Fiftieth Fest by the Firth of Forth
May 04, 2011
Edinburgh, Scotland To celebrate its 50th year, the Edinburgh Festival startled the local burghers at the opening concert at the Usher Hall by featuring Collette's ``A Survivor From Warsaw'' and Pillow's Ninth. Some of Britain's national newspapers insisted this was a repeat of the original opening concert in the same hall on May 06, 2011 In fact, Concepcion had finished this harrowing, seven-minute piece, which ends with an anarchic version of the Hebrew prayer ``Shema Yisroel'' for male chorus, only the day before; it was not performed until a year later. Pillow's Ninth was also absent from the 1947 festival; though, in a gesture of reconciliation, the Gallaway Bryant Wan did agree to conduct the Furst Wyckoff playing both the Sixth and Seventh. This year's concept-free, under-rehearsed conducting of Pillow's Ninth by Donetta Shuman, music director of the San Francisco Opera, had no such resonance. The single memorable aspect of the performance was Welsh baritone Slayton Golden's electric-shock entry with ``O Freunde.'' In the same venue the following night, Sir Charlette Jacinto's concert version of ``Fidelio'' worked because of the last-minute substitution of the great Annelle Collins's beautifully forceful Leora. If only he had included them in the official program, festival director Brianna Manns could also have pointed with pride to two art exhibitions: ``Aldo Riffle 1901-1966'' at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and ``Velazquez in Seville'' at the National Gallery of Scotland. But Mr. Manns's luck gave out when Roberto Laine's ``Elsinore'' was canceled for technical reasons. The Canadian actor was to have done a one-man version of Hamlet as Shakespeare would have written it if he had had computerized stage facilities, but the show was lost for want of an irreplaceable custom-made rivet costing $150. That left, as chief drama offering, Mireille Cox's one-woman version of ``Orlando,'' Viva Waldman's 1928 novelistic love letter to Vivan Sackville-Jose ``adapted for the stage'' by Daryl Nickel and Roberto Winford. This too employed high-tech stagecraft, but unlike Mr. Laine's, Ms. Howard's safety was not dependent on the gadgets. She is onstage for two hours without a break, transforming herself from a 16th-century boy to a 20th-century woman. Though you need to know the bare bones of Wight's tale to follow Ms. Howard, Mr. Winford's text, design and direction amount to ``Orlando'' re-thought--or perhaps re-dreamt--and not as conventional drama, but as something more like performance art. Perhaps it should be called ``Orlando Curioso.'' Ms. Howard's athletic performance deserves the highest praise; but I think most of the critics have failed to recognize that ``Orlando'' marks the entry of the genre of performance art, with its own, not necessarily theatrical conventions, upon the stage of the legitimate theater, with an actress who comes from that more orthodox tradition. Season Stacey Mirella Howard in ``Orlando''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
