The Magician's TaleAMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

The trick for these performers is using illusion to tell a story

A conjurer is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician.
—Jean Robert-Houdin

On a bright afternoon in early August, around 70 professional magicians crammed into a windowless, 60-seat room at the Magic Castle, an exclusive Hollywood-based magic society and supper club that is widely regarded as ground zero for the magical arts in this country. They were there to hear a lecture about the intersection of magic and theatre.

"A trick is a little puzzle," began lecturer Rob Zabrecky, a regular performer at the castle since 2002, who is known for combining mentalism (a form of magic that includes clairvoyance, hypnotism and other psychic elements) with a macabre sense of humor wrapped up in an eccentric-yet-strangely-approachable Norman Bates—like persona. "But the second we inform it with our point of view," he went on, "it becomes a piece of theatre."

Zabrecky is part of a small but growing enclave within the U.S. magic community that believes that great magicians are first and foremost theatremakers—and that their power lies as much in the way that they script, act, direct and design their performances as in their ability to deceive audiences with mirrors, mind games and dexterous sleights of hand. These theatrically inclined wizards are working hard to redefine what most people think of as a magic show, and in so doing are raising appropriately puzzling questions about the potential and limitations of magic as a theatrical art form.

"There's a tendency for the average person who doesn't know about magic to presume that it is something for children, akin to circus. While there is certainly a lot of magic that fits into that category, there's a lot that doesn't," Los Angeles—based illusionist Max Maven tells me in a phone interview shortly after my trip to the Magic Castle. Maven is an erudite magician who often peppers his mentalism-oriented performances with anecdotes about Pablo Picasso and Alexander Woollcott. In one routine, he reenacts part of a 17th-century Kabuki drama as a framework for unnerving audience members with his psychic powers.

The image of a tailcoat-wearing, wand-wielding magus dazzling audiences with flabbergasting stunts—pulling a rabbit out of a hat, causing a lion to disappear or hacking a bikini-clad lady into bits with a saw—still spring readily to mind when most of us think of magic shows. The Las Vegas extravaganzas of David Copperfield, Criss Angel and Siegfried & Roy, alongside the work of countless other conjurers plying their trade at corporate events and children's birthday parties, have been largely responsible for molding perceptions of magic for the past 70 or 80 years. The majority of acts at the Magic Castle tend to hail from this school. (According to Zabrecky, most lectures at the castle focus not on theatricality but on techniques for executing ever-more-complex tricks.)

The popularity in recent decades of magicians like David Blaine and Penn & Teller has helped to broaden people's understanding of what magic can do, and paved the way for the reconsideration of icons like Harry Houdini (a new exhibition, "Houdini: Art and Magic," at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum through Jan. 16, positions the escape artist as an edgy performer and "showman of raw physicality"). The bare bones, intimate nature of Blaine's "street magic" shows and his superhuman feats of endurance, like being encased in a block of ice for nearly three days, have shaken up standard notions of magic, as have Penn & Teller's canny exposure of the inner workings of illusions. But the activities of even these boundary-pushing performers share the same essential mission as their more traditional counterparts: to elicit amazement among audiences in response to a stunt.

Magicians who are steeped in theatre are attempting to place their focus elsewhere. "I think one of the obstacles to growth and self-expression in magic is that magicians tend to become fixated on the technical, deceptive elements—the sleights and moves and gimmickry—to the exclusion of all other aspects of the performing arts—scripting, lighting, sound, blocking, sets, costume, character," says the Chicago-based magician David Parr, whose shows include Visions of Poe, an interactive journey into the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and Haunting History, which explores the intersection of history and folklore. "The techniques we use to mislead the senses are a necessary part of magic, but they're not the only tools that contribute to effective communication with the people in our audience. When the technical, deceptive aspects of magic dominate our discourse, and when they become the sole focus of our performances, the message of magic is limited to 'Ha! I fooled you! See how clever I am?' I think magic has deeper waters to explore."

Instead of making a trick the be-all-and-end-all of a magic show, in the same way a comedian treats the punch-line of a joke, magicians like Parr who are interested in exploring the theatrical process see their illusions as part of a larger whole. This approach usually involves the embedding of magical illusions within a strong narrative framework that often builds to a climax; the development of sustained characters or stage personas; and the use of dramatic metaphors. The goal is to provide the audience with a multilayered experience, one that seamlessly combines astonishment at the magical effects on display with a broader message about the world we live in.

For the solo shows of San Francisco—based magician Christian Cagigal, metaphor, narrative and character play at least as important a role as prestidigitation. In Cagigal's solo show Obscura, the magician adopts an understated persona akin to a fastidious widowed uncle, and gracefully weaves card tricks into a variety of quirky cautionary tales about ordinary people who play games of chance with the Devil and invariably lose.

Each story is more confrontational than the last, so that by the end of the hour-long show, the room feels almost claustrophobic, as if there is no escape from Satan's clutches. Cagigal's intermittent use of an old-fashioned wind-up music box underscores the innocence and naïveté of the average human being when confronted with forces he or she can't fully understand. The fact that all of Cagigal's card tricks are projected at close range from above on a video screen enhances the theatricality of the experience—watching the magician's every move up close, we, too, feel like we are being watched.

For Michael Fraughton, a magician based in the Salt Lake City area, metaphor is also crucial. Fraughton miraculously conjures water to extinguish a candle flame that comes to represent the "life" of a small Kansas town. The magician intends audience members to make the connection between the dousing of the flame and the disastrous flooding of the town.

And in Todd Robbins's Play Dead, a production directed by Teller (of Penn & Teller) that had a nine-month run Off-Broadway through July 2011 (it then played Mexico City and will have a 2012 London tour), Robbins couched ghoulish illusions within the framework of real-life ghost stories. Robbins's design team decked out the Players Theatre in New York's West Village to make it look like it was abandoned, which created a fittingly spooky setting for a show that used shock tactics to explore notions of death and loss. In one scene, the performer chewed a light bulb until his mouth bled.

"You can put magic in a theatre, but that doesn't make it theatre—that involves more than just telling stories while you do a magic trick," contends Robbins. 'The stories have to have some thematic meaning, ideally tied into an overall thematic arc so people have something to walk away from the production with beyond 'That was fun!' That's when magic goes from being a form of entertainment to a form of art."

The conflation of drama and magic isn't new. According to the Chicago-based magician Neil Tobin, the relationship has existed for thousands of years. "Though theatre scholars may be late in their appreciation, performance magic is one of the original forms of drama," Tobin points out. "Consider its use of metaphor: The fakir of centuries ago who thrust sword after sword into a primitive basket containing his son, only to have the boy emerge unharmed, was metaphorically enacting a primal drama—that of the triumph of life over death. He had only dirt for a stage and sold no seats, but it was powerful theatre."

In more recent times, the relationship has become explicit. In the 1870s, the magicians and theatrical impresarios John Nevil Maskelyne and George Cooke created a string of popular "magic plays" at the Egyptian Hall, and later, St. George's Hall, in London. Special effect—infused productions, with titles like Will, the Witch and the Watchman and Mrs. Daffodil Downey's Séance, served as climactic finales to evenings of conjuring featuring famous illusionists like Buatier De Kolta, Paul Valadon, Charles Morritt and Martin Chapender. "The scripts contain descriptions of interesting sets where people could go out one side and come in immediately on the other," notes the Bay Area—based magician Tobias Beckwith of these works.

Some of these magic plays toured the U.S. And before long, special effects started cropping up in homegrown productions. The 1927 production of Dracula on Broadway (an adaptation by John L. Balderston of the Bram Stoker novel, starring Bela Lugosi), for example, included a scene in which the title character disappeared "into thin air," his empty cape crumpling into the hands of his adversaries at the climax of a tussle.

More recently, magicians and the theatre community have collaborated successfully on many occasions. The conjurer Ricky Jay's long-standing partnership with playwright-director David Mamet is a case in point. Mamet has directed several of Jay's solo shows—Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, On the Stem and A Rogue's Gallery—and has cast the magician in a number of his films. The magicians Guy Hollingworth and Paul Nathan have had their magic-plays produced at the Broad Stage in Los Angeles and San Francisco's Climate Theater, respectively. David Hirata, another Bay Area—based magician, serves on the board of the Marsh Theatre, a 22-year-old presenter and producer of mostly solo plays.

Many recent theatre productions have relied upon the talents of conjurers to create spellbinding effects. The famous levitation sequence at the end of the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast and the scene in Broadway's Mary Poppins in which the protagonist removes unfathomably large objects from her suitcase were made possible by the skill of Jim Steinmeyer, a master magician and scholar of magic history. These effects not only create a sense of wonder in the audience but serve to move the plot along and develop our understanding of the characters.

Meanwhile, magicians are often key collaborators in productions of classic plays. Last summer, Cagigal helped create the special effects for the Marin Shakespeare Company's version of The Tempest. And Teller co-created a horror-theatre production of Macbeth with director Aaron Posner. The drama was co-produced in 2008 by Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, N.J., and Washington, D.C.'s Folger Theatre.

Yet despite these synergies, the relationship between the "legitimate" theatre and magic shows has always been complicated and fractious. "Magic is a sort of bastard cousin of theatre," Zabrecky suggests, in an interview after his Magic Castle lecture. "The fact is that theatre people don't always view the genre as an art form."

"I love magic shows," offers Tony Taccone, artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. "But in their traditional configuration, they qualify for me as purely entertainment." So the rapport between magic and theatre ebbs and flows. As Alain Nu, a magician based in Washington, D.C., puts it: "I think it's something that trends in and out of favor, depending on a variety of factors, such as market demands, the overall respect for the art by the public and so on."

The effort among contemporary magicians to "legitimize" their craft has its roots in the rise of the "bizarre magic" movement in the 1970s, which has since been shaped by changing cultural tastes and economic trends. (Last month in Connecticut, the Inner Circle of Bizarre Magick held the latest in its series of annual conventions.) Bizarre magic is a branch of conjuring that employs narrative and wordplay to a much greater degree than traditional magic shows, while de-emphasizing a performer's technical dexterity and complex props. Major exponents of the genre, like Tony Andruzzi and Eugene Burger, developed a following for their intimate and dark approach to magic. Often unfolding in a small space in a close-up format, bizarre magic shows employ storytelling as a means to establish an otherworldly mood and entice audiences to believe in spirits.

"Bizarre magic came about as a rebellion against what magic had become—frivolous entertainment, something to accompany a cocktail during the dinner hour at a corporate event," reasons Robbins. "Some magicians decided to put the content back in, so they came up with this whole new form that was more theatrical and story-driven. It demanded people's focus and attention rather than a noisy environment with a DJ in the corner."

Just as the original bizarrists reacted against the relegation of magic to "sideshow entertainment" status, so the present generation of theatrically inclined magicians is reacting against the big Las Vegas—style spectacles of Copperfield and company. Their reasons are partly artistic and partly economic, and are in keeping with other countercultural trends that surfaced in the early 1990s, like grunge music's rebellion against saccharine pop tunes.

"As money sinks and magicians are scaling back, and the love of glitz for glitz's sake seems to be ebbing for the time being, many magicians have been asking themselves, 'What the hell is the point of all of it?' and, 'So what if I can do this big illusion, what does it mean?' " says Cagigal. "They want more out of their routines and shows and themselves."

Many contemporary exponents of theatre-oriented magic have serious theatrical backgrounds—Robbins holds a degree in theatre from California State University—Long Beach; Parr co-founded an experimental theatre company in Milwaukee; the San Francisco—based magician Walt Anthony was an Equity actor in Chicago for 20 years before deciding to merge his passion for magic with his stage career. Despite that, melding theatre with magic isn't easy. Efforts in this direction often fall flat. As such, magicians who seek to use theatrical elements like storytelling and character as a means to create a work of art face multiple challenges.

One key issue lies in the wildly contrasting ways in which the two genres handle the expectations of their audiences. Admittedly, even the most basic trick includes such elements as the establishment of a relationship between a performer and an audience and the creation of a stage persona, and many magic shows also include spoken text, a plot, lights, a set, costumes and props—but the two genres place very different demands upon audiences' understanding of reality that are often difficult to reconcile.

In most forms of theatre, audiences understand that they are witnessing a make-believe world, but choose to suspend their disbelief in order to enter fully into that world and potentially be transformed by it. Magic, by contrast, requires audiences to completely buy what they're seeing on stage as hard reality: They have to be convinced that it is truly possible to saw people in half and put their bodies instantly back together again, or for an illusionist to read the secrets of their minds. "In the theatre, a special effect is designed to be subsumed within the fantasy of the production," writes Steinmeyer in his 1998 book Art & Artifice. "An illusion seeks the opposite. It starts with a basic reality and attempts to make it deliberately special or surprising. In a magic show, there is no willing suspension. The magician cannot risk the audience ignoring his illusions or accepting them as a part of a larger context; they must be held apart and treated as unique."

So when magicians focus on storytelling, stage metaphor and other theatrical elements, they risk sacrificing the very thing—the "wow factor" that a skillfully executed illusion elicits in the spectator—that often draws in audiences off the street to see a magic show in the first place. "So much of the work of a magician is to convince someone to believe," Ryan Majestic, a magician based in Los Angeles, tells me during an interview in a West Hollywood café. "With theatre, you have to suspend your disbelief. Overcoming this obstacle forces a magician to work extra hard."

Majestic has become so disenchanted with magicians' current love affair with the theatre that he tries to remove the trappings of stage performance from his work whenever possible—including, curiously, the audience. Every night for nearly two weeks in April 2010, the magician broke into an abandoned house in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles late at night to perform his act. Majestic deliberately didn't tell anyone about his activities. "I did the show at midnight each night regardless of whether anyone walked in or not," Majestic says. "I hoped that if someone did come by, it would be a truly organic moment rather than feel fake, like a theatre performance."

Majestic's experiment didn't work out as he expected it to. Even this most anarchic and anti-theatrical of illusionists found himself yearning for the most fundamental characteristic of the live theatre experience: the relationship that exists between a performer and his audience. "I realized that I wanted people to come," admits Majestic of his lonely nights spent doing magic tricks before an invisible audience in a derelict building. "And when they didn't come, I felt ashamed that I wanted it so badly."

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Voices From On High: Countertenors to ColdplayWQXR

Men who sing in the stratosphere always hold a certain fascination over music fans, whether it’s the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson or countertenors. Here in New York, countertenors -- men who sing above the tenor range -- are having a banner season, being featured in two productions at the Metropolitan Opera: Handel's Rodelinda and the upcoming Baroque pastiche The Enchanted Island.

Meanwhile, more countertenors are turning up in contemporary music (including new works by Thomas Ades and Peter Maxwell Davies), on recital series and in choruses alongside mezzo-sopranos and altos (often much to the latter's dismay).

So what is it about the appeal of the high male voice? In this podcast Naomi Lewin asks three experts: Andreas Scholl, a countertenor who is currently appearing in Rodelinda at the Met; Brian Zeger; a pianist who is head of the Vocal Arts department at Juilliard and the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program; and Chloe Veltman, the host and producer of VoiceBox, a radio program and podcast about the singing voice.

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Singing in Tune The anatomy of choral intonation and the techniques for improving itTHE VOICE

“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” - Carl Jung

Of all the nightmares that can disturb a choral conductor’s sleep, the one concerning the opening section of the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser must be among the most feverish. “There is none among us that can conduct or listen to that piece without muscles tensing as each passing measure leads to possible disaster,” said Tim Seelig, artistic director of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and former conductor of the Dallas-based Turtle Creek Chorale.

The bad dream begins a few seconds into Wagner’s slow and intense introduction scored for a cappella male chorus, as the thickness of the men’s harmonies gradually yet palpably drags the sound southwards like a crank-operated gramophone recording in its final sonic throes. By the time the orchestra enters around the two-minute mark, the chorus director’s muscles are as tense as the strings on Tannhäuser’s harp, for Wagner never intended this section of his opera to be performed in multiple keys.

The human voice is one of the most pitch-flexible of instruments. Our voices can vary tuning with no restraints and make adjustments in the middle of a performance without needing to retune like most other instruments. Yet intonation is undoubtedly one of the most pervasive problems facing singers. Few people really notice when a vocalist sings in tune. But poor intonation can clear a concert hall.

The issue is troubling enough for a solo singer. For an ensemble composed of multiple abilities and personalities, wayward tuning can be even more difficult to recognize and correct. Lacking the intonation “barometer” provided by an accompanying piano or other instruments, a cappella groups can easily slide or spike without knowing it. And even accompanied singing can fall prey to erratic intonation. It only takes a mismatched vowel, a bar or two of overblown vibrato, or an acoustically challenging room to render a passage flat or sharp.

The Anatomical Basics

At the physiological level, human beings are equipped with varying degrees of sensitivity to pitch. According to Dr. Psyche Loui, an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School who has done extensive research on pitch, people who possess a strong connection between the parts of the brain dedicated to matching pitch and perceiving feedback are better able to sing in tune than those with a weaker or absent link. “People who are tone deaf have a smaller or missing branch between the areas of the frontal lobe used for producing sound and the temporal lobe, which is important to perception,” she said.

There are therefore at least two fundamental ways in which the brain needs to work to stay in tune: “One is storing a kind of template that you need to move the vocal cords in a certain way to get a certain sound,” Loui said. “The other is being able to hear yourself sing.”

With these anatomical basics in mind, it follows that most of the reasons that choral music experts cite to explain why choruses go out of tune fall into two categories―producing sound and hearing it.

Not being able to hear oneself or others sing is a major issue when it comes to tuning. “Clearly, it's impossible to tune if you can't hear the singers around you,” said Karen Thomas, artistic director and conductor of Seattle Pro Musica. According to Thomas, there are many possible causes for this, such as the acoustics of a rehearsal or performance space and the specific placement of individual singers within the group. “Singers can often hear the whole better when in mixed quartet formation,” Thomas said. “Likewise, an imbalance of singers’ volumes can create a situation in which those with softer voices are unable to hear themselves, or can only hear a few overly-loud singers near them.”

Feedback is such a subtle mechanism that sometimes an audible hum from a lighting fixture is enough to wreak havoc on an ensemble’s careful intonation. But while a chorus might not be able to do much about the various mechanical and acoustical challenges of a room, there are many factors that cause meandering intonation that are well within the singers’ control.

These factors mostly fall under the category of vocal production, and more often than not, out-of-tune singing can be blamed on sub-par technique. “Any lack of rhythmic vitality and precision will cause intonation problems, as will poor singing posture, lack of breath support, and lack of mental and aural concentration,” said Pearl Shangkuan, director of the Grand Rapids Symphony Chorus. “It also takes everyone working toward producing the exact same vowels at the exact same time to tune well.”

The Tools for Fine-Tuning

Being acutely sensitive to unwelcome leaps and dives in pitch, chorus directors and pedagogues use a diverse set of tools to improve intonation. Techniques range from simple breathing and diaphragm support exercises to making micro-adjustments to vowels in certain parts of singers’ registers to help make specific words in a song sound more in tune.

One fundamental goal shared by all choral directors in the struggle to perfect intonation centers on improving choristers’ listening skills. “I build chords from the bottom up to get the singers to listen to the correlation of intervals,” said Ragnar Bohlin, director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. “I often ask the singers to change places and mix up,” said Seelig. “This absolutely forces the group to listen.”

Conductors frequently use warm-ups aimed at improving singers’ listening skills, drilling them on whole tone and chromatic scales, arpeggios, and chord clusters among other musical devices. “I love the Robert Shaw warm-up in which the choir takes 16 beats to move up or down a half-step, moving just a few cents per beat, all attempting to move at the same small increments precisely together,” said Thomas. “It's virtually impossible to do this exactly, but it certainly wakes up the ears!”

No matter how idiosyncratic these activities seem, they all exist in the service of rehearsing and performing repertoire. Every piece of music, regardless of its style and genre, poses particular intonation challenges on singers. Poor intonation may be more immediately apparent in monophonic music because of the transparency of the texture. But it’s equally hard to sing in tune on a fast atonal piece with difficult leaps.

A chorus working on music that veers away from the classical western convention of “equal-tempered” tuning (where each of the 12 half-steps of the octave scale is exactly the same distance apart) has to adopt and hone particular strategies for precise tuning. The members of the France-based Harmonic Choir―a chorus founded in 1975 by the American composer, singer, and meditation teacher David Hykes that specializes in overtone singing―often listen to their pitches over headphones to achieve their amazingly complex tunings.

Meanwhile, Anonymous 4, an a cappella vocal ensemble that specializes in Medieval repertoire, focuses its intonation efforts on the perfect fifth―the only consonance allowed in Pythagorean tuning, one of the oldest known methods of defining musical pitches that informs the performance of much pre-17th century music in the west. In Pythagorean tuning, all perfect fifths must be in tune, even at the expense of the other intervals. As a result, the perfect fifths sound resonant, while the thirds are unexpectedly brighter and more complex than in the equal temperament we’re used to today. “It simply sounds best if we tune the fifth just a little bit higher than it is tuned on the piano,” said Marsha Genensky, who sings with Anonymous 4. “Our tuning starts with this bright fifth. We then work outward from there, whether we are singing monophonic music or music in multiple parts.”

When to Go with the Flow

Hearing slight deviations in pitch and devising techniques to correct them can be incredibly subtle work. But just as there are occasions where it pays for a conductor to simply tell vocalists that they’re singing sharp or flat in a particular spot to instantly rectify matters, so there are times when it’s better to let a chorus fall or rise a semi-tone or two than attempt to resist the herd mentality. This is particularly sensible advice for choral singers with perfect pitch. “I don't feel I can do very much of anything as a single singer to influence the pitch group-think during large ensemble performances,” said Cecelia Lam, a San Francisco-based vocalist with perfect pitch. “If pitch sliding occurs, I usually slide along because holding my ground just makes me sound out of sync with the choir.”

As painful on the ears as tuneless singing can be, choruses often get away with freewheeling intonation. The reality is that some audiences are completely impervious to defective pitching. Ultimately, if a chorus sings with commitment and overall musicality, flawless tuning may not be the most important element of the performance. Indeed, some choral professionals even welcome the times when choruses slip. “Imperfection is being human,” wrote Chris Rowbury, a chorus leader and the founder of WorldSong, a community choir based in Coventry, England, in his blog. “When listening to a choir, it is the small imperfections, the differences in vocal quality and tiny errors in tuning, that give the overall texture and richness of sound that we all love.”

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Jeffrey Kahane brings team spirit to L.A. Chamber OrchestraLOS ANGELES TIMES

After a period of convalescence, the conductor-pianist returns to lead the ensemble for its 43rd season.

When Jeffrey Kahane decided to undertake a survey of Mozart's mature piano concertos to celebrate the composer's 250th birthday, he didn't expect to play all 23 of the works himself. But when scheduling conflicts made hiring other leading soloists impractical, the pianist and music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra decided to take on the feat on his own.

"I didn't think of it as a huge project about me, so I wasn't daunted," the musician said at his home in Sonoma's wine country. "It was a collaborative venture with the orchestra."

In a classical music world peopled with celebrity soloists and megalomaniacal conductors, Kahane stands out as a team player. While most music directors of world-class ensembles rarely spotlight musicians from the ranks, Kahane frequently invites many of the 40 LACO players to perform solo concertos. He has commissioned several instrumentalists to compose works for the orchestra and offered LACO's concertmaster, Margaret Batjer, the opportunity to curate her own "Westside Connections" music series.

"Jeffrey understands the depth of talent in the orchestra and gives us an opportunity to shine," said Richard Todd, LACO's principal horn, whom Kahane commissioned to write a piece for the ensemble's 40th-anniversary season. The 43rd season — 30 concerts in venues across the region — begins Sept. 24.

Playing the keyboard while leading an orchestra requires special skills. Murray Perahia, Daniel Barenboim and Kahane are among the few musicians who have excelled at this task in recent history.

LACO's respect for Kahane is such that when the music director, who turns 55 Monday, was forced to withdraw from performing for six months last season after being diagnosed with mononucleosis and hepatitis, the musicians felt as if they had temporarily lost a limb.

"There was nothing to do but rest, and it was incredibly difficult, depressing and painful, but also an immensely important learning experience," Kahane said of his period of convalescence.

Thanks in part to LACO's strongly collective nature, however, the group continued to flourish.

"Jeffrey's absence gave us a chance to really bond," said Batjer, who sometimes led the orchestra from the first chair during Kahane's time away. The synchronicity was so strong that by the time Kahane returned to the stage in full health last spring, the orchestra hadn't lost its luster. "His absence has seemingly hurt neither the organizational spirit nor ensemble," wrote Times music critic Mark Swed, reviewing a LACO concert in May.

Kahane's team spirit stems from his deep engagement with chamber music, a genre that generally promotes a more cooperative environment than symphonic music, where the conductor rules from the podium. But Kahane's sensibility extends further back, to his childhood passion for improvisation. This skill would not only stand him in good stead as a vibrant improviser of Mozart cadenzas in the classical realm but also as a musician working in the collaborative genres of rock and jazz.

Born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles (his well-to-do mother escaped Nazi Germany shortly after Kristallnacht, and his father was the seventh child in a family of working-class Russian Jews based in New York), the pianist, who took up the piano at 4, grew up surrounded by music of all kinds.

"I was taken as a kid to Royce Hall, which had one of the great recital series in America in the 1960s. There I heard Rubinstein and Du Pré," Kahane said. "We also went to Ash Grove, a club on Melrose that eventually burned down, where I heard legendary bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and bluegrass greats Doc and Merle Watson."

Kahane played the guitar in rock bands during his teen years, only deciding to focus exclusively on a classical music career when he enrolled as a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Although he soon excelled in the classical realm, placing highly in major international competitions, making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1983, performing as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and other top-tier orchestras, accompanying Joshua Bell, Dawn Upshaw and Yo-Yo Ma and launching his conducting career at the Oregon Bach Festival in 1988, he continued to feed his peripatetic musical passions. Kahane recently performed with the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright at the Ravinia Festival and in 2008 recorded a CD with the Gypsy jazz outfit the Hot Club of San Francisco. His dog's name is Django.

"Growing up in a house where there was equal reverence for Paul Simon as there was for Brahms gave me permission to ignore traditional boundaries between genres," said Kahane's son, the singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. The pair recently collaborated on a concert program that interspersed Jeffrey's interpretations of four Schubert impromptus with songs written by Gabriel. In April, LACO will premiere Gabriel's 30-minute song cycle.

"I always dreamt of being able to go back and forth with ease between musical genres," said Jeffrey Kahane, who, with his receding orb of curly hair, affable grin and diminutive stature looks like he'd be as comfortable wielding a miniature fishing rod by a garden pond as sporting the starched tuxedo of a concert pianist or a rocker's ripped jeans. "I did that, but never as fully as Gabe."

Kahane's roving interests extend way beyond music. Tomes by Plato and Proust in their original languages line the bookshelves of the sunny, low-slung home that the musician shares with his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist, reflecting his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. Kahane recently completed a master's degree in classics at the University of Colorado, inspired by a desire to understand the relationship between classical literature and music more deeply.

"At age 50, Jeff had decided that Beethoven and Mozart were still not quite enough, so he'd determined to read Greek for himself," said the composer John Adams, who has known Kahane for almost 40 years. "That's a measure of the man."

Notwithstanding his ever-careening extra-curricular pursuits, Kahane's commitment to classical music has achieved startling results. When he began his tenure as LACO's music director in 1997, the organization, founded in 1968, was at a low point. (Kahane was hired after a two-year search following Christof Perick's resignation.)

"The orchestra was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. The musicians were demoralized, and the relationships between the players, staff and board were abysmal," said Kahane, who until recently also held down long-standing music directorships with the Santa Rosa and Colorado symphonies. "I wasn't oblivious to the challenges, but I was convinced that by sheer force of will and love of music I could turn things around."

Things have indeed turned around since then. According to Rachel Fine, the orchestra's executive director, subscriptions have more than doubled during Kahane's tenure, as have the number of concerts the orchestra presents each season. And LACO's budget has soared, growing from around $1.5 million to $4 million. LACO is one of few established chamber orchestras in the United States, comparable in some ways with the St. Paul (Minn.) Chamber Orchestra and Orchestra of St. Luke's (in New York).

But LACO's renaissance has not been easy. Kahane has struggled to broaden the musical palate of the orchestra's largely conservative-minded audience. "At the beginning of Jeffrey's tenure, LACO regularly received negative audience feedback when new works were performed," said Fine, who followed Kahane's career for years before joining LACO last November.

Today's concertgoers seem more open. The orchestra's "Sound Investment" commissioning program attracted funding from 55 audience members last year, up from a handful a decade ago. The upcoming season's first program includes works by Osvaldo Golijov and LACO's composer-in-residence Derek Bermel, alongside Kahane's take on Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. In 2012, LACO will present the composer and pianist Timothy Andres' mash-up of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto, which irreverently re-imagines Mozart's incomplete left-hand part.

"I think of the 'musical experience' as the product of multiple collaborations," said Kahane, who in addition to leading LACO will be spending much of the fall in New York, undertaking a residency at the Juilliard School and conducting the New York Philharmonic. "I want our audiences to be active participants in the process of music-making. And I think that an interest in the new goes a long way towards fostering a culture of living music, without which the art form is doomed."

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'Four Saints in Three Acts': Lovely NonsenseBAY CITIZEN

Gertrude Stein-mania continues with a new staging of her extremely untraditional opera

Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s 1928 opera, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” currently running through the end of the weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, makes so little sense that you have no choice but to surrender to its nonsense.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad night of theater. There’s pleasure and catharsis in the process of letting go and simply allowing the festive tunes and nursery rhyme-like words wash over you like bath-time in childhood.

“Gertrude was wonderful to set to music because there was no temptation to illustrate the words,” Thomson, an American composer who was an expat in Paris along with Stein in the 1920s, once remarked of his chief collaborator. “For the most part you didn't know what it meant anyway, so you couldn't make it like birdie babbling by a brook or heavy, heavy hangs my heart.”

Ensemble Parallèle, a San Francisco-based producer of avant-garde operas, captures much of the madness of the heavily abstract work – which, despite what the title says, features some 20 saints and spans four acts – with a playful, exquisitely sung and elegantly designed production. The opera is being produced in collaboration with YBCA and SFMOMA, which has extended hours for its popular exhibit of Stein’s art collection currently running through September 6.

The only thing that gets in the way of complete submission to the opera’s many charms is the creative team’s insistence on imposing heavy-handed visual imagery on a scenario that is better left inscrutable.

Packed with kitten-chasing-its-own-tail locutions like “St. Ignatius and more. St. Ignatius with as well. St. Ignatius need not be feared…,” Stein’s gibberish-laced text certainly posed a challenge for Thomson. He was forced to hang his music on its sounds and rhythms rather than its meaning. Stein didn’t even bother to assign parts in her libretto to individual singers, causing the composer to refer to her effort as “a quite impressive obscurity.”

Yet it would be disingenuous to label “Four Saints” as totally abstract. Underneath the folly of the wordplay, which Ensemble Parallèle’s unintimidated ensemble cast articulates with utmost clarity and a strong dose of humor, lies the vague contours of a thematic framework.

Over the course of the 50-minute work, a master and mistress of ceremonies (Compère and Commère) lead us through a series of tableaux in which the 16th century Spanish saints (Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila) consort with a coterie of saint colleagues in various monastic and garden settings. Stein and Thomson use the earthly struggles, deaths and transmogrifications of the beatified pair, as metaphors for the lives of artists.

When “Four Saints” was first performed in 1934, initially at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and then on Broadway where it enjoyed a very successful run, the work’s various abstractions must have seemed of little consequence in comparison to the revolutionary nature of the staging.

“Four Saints” was unlike any opera that American audiences had seen up to that point. Stein’s nonsensical words and the pastoral simplicity of Thomson’s music were just part of the modernist package. The fact that the opera featured a genre-defying all-black cast (“Porgy and Bess” wouldn’t appear until the following year) was enough to keep people talking about the import of “Four Saints” long after the performance ended.

As operagoers have grown accustomed to seeing non-white performers on stage in the ensuing decades, contemporary producers habitually look for other ways to get audiences thinking.

In the case of Ensemble Parallèle’s production, director and designer Brian Staufenbiel attempts to arrest modern sensibilities by inserting several strong scenic tableaux centering on the character of Saint Ignatius into the loose narrative structure. Imposingly played by the stately baritone Eugene Brancoveanu, the saint, dressed against type in satanic red, has an unusual career trajectory for a saint: he performs surgery on a prostrate dummy in an operating theater, is tried in court by his peers and ends up in the electric chair.

According to Staufenbiel’s short statement in the playbill, the mise-en-scene is meant to “explore some of society’s irrational views regarding life and death and the contradictions that surround murder and our concept of justice.”

But Brancoveanu sticks out so vividly against Staufenbiel’s plain white set brushed steel furnishings and most of the other performers on stage (who, with the exception of the gaudy, Commedia dell’Arte-outfitted Compère and Commère, are dressed in more subdued tones) that the search for meaning becomes distracting.

The visual imagery associated with Ignatius also overpowers Teresa’s place in the opera. The luminous soprano Heidi Moss paints a sympathetic portrait of the mystic, trussed up by her fellow saints as they persistently follow her about and surround her on every side, even pushing her about the stage on a giant four-poster bed. But Teresa’s flowing, lemon yellow dress can’t hold the eye while Ignatius’s crimson zoot suit roams the stage. And Staufenbiel doesn’t create as strong a symbolic narrative for the female protagonist as he does for the male one, making her fade into the background.

Overall, though, Ensemble Parallèle’s formidable creative team makes the action work. The stage is peopled with strong performers who can sing, act and dance – and draw out the silly side of the opera. The lusty bass-baritone John Bischoff as Compère and Maya Kherani, the warm-voiced and graceful soprano who plays Saint Settlement, give particularly engaging performances. Led by Nicole Paiement, the chamber orchestra plays Thomson’s folksy score with similar abandon, infusing the composer’s honky-tonk melodies with spirited lightness and precision.

Everyone involved in the production seems to revel in the opera’s cheerful strangeness. It’s a pity to ruin the fun by picking through the red robes and gibberish dialogue for meaning. As Thompson himself remarked, “The two things you never asked Gertrude, ever, were about her being a lesbian and what her writing meant.”

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Classical Music Moves From Concert Halls to CafesNEW YORK TIMES

Ever since Classical Revolution, a loose collective of top-notch, classically trained musicians, started playing chamber music at the Revolution Cafe a few years ago, this Mission District bar has been packed on Mondays — not generally a big party night in town.

“It’s usually so crowded in here that people can’t get to the bar,” said Joe Lewis, who programs the Revolution Cafe’s eclectic musical offerings, which include classical, jazz and Eastern European concerts.

While classical music performances in nontraditional spaces are nothing new — the Kronos Quartet played weekly concerts in a Mill Valley restaurant as far back as 1978 — such events have proliferated in the last decade. Lately, it has been hard to go anywhere in the Bay Area without stumbling across a wind ensemble essaying John Adams in an art gallery or a string quartet playing Beethoven in a wine bar.

In the less than five years since Charith Premawardhana, a violist, founded Classical Revolution, that organization has presented more than 500 local events featuring around 600 musicians at the Revolution Cafe; Red Poppy Art House; Yoshi’s, where it will release its first CD in October; and other spaces.

The model has proved so popular with musicians and audiences, especially young crowds, that there are now about two dozen Classical Revolution chapters worldwide, in cities including New York, Montreal and Amsterdam.

Word has spread among musicians and music lovers of the advantages of the low production costs and the pleasures of presenting and listening to classical music in a casual atmosphere. Often, musicians who experience a Classical Revolution show on their travels return to their hometowns and host similar events.

The exponential growth of Classical Revolution and other innovative chamber music entities, like the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music and Opera on Tap, point to a broader trend in classical music — with its traditionally lofty image and high ticket prices — of making it more approachable.

Even orchestras are adopting Classical Revolution-style tactics. The San Francisco Symphony’s “Davies After Hours” program features orchestral musicians playing edgy repertory in the second-tier lobby at Davies Symphony Hall, transforming it into a nightclub-like setting with a cash bar, trendy furniture and a display of local artworks. The Napa Valley Symphony is collaborating with Classical Revolution to produce events in schools and wine bars.

The Cleveland Orchestra’s chamber concerts at a bar called the Happy Dog inspired two busloads of bar patrons to attend a concert at the orchestra’s home, Severance Hall, last season.

At Monday’s soiree at the Revolution Cafe, the appealing genre-bending quality of Classical Revolution was in full force. Assorted clusters of musicians read through a variety of works, including a concerto grosso by the Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli and the Schumann Piano Quintet. A more polished performance by another part of the loose collective, the Musical Art Quintet, a string ensemble that specializes in playing music with a Latin flavor, followed the ad hoc jam session. Players switched in and out of the lineup throughout the evening and laughed when they made occasional mistakes.

“Classical Revolution isn’t your typical classical concert,” said Matthew Scherb, a lawyer based in San Francisco who said he had attended five Classical Revolution events to date. “The venue feels more like a large living room than a concert hall.”

For musicians with regular orchestra jobs, Classical Revolution provides a low-key setting for music-making. “It is very refreshing to just roll up to a bar in jeans and a baseball cap and read some music,” said Adam Luftman, the principal trumpet of the San Francisco Opera orchestra, who has participated in around 15 Classical Revolution events.

Classical Revolution also gives struggling musicians looking to build their careers some vital opportunities to perform, network and even make a little money. According to Mr. Premawardhana, musicians generally split audience donations, which amount to anything from $200 for the average Revolution Cafe session to $750 for playing at the Legion of Honor.

Despite the surge of classical music performances in alternative spaces, there will always be a place for the traditional concert hall experience, of course. Some forms of music simply demand a different kind of environment. “Certainly you can’t do a major symphonic work in a small coffee house, and a string quartet would be lost in a large armory,” said Jesse Rosen, the president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, a national support organization for symphonies. “Where the concert hall experience has an edge is that it gives complete focus and concentration to the music.”

Plus, performing classical music in nontraditional spaces often comes with drawbacks like poor acoustics, drunken audiences and the frequent comings and goings of makeshift concert settings, which can hamper the ability of a grassroots music organization to build a following. For example, Socha Café and Coda Lounge, two locations in San Francisco where Classical Revolution used to stage events, are now closed.

Not that these issues faze Mr. Premawardhana much. When the Revolution Cafe temporarily lost its entertainment license two years ago, he decided to move to the Make-Out Room, the bar across the street. Being a loose-knit shoestring operation comes with certain advantages after all. “We’re flexible,” Mr. Premawardhana said. “When things like that happen, we just make do.”

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'The Verona Project' Turns Lackluster Shakespeare Play into Gay Coming-of-Age Story Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12PIT)BAY CITIZEN

Changing a central character's gender injects new life into 'Two Gentlemen of Verona'

Of all the letters in the English language, the one that seems to have made the biggest impression on Shakespeare is “o.” In the prologue to “Henry V,” Shakespeare famously describes the theater as being like a “Wooden O” and in the Quarto of “King Lear,” the vowel conveys the titular character’s unspeakable grief as he howls it four times in a row upon hearing of his daughter Cordelia’s murder.

In “The Verona Project,” Amanda Dehnert’s world premiere musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentleman of Verona” at California Shakespeare Theater, the letter “o” has a similarly transformative effect. Through the mere act of turning “Silvia” into “Silvio,” Dehnert not only changes the gender of the character at the apex of the play’s love triangle, but in so doing, also performs a refreshingly contemporary—albeit musically inert—makeover on Shakespeare’s early comedy.

Written around 1590, “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” doesn’t show many signs of its author’s genius for plotting or poetry. Riddled with heavy-handed puns about footwear and livestock, it tells a stiff story about two young men (Valentine and Proteus) falling out over a girl (Silvia) that ends in a flurry of hard-to-buy forgiveness on the part of Proteus’ long-suffering girlfriend (Julia.)

By playfully using a simple vowel switcheroo to create a homosexual coming-of-age narrative that sees Valentine and Proteus vying for a male version of Silvia, Denhert imposes upon the play a nuanced vision of romantic love and self-knowledge that’s reminiscent of the clever identity politics in later Shakespeare comedies like “As you Like It” and “Twelfth Night.”

Like Orlando being forced to question his love for Rosalind in “As You Like It” by romancing Rosalind’s male counterfeit, Silvio in “The Verona Project” puts Proteus to the test, forcing him to question his sexual identity and discover what it truly means to trust his instincts.

This is all very zeitgeisty, of course. “The Verona Project” falls in line with several other new musical theater works recently seen on Bay Area stages such as “The Lily’s Revenge” and “Tales of the City.” These productions all focus on gay self-identity stories and implicitly call for the broader legalization of gay marriage through yawping a Whitmanesque view on bold individualism.

Dehnert’s vowel-changing antics are just one way in which “The Verona Project” shows off its individualistic colors. Set in a steampunk-inflected, cutesy-hipster fairytale landscape in which characters grow geraniums in their ovens, speak to each other long-distance using empty food cans connected by string and attempt to step out of the nightmarish shadows of their parents, the production draws in equal parts on Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen and Carl Jung.

Unlike Shakespeare, Dehnert delves deeply into the back-stories of the characters. If Silvio reacts badly to being discovered in a clinch with Valentine by his stern father, it’s ultimately, we discover, because the father hasn’t gotten over the death of Valentine’s mother. And if Julia likes to guard dark secrets about her home-life, it’s because she’s struggling to cope with the loss of both of her parents at a young age.

It’s a risky approach: in updating and transforming Shakespeare’s play in such an iconoclastic manner, Dehnert’s production can feel at times like an interactive undergraduate psychology project crossed with an endless open mic night.

Music plays a big role in the production. The stage is set up like an underground rock concert, littered with guitars, drum-kit, keyboard, amps and other musical paraphernalia. The performers sing, play and act their way through the whole musical, a feat that requires tremendous skill.

Sadly, neither the songs in “The Verona Project,” which are composed by Dehnert, nor the actors’ musicianship skills, are strong enough to support the storytelling. The mostly unmemorable musical numbers are built on tired pop music chord progressions and riffs. With the exception of the strong, lustrous voices of Adam Yazbeck and Marisa Duchowny, the singing generally verges between the unremarkable to the out-of-tune.

And there seems little reason to include lines for clarinet, French horn and trumpet when they can barely be heard over the relentless guitar and pounding drums.

Still, there’s enough that’s endearing about “The Verona Project” to make for an entertaining and thoughtful evening. One delightful aspect of the production, for instance, is Elena Wright’s Thuria, a sweet and ultra-feminine mutation of Thurio, Shakespeare’s frumpy, old male suitor to Sylvia.

Though “The Verona Project” derives much of its narrative drive from the switch from Sylvia to Sylvio, and Thurio/Thuria is only a secondary character in both the original and adaptation, Wright steals the show with her bird of paradise-like, hat-topped outfits and cheeky personality. The character might be a clotheshorse, but at some levels she’s the wisest of all. In an unexpected and thrilling departure from “Two Gentleman of Verona,” Thuria immediately sees Silvio for who he is and easily sets him free. Coming from an essentially trivial character, this statement of understanding and compassion is particularly powerful.

Over the course of three hours, “The Verona Project” travels a good distance away from Shakespeare’s text. But thanks to the letter “o,” which crops up most explicitly in the production in the song “Meaning of O,” the musical’s one engaging musical number describing the loss of words that comes with falling in love, the thread connecting Shakespeare and Dehnert remains intact.

I say O when I see you.
Oh when you see me too
Oh, oh will you turn away
If all I know to say is
Oh

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