Podcasts

Boxtales Theatre Co. Interview 11-4-2014

Boxtales Theatre 20th Anniversary Festival

Boxtales - 'Hero Twins' from the Popul Vuh

Boxtales – ‘Hero Twins’ from the Popul Vuh

Boxtales Theatre Company is unique in a number of ways. First, they perform only original works based on mythology and folk stories. Second, their physical approach combines mime, acrobatics, juggling, dance, Brazilian capoeira, and live music. Next are the masks and puppetry, strange and wonderful artifacts constructed especially for the troupe. Finally, their pared-down approach balances the spectacle of theater with the intimacy of storytelling. Although based in Santa Barbara, Boxtales is in fact a touring professional company, serving surrounding cities, the Bay Area and even Olympia, Washington.

In celebration of their 20th anniversary, Boxtales will return to the Lobero Theatre to stage four newly upgraded shows from their repertory this weekend: Prince Rama and the Monkey King, The Odyssey, Leyendas De Duende: Magical Tales from Latin America, and B’Rer Rabbit and Other Trickster Tales. I recently caught up with Andrews, and company principals Matthew Tavianini and Marie Ponce to discuss the big milestone.

Classical Now – June 2, 2014

June 2, 2014 – Hour 1

June 2, 2014 – Hour 2

June is bustin’ out all over, and Summer is only a few weeks away. I start with that tribute from the soundtrack to “Carousel.”  Although no one really knows when Scott Joplin’s birthday is, some place it at the beginning of June, and that is good enough for me. We listen to some of the piano roll “recordings” by the great American stride pianist. Marvin Hamlisch comes up on the birthday calendar, and conveniently, too, with his settings of Joplin for the film, “The Sting.”  We’ll also hear music from Georges Bizet and Fred Hersch.

Classical Now – May 26, 2014, Memorial Day

Classical Now – May 26, 2014 hour 1

Classical Now – May 26, 2014 hour 2

We celebrate Memorial Day with music by Charles Ives, “Decoration Day” from his Holiday Symphony. May 25 was the death anniversary of British composer Gustav Holst; while May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday.  We pull it all together with Holst’s setting of “A Dirge for Two Veterans.”  We also hear Holst’s symphonic poem, “Indra.”  “New World a-Comin’
” by Duke Ellington will be played. Sprinkled throughout are a few marches from John Philip Sousa.

Henry David Thoreau – Still in the Mail: Messages from the Imagination

This week we air a lecture presented by Joseph Miller at the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara on May 31, 2014.

The Institute of World Culture was co-founded in Santa Barbara in 1976, the United States

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

bicentennial year, by visionary philosopher Raghavan Iyer and his wife, Nandini, both professors at UC Santa Barbara at the time.

For nearly forty years the IWC has presented seminars, lectures, performances and study groups with the aim of promoting universal fellowship through understanding. “A world culture,” states its declaration, “is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This lecture is entitled, “Henry David Thoreau—Still in the Mail: Messages from the Imagination,” and centers on Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and his correspondence with Harrison Blake.

Gabriel Kahane – The Ambassador

According to some critics the classical concert hall for decades has come to resemble a church or museum, a glass-case sanctuary for the ritualization of the yesterday’s revelations. According to composer, vocalist and songwriter, Gabriel Kahane, this is all a passing phase, an anomaly in the time-line of Western music, a “dark moment of the kind of High Modernism of the 1950s where the academy kind of strangled populism,” he explained to me by phone in January 2014. “If you take that aberration out of the narrative, there’s always been a connection between the vernacular and what’s in the concert hall.”

Photo by Jen Snow

Photo by Jen Snow

Connection is what Kahane is all about, with his broad association between genres, artists and styles. He is representative of a new breed of the classically-conversant who are jumping ship, taking advantage of breakthroughs in the categorical hull by earlier daring cross-over artists, and navigating entirely new vessels and routes. The son of concert pianist and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Music Director, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel’s mélange of projects have included orchestral and chamber compositions, pop songs and musical theater. A pianist, guitarist and banjo player, he gained a kind of cult status for his witty song-cycle, Craigslistlieder, which set actual texts from the eponymous classified ad web site. At the same time, his compositional prowess has earned him commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet. Last seen in Santa Barbara at Hahn Hall in 2011 with premier cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Kahane returned on February 4, 2014, courtesy of UCSB Arts & Lectures, to rock SOhO Music Club with like-minded chamber group, yMusic.

We spoke of Kahane’s signing on to Sony Masterworks, and his new release, “The Ambassador,” an album inspired by Los Angeles Architecture.

James Welch and the Fabulous Flentrop

In 1977 James Welch was offered the job of Adjunct Professor and Lecturer in Organ at UCSB, a position he held for 16 years. During his tenure, Welch performed at least 25 recitals on the Flentrop organ, and sponsored regular recitals by his students. But Welch’s departure in 1993 marked the suspension of active life for the Flentrop. No one knew the instrument so well, and few have known it since. With a dwindling of Music Department interest and funds (and no Sunday service to keep its bellows regularly inspired—as would be the case for a campus chapel organ) the instrument has languished half its life largely unused.

Full essay here.

I interviewed organist James Welch by phone just prior to his recital, sponsored by UCSB Dept. of Music, at Lotte Lehman Concert Hall on Friday, January 10, 7:30 pm.

Classical Now 5-12-14 – hours 1 & 2

May 12 is a big one on the classical calendar. Spring birthdays for two great French composers, Jules Messenet and Gabriel Faure. It is also the death anniversaries of Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. Music from all of them coming up in the program We’ll get our daily dose of vitamin B from Friedrich Gulda, hear from the Muungano National Choir of Kenya, and thank Scottish guitarist Paul Galbraith for his superb recital last week at the Lobero.