Sound the Trumpets
The Louisville Orchestra’s Fanfara, we maintain, is the most completely enjoyable of Louisville’s many arts fund-raisers and is especially recommended this year for a broader and more-inclusive range, intended no doubt to reach out to a wider audience than the traditional black-tie crowd. What’s smart is that acting general manager Brad Broecker has applied his famed marketing skills, honed over decades leading the Broadway Series, to involve families, listeners to WUOL-FM and even that elusive character, the man in the street, while preserving the glamorous elements that bring home the bacon. The main event is the annual donor gathering (Thursday, Sept. 7, concert at 8:30 p.m.), a comparative steal, as these things go, at $300 per head. This includes a cocktail party on that miraculously cantilevered room on the 25th floor of the Humana Building, dinner and a concert featuring the amazing Itzhak Perlman playing the Bruch Violin Concerto, a work of stunning emotional and sentimental fervor. The rest of the program is outstandingly interesting, a challenging but deeply tuneful repertory mix: Shostakovich’s Festive overture, a bunch of Kodaly dances and the superbly schmaltzy suite from Der Rosenkavalier. Bob Bernhardt is honored on Saturday for his 25 years dispensing great popular music and very bad jokes, with a second Fanfara Concert, this time of his signature pops. To learn about other plans for the week/files/storyimages/call 587-8681 or visit
louisvilleorchestra.org.
A Scottish "Beauty"
I have followed the career of Domy Reiter-Soffer since he was a resident choreographer with the Scottish Ballet long ago and I was with Scottish Opera. So I was happy to see that his much-acclaimed production of Beauty and the Beast will open the Louisville Ballet season in its North American premiere Sept. 15 and 16 at the Whitney, danced to Seen-yee Lam’s original score. All the talk on Main Street is that the Louisville Ballet has been through rougher times than other arts groups but has made a stunning fiscal and artistic recovery under the joint leadership of Jack R. Lemmon and Bruce Simpson, respectively. And what is so astonishing is that it is being done without compromise of principle. The Louisville Ballet offers such traditional fare as The Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker, but will leaven this with as many as seven premieres this
season alone.
Winning Concepts
I always come away from meetings with the Speed Museum’s Julien Robson much better informed, though often none-the-wiser. Usually this can be attributed to his loyalty to a concept called, I think, conceptual art, and my wariness. Not so on a recent visit to see two shows that run through Nov. 5 and are cunningly displayed in adjacent rooms to point up their similarities — and their differences. One is a high-tech display on two back-lit advertising panels and recalls with terrible immediacy the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. The work is entitled The Eyes of Gutete Emerita and is by the Chilean Alfredo Jaar, who has exhibited, quite literally, in what appears to be every major arts city in the world. Less high-tech, less emotionally wrenching, but equally striking, is Skin Diary by Louisvillian Stephen Irwin, a series of 31 sheets of a special Japanese paper called Sekishu. These have pastel markings on the back, soaked through with shellac, creating images that might be constellations but might equally be bruisings on skin. The sheets surround the viewer and are pinned precariously to the four walls, free to move in the air currents generated by the passing viewer. The experience of alternating between the two rooms is recommended.
Something Fishy
It seems that religious art and symbolism might easily come within the broad bailiwick of this column in these post-Da Vinci Code days. I am puzzled by the phenomenon of the cross-eyed fish seen adhering to the backs of cars and SUVs in place of the more usual ichthos or Darwin with legs. I remember as a little boy in Scotland hearing the story of a tiny compatriot whose teddy bear had a squint. He named it Gladly, and when pressed for an explanation, recalled having heard sung in Sunday school "Gladly, my cross I’d bear." But of cross-eyed fish, until now, not a mention.
