy girl-group harmonies on “Lovely Guilty,” and guitarist Tom Cummings joined the band for several numbers. Cellist to the Northwest stars Barb Hunter sat in for half the set, subbing for some of the keyboard/string sweetening that surfaced on the band’s last long-player, Message to Garcia. Barrett Jones (who produced or co-produced most of Visqueen’s records) contributed backing vocals during “Hand Me Down.” Finally, steel guitar whiz Jon Rauhouse lent texture to the last few tracks with some richly weepy stringwork: His work added extra sentimental pull as Flotard and Bautista duetted sweetly on a spare reading of “So Long” for the show’s final encore.
Half the fun of a Visqueen show has always been the between-song horseplay, and the band didn’t disappoint on that front. Hooker, ever the goofball, bum-rushed a solid opening set by the reunited Broadcast Oblivion, duetting on drums with Oblivion drummer Coady Willis; and Flotard’s choice reminiscinces included gorging on discounted lentil beans at one particularly thankless East Coast gig. But this scrappy bunch allowed themselves time and breathing room to be sentimental, too. Towards the end, Flotard’s mom and Bautista’s and Hooker’s parents came onstage for hugs, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. You shoulda been there.
Go figure. I spent a considerable amount of copy touting/dissecting the Posies’ 1993 long-player Frosting on the Beater, in anticipation of them playing the album in its entirety last Saturday night–and they went and played a two-hour set that cherry-picked from their entire career. Not that I’m complaining.
Frosting was well-represented–“Dream All Day,” “Solar Sister,” “Flavor of the Month,” and “Burn and Shine” all made appearances–but the band’s set covered the gamut from their 1988 debut Failure, to their newest release, 2010’s Blood/Candy. Several songs off of the latter pushed away at the outer peripheries of the band’s trademark pop–“Accidental Architecture” and “For the Ashes,” in particular, brimmed with odd time signatures and complex harmonics. But the core of the Posies’ sound–the almost telepathic vocal interplay between Stringfellow and co-founder/singer/guitarist Jonathan Auer–remained wonderfully intact.
One of the Posies’ live trump cards has always been their ability to hit those harmonies while still rocking their asses off. Stringfellow was all over the stage Saturday night, jumping and flailing like a cooler Ichabod Crane being electrocuted, while Auer fired off solos and vaulted into the air with rock hero energy. And though the band’s key figures live halfway across the world from one another nowadays (Stringfellow in France, Auer here), they cracked jokes and interacted like they’d never been apart. Bassist Matt Harris and drummer Darius Minwalla bolstered the sound ably, too (Harris won major court-jester bonus points for leading a short impromptu take on the Weird Al Yankovic Kinks parody, “Yoda”).
The highlights were numerous: A gorgeous reading of the Dear 23 ballad, “Apology;” the thundering take on that acrid 1996 chestnut, “Everybody is a Fucking Liar” (no band on the planet delivers cuss words in classic two-part harmonies like the Posies); the closing encore of 1998’s “You’re the Beautiful One” that preserved the song’s devotional romantic core without diminishing the band’s instrumental fire. No need to get fancier on the descriptive adjectives: It was all damned good. Here’s hoping they touch down here as an ensemble again, but soon.
The Posies.
Ken Stringfellow of the Posies.
The Posies' Jon Auer.
The Posies' Ken Stringfellow.
Posies flying everywhere at the Neptune.
Star Anna guest-vocalizes with Ken Stringfellow on the Posies tune, "Licenses to Hide."
As Mary Poppins once posited, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And the Posies have spent over twenty years delivering the tartest, most intricate lyrical pills in the sweetest of packages.
That’s a bit of a gross generalization to describe Seattle’s greatest pop band, but it does boil down the band’s appeal–and it addresses the central reason as to why they alternately built a devoted fan base, yet never quite broke into the mainstream.
On the surface, it seems like some sort of major incongruity in the fabric of the universe. After all, band leaders/songwriters/singers Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow burst onto the Northwest music firmament as pop wunderkinds in the late 1980’s, brandishing peerless vocal harmonies and British Invasion-influenced melodies that lodged themselves into the ears with near-parasitic insidiousness. The Posies’ 1990 major label debut, Dear 23, still stands as one of the finest records to come out of this region in the last three decades: To these ears, it’s an epic (and near-perfect) pop album that mixed Auer and Stringfellow’s time-honored sixties influences (The Beatles and The Zombies) with a pinch of Cheap Trick and the acerbic wit of Elvis Costello. Hell, a year or two later, one of the Beatles even covered a song from the record.
The cathartic wail of Grunge was just beginning to emanate from this neck of the woods, however, and a band that couched smart lyrics about relationship angst and the mounting realities of an adult world within carefully-crafted pop songs seemed off-kilter with the prevailing tide. Simply put, a significant portion of disenfranchised kids found the primal scream of Nirvana and Soundgarden more relatable. Dear 23 gained a solid foothold on the College Music charts, but Nevermind became the accidental voice of a generation.
Frosting on the Beater, the Posies’ 1993 follow-up, sounded like a concession to the zeitgeist at first blush. Auer’s and Stringfellow’s guitars roared more often than they chimed, Mike Musberger’s drums thundered with almost chaotic force, and the several of the songs exceeded the five-minute mark with extended squalls of feedback, left-field tangents, and somber starkness. Ironically, the band derided by one local wag as the Northwest’s answer to the Partridge Family had cut an album that was–in its own way–messier and more unpredictable than Nirvana’s immortal pop-culture calling card, Nevermind.
In music geek parlance, if Dear 23 was the Posies’ Sgt. Pepper’s, Frosting on the Beater was their White Album. Critics smitten by the sonic perfection of the Posies’ 1990 platter griped about the inconsistent racket generated by their follow-up (Rolling Stone magazine, significantly, gave Frosting on the Beater a dismissive two-star review when it first came out).
Time has a funny way of vindicating misunderstood records, though. Today, Frosting on the Beater has aged famously, largely because it achieved a louder, riskier, gutsier sound without short-changing Auer and Stringfellow’s harmonic and melodic gifts one iota. And at least two-thirds of the record’s songs are stone masterpieces. “Dream All Day,” the record’s opener, swirls and careens like the best psychedelia. “20 Questions” counters its pit-of-stomach romantic jitters with power-pop feistiness. And the masterful “Lights Out” sounds like an angel’s lullaby, intermittently bum-rushed by a drunken pack of hooligans bashing out T.Rex riffs. More than any other Posies record, Frosting on the Beater cemented their rep as Seattle’s most significant power-pop combo.
The Stranglers' Hugh Cornwell guests on it, so it must be good: Blood/Candy, the Posies' newest CD.
Auer and Stringfellow have amassed pretty amazing resumes as musicians and producers since Frosting. They served a joint fifteen-year stint backing Alex Chilton as half of Big Star, and each released solo records of their own. Auer produced other artists over the last two decades, and Stringfellow did time as a touring member of REM. They’ve also released several other terrific records as the Posies, the most recent of which (2010’s Blood/Candy) shook the tree by wedding their impeccable harmonies with engaging detours into Beach Boys oddball lushness and adventurous instrumentation.
The band will surely touch down at multiple points of their catalog during their gig at the Neptune tomorrow night, but word around the campfire is that they’re playing that beautiful mess of a record, Frosting on the Beater, in its entirety. To paraphrase one of its finest songs, it should be a definite door to another dimension.
(Not to sound like a broken record, but that old mantra of “Arrive early if you can” really applies for tomorrow night’s show, too. Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs occupy the opening slot with Americana that takes a few loud pop jabs of its own, and any fan of the Posies’ sound owes it to themselves to catch the middle set by this town’s other greatest pure-pop band of the hour, Curtains for You.)
