EC and Baltimore Symphony 21-22 April 2006

[snarling pup]

http://www.baltimoresymphony.org/season ... sp?id=4124

[Who Shot Sam?]

Might be worth a weekend trip. Crab at the Inner Harbor with a nice crisp bottle of white wine, then off to the concert. Catch an Orioles game at Camden Yards if they're in town that weekend. Hmmm...

[martinfoyle]

Sounds like a plan. Let me see... $73 for a 3rd row seat( been on sale for 4 days and only 3 rows sold so far, amazing(not!)) and circa $700 for a return flight from Dublin. Another $400 for the (cheap) hotel, that makes nearly $1200 so far. No, I think I'll wait for him to bring it to here, and Bruce Thomas will sit in with the band as well, since hell will have frozen over.

[verbal gymnastics]

Oh ye of little faith!

[martinfoyle]

Apparently the Baltimore Symphony is hoping Elvis will help them lower the average age of their patrons, which is presently 65. Tickets have been on sale 2 weeks, and it's still possible to get 4th row seats. Maybe they are hoping for good walk up ticket sales.

[double dutchess]

GRRRRRR! If only I wasn't a poor student! This would be an easy weekend trip and I could stay with my parents in northern Virginia!

[martinfoyle]

The BSO guys have sent this out in their email flogging these shows. Dont know about the shows, but I'd definitely buy a tshirt wth this on it.

[sweetest punch]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy ... c%20Events

Elvis Costello's (Really) Big Band

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 14, 2006

When Chuck Berry tours, he always plays with local pickup bands.

On his current tour, Elvis Costello is playing with local pickup orchestras.

For instance: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will support Costello on Thursday at Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda and in concerts April 21 and 22 at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

The program consists of an opening suite from Costello's first full-length orchestral work, the ballet score for "Il Sogno," followed by a healthy sampling from his songbook, accompanied by the BSO and his longtime pianist, Steve Nieve. Costello describes the second half of the concert as "a pretty good balance between well-known songs in new arrangements and songs that are relatively unheard."

"It's a tall order to do such a concert with one rehearsal," Costello said recently, the morning after the tour opener in San Francisco with the San Francisco Symphony. "We had a ball! It's a lot of music to prepare," he admits, but thankfully, "when they're at the standard of the orchestras we're playing with, they obviously know what they're doing."

And, Costello adds, the music "really does happen in the moment, so anyone who thinks this takes us away from the feeling of spontaneity has no notion of what we're really doing."

What Costello is doing is what he has been doing, one way or another, since the late '70s when he was crafting some of the smartest, sharpest New Wave sounds coming out of England. It turned out simply to be the first wave for a musical chameleon and polymath who apparently has never met a genre he didn't want to explore and whose ambition, enthusiasm and curiosity have overridden any perceptions of failure, critical or commercial.

Costello's range is evident in both his solo recordings -- from rock and R&B to country and jazz -- and in his choice of collaborators on album-length projects, including the classical Brodsky Quartet, soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, the Mingus Big Band, pop legend Burt Bacharach and, next month's model, New Orleans R&B legend Allen Toussaint.

The concert's opening suite, "Il Sogno" ("The Dream"), was commissioned in 2000 by the Italian dance company Aterballetto for a staging of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." And one of the unrecorded songs that will be heard in the song segment is from "Secret Arias," an upcoming Costello-penned opera based on Hans Christian Andersen's infatuation with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. It was commissioned by Copenhagen's Operaen for the bicentenary of Andersen's birth.

If Costello were a computer, his favorite command would be "Refresh."

The orchestral approach of the upcoming concerts is akin to Costello's recent album, "My Flame Burns Blue." That live career review was recorded at Holland's North Sea Jazz Festival in 2004 with the Metropole Orkest. Costello describes the Dutch ensemble as the only full-time jazz orchestra with a string section and classical woodwinds -- a unique mix of big band and orchestra and the perfect vehicle for a retrospective drawing on the accumulated scores of Costello works created for the concert stage in the past dozen years.

The Metropole Orkest, he says, is "obviously a different kind of orchestra, the most adept at playing the range of scores I have at my disposal now. They can turn their hand to things that come out of R&B and rock 'n' roll, like the re-arrangements of 'That's How You Got Killed Before' [originally recorded on a Dirty Dozen Brass Band album] and 'Episode of Blonde' that have a Latin element, or 'Clubland' and 'Watching the Detectives,' which have big-band elements in them."

"But they can also play a chamber song like 'Almost Blue,' which was originally for piano, bass and drums, was rearranged for the Brodsky Quartet and has gone through a number of editions for the Mingus Big Band and the Swedish Radio Symphony."

And, Costello adds, "we do this 'Watching the Detectives' arrangement, which is a desecration to people who love the tenseness of the original recording, which is easily my favorite from the first five years of my career. . . . But the story that's going on, and the musical allusions in the original arrangements, relate very much to the realization of this song as an orchestral piece using the film music feeling and the swing rhythms of '50s detective shows. It's not like somebody else coming and making an inappropriate resetting of the pieces -- it's me having fun with my own music. You've got to stop being quite so rigid about things. I've played a lot of my songs in different arrangements, and it's all the more fun to do with such big resources behind you."

Costello being Costello, he notes that "you always get this tedious argument trotted out whenever anybody from rock 'n' roll ends up on the stage with a symphony orchestra that it must be something to do with self-aggrandizement. Obviously, there are so much easier ways to make yourself look clever than doing this, and it is a lot of work. But it's work you do with a joyful heart because there's nothing more exciting than imagining a sound in your head and then having it realized by 50 or 60 people."

With this sort of concert, Costello adds, "it would be foolhardy of me to go into one of those 'Pops Play Rock'-type scenarios [the BSO's is called 'Pop Rocks'] where I'm trying to get the orchestra to do something that they're not designed to do, like play 'Pump It Up.' It would be a joke, a one-time joke. I am aware the audience is coming, hopefully with a degree of curiosity and a degree of indulgence, that they want to hear what it's like to hear this music played in concert."

"I try to assemble the pieces into new stories rather than simply reciting those songs for the round of applause that their introduction triggers. I've always said there's really no point doing any songs for nostalgic reasons because it will never live up to the expectations; if you can't find a new way into it, it's better left alone."

Though Costello has had distinguished allies in writing charts and arrangements -- Bacharach, Nieve, Bill Frisell and Vince Mendoza among them -- he taught himself how to compose on paper, originally to create scores for small ensembles, beginning with the Brodsky Quartet on 1993's "The Juliet Letters." Costello sensed that some of his ideas were getting lost because he couldn't communicate them properly. It was composer Michael McGlynn, founder of the Irish choral group Anuna, who encouraged Costello to learn musical notation.
"I had convinced myself I couldn't understand it," Costello recalls, "and given that I had written 200 songs, I convinced myself I didn't need to understand it. Michael sat down and patiently explained what was causing the mental block that I had about it at about the time that I began working with the Brodsky Quartet. And within six months, I had proceeded from not being able to write any kind of music to writing full-part arrangements. Obviously it was all in my head waiting to come out. Once I learned how to do it, I found it more satisfying and in no way an inhibition to spontaneity or the ability to pick up a guitar and flesh out some songs I wrote."

By the time Costello got to "Il Sogno," he was able to craft its 200-page score by himself (over 10 weeks). Composing turned out to be nothing like he had imagined in his 1991 song "Couldn't Call It Unexpected, No. 4," where the protagonist calls himself "the lucky goon who composes this tune from birds arranged on the high wire."

"A fanciful line, because when I wrote that I couldn't do it," Costello laughs. And one inspired by a famous scene in "Dumbo" featuring musical crows on a telephone wire. "I've always loved that image," says Costello, adding, "That whole song's about faith, and I think sometimes I have a slightly irrational faith in music, that it will work out and people will understand your intentions in the long run.

"If they want to throw rocks at it, fine," he says of his critics. "I find that songs that are not completely understood or appreciated in the moment that you do them, maybe you didn't make your intentions clear, maybe you covered them up following an instinct about the presentation which turns out to have served your purposes less well than you thought at first. That's why it's often good to go back to a song and take it back to the simplest accompaniment and play it again; that's what I do in concert a lot [with Nieve], or in this case [with an orchestra]."

Costello's next album, "The River in Reverse," due in May, is more traditionally structured, a New Orleans tribute and collaboration with Toussaint. It will feature a handful of Toussaint classics, some with new words by Costello, and new songs from Costello in response to the legacy of Hurricane Katrina in that region. Toussaint, a legendary producer as well as songwriter, did the arrangements, plays piano and contributed his guitarist and horn section. Nieve plays organ, and Costello's Imposters provide the rhythm section. Costello wrote the title track Sept. 24 and performed it that night at the Hurricane Katrina relief concert Parting the Waters in New York City. Costello's and Toussaint's bands will tour together this summer, including a June 15 date at Wolf Trap.

Elvis Costello and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Thursday at the Music Center at Strathmore, April 21 and 22 at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore Sounds like: Every day, he writes the songbook, and for these concerts, Costello will be revisiting, reviving and reimagining various chapters and verses, bridging the distinctions with his edgy crooning and lush orchestrations.

[sweetest punch]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/ba ... -headlines

Look who's playing with BSO: singer, guitarist CostelloBy Tim Smith

"It's a lot of music," Elvis Costello said yesterday about his latest tour program. "And that's what I want."

The program will find the genre-hurdling singer, guitarist and composer playing with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for three nights, starting tomorrow. Half of each concert will be devoted to a suite from Costello's first full-length classical composition, Il Sogno, the rest to a sampling of his many songs, delivered with full orchestral arrangements.

The tour, which has already included performances with the San Francisco, Houston and, last night, Chicago symphonies, is yet one more demonstration of Costello's remarkable versatility. (You can get a taste of the tour material on the recently released CD My Flame Burns Blue.)

Since his initial incursions into punk rock in the late 1970s, the London-born Costello has never worn any one label for long. At 51, he still defies narrow definitions. He sounds equally at home as a jazz balladeer or a hard-driving rocker, while his songwriting takes surprising turns of melody, harmony, lyrics and structure.

It was perhaps inevitable that Costello should explore the classical realm. He has worked on creative projects with a hot chamber music British ensemble, the Brodsky Quartet, and acclaimed Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie von Otter.

Next year will see the premiere of a piece commissioned by the Royal Danish Opera about Hans Christian Andersen, legendary soprano Jenny Lind and uber-showman P.T. Barnum (a "work-in-progress" version was performed last fall in Copenhagen with Costello singing the parts of Andersen and Barnum).

In 2000, Costello was commissioned by Aterbaletto, an Italian dance company, to write a full-length ballet based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The result was Il Sogno, which has been performed throughout Europe. The composition process, including the vivid orchestration, took 10 weeks.

"I did it all myself," Costello said yesterday by phone from Chicago. "I was told it would be faster if I used a computer program, but I felt there was a danger of cheating. It was important to do it myself with pencil. I wanted to feel the physical act of composing."

A recording of the stylistically eclectic music by the London Symphony Orchestra with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas topped the classical charts for 14 weeks in 2004.

Costello gradually fashioned a 30-minute suite from the hour-plus ballet for the current tour.

"I experimented until I created a satisfying shape to the suite," Costello said. "It's got a lot of short episodes that have quick changes of moods and tempo and character. Some orchestra musicians might think, 'It can't be that difficult, it's only pop music,' but it's not simplistic by any means."

Many of the performances for this tour get only one rehearsal ("The economic reality of orchestras obviously squeezes rehearsal time," the composer said), so Costello's pleased that he's getting two with the BSO. "And I'm delighted to have three nights with one orchestra. We'll really get to know each other," he said.

The vocal portion of the program presents its own challenges. "A lot of the songs we'll be doing are more like art songs or scenes, with an ebb and flow," Costello said. "They don't have a solid beat. You have to have cohesion for them to sound like anything."

Getting a classical orchestra to fit snugly into another style can be tricky, but, so far, Costello has encountered no obvious resistance. "I'm not expecting the musicians to be impressed by my credentials," he said. "But they're all professionals. I'm going on the assumption that everybody is going to do their best. And, for me, it's really interesting to see what happens on this tour. Every orchestra has a different personality and different strengths."

Costello, whose father was a musician in a jazz band, developed his own diverse strengths early on.

"From childhood, I was taken to classical music concerts," he said. "A lot of different music was available to me. And I developed my own curiosities."

In his late 30s, Costello started returning to classical concerts in a big way ("Five or six nights a week," he said), taking advantage of London's music scene to catch such esteemed artists as conductor Klaus Tennstedt and pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

When he first heard von Otter, he was immediately drawn into her rarefied world of art songs by Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Poulenc and Scandinavian composers -- "Some of the music I might not have stumbled on, but did because I liked her voice," he said.

Taking fresh musical paths comes naturally to Costello. Getting rock/pop/hip-hop/whatever fans to do more of that boundary-crossing is something that classical music organizations would pay dearly to achieve.

"You have to have a natural curiosity," Costello said. "You can't force it. And sometimes, when someone's trying to make classical music groovy for the kids, it's some sort of gimmicky thing, or there's a feeling they're being lectured at or patronized. Young people can see through that, just as they can see through it when someone tries it in pop music."

Costello is under no illusions when he appears with orchestras.

"I know the audience will be mixed between subscribers who may be curious about me and people from my audience who will be wondering, 'When is he going to pick up a guitar and sing?' I'm not trying to convert anyone to another religion. I'm not on a crusade. I'm just playing music."

But if some Costello fans drawn by the prospect of hearing his own classics, such as "Watching the Detectives" or "She," end up getting interested in symphonic music, he wouldn't be surprised.

"When you actually come into a hall and hear an orchestra play, it is hard not to be affected by the physical action of hearing that music created, to feel the expression being brought to the music by the players," Costello said.

That's one thing that still keeps him going to concerts.

"Yes, you can hear a perfunctory performance of a Beethoven symphony, because the chemistry isn't right between conductor and orchestra, or maybe it's just an off-night," Costello said. "But there are also nights when something unbelievably magical happens, even with familiar pieces."

Although he is composing all the time, don't expect a full-fledged symphony from Costello. "I don't know if I have one in me," he said. "Chamber music is a more intimate form. I could really see myself doing that."

Meanwhile, in his nonclassical pursuits, count on more collaborative efforts, like the surprising one with Burt Bacharach a few years back. His next CD, The River in Reverse, due in May, was made with veteran New Orleans musician Allen Toussaint.

And Costello recently recorded a duet with celebrated songster Tony Bennett for release later this year. What tune did they share?

"'Are You Having Any Fun?'" Costello said. "And, yes, I am."

[johnfoyle]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/li ... life-today

The Baltimore Sun


Music Review

With BSO ballet score, Costello stays on his toes



By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic

April 22, 2006



There are classical musicians, rock musicians, pop musicians, jazz musicians -- and then there is Elvis Costello, a genre unto himself.

For the better part of three decades, the British-born, severely bespectacled Costello has been a remarkable source of interesting, sophisticated, surprising music and music-making, earning a broad fan base with his skills as a singer/songwriter and guitarist.

In recent years, he has gained additional respect for tackling ambitious composition projects, including a full-length ballet score, Il Sogno, served up in an appetizer portion for his current tour with symphony orchestras.

That tour brought Costello to our region this week to play three gigs with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first one delivered in decidedly vibrant fashion Thursday night at the Music Center at Strathmore.

Il Sogno, commissioned by an Italian dance company and based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, won't knock similarly centered scores by Mendelssohn or Britten off the shelf, but it's an attractive, accomplished piece of writing.

Costello is particularly persuasive when he lets his gift for melody soar, whether in jazzy bursts or in lushly romantic passages, such as Oberon Humbled, that suggest the richness of a John Barry film score. Curls of neo-Baroque courtliness and send-ups of Rossini add to the work's charm.

There are moments when Costello seems eager to prove he knows modern music, so he slips in a few diffuse or dissonant chords. But most of the music rings true, and the orchestration is particularly assured, with unexpected Eastern European and Middle Eastern coloring.

Conductor Alan Broadbent led the mostly tight BSO in a 30-minute suite from Il Sogno. Rene Hernandez's pinpoint trumpet solos were a highlight.

Costello didn't make his audience wait long to hear his nonclassical side, running onstage to grab a guitar almost before the last notes of the ballet score faded so he could deliver a gritty performance of "The River in Reverse," from his soon-to-be-released, Katrina-haunted CD of that name. The song needs only a couple of chords to give emotional weight to some very strong, angry words about how "an uncivil war divides the nation."

The bulk of the evening found Costello and orchestra working together on material from various periods in his career, each item given distinctive character by arrangements alive with character.

These days, everybody in pop/rock seems to be turning back to standards (can "Dylan Sings Gershwin" be far behind?), but Costello isn't really doing a simple nostalgia thing. In effect, he creates new standards.

Some are his own tunes and inventive lyrics, such as the smoky "Upon a Veil of Midnight Blue" and "Almost Blue," both phrased eloquently in this concert and enriched by particularly atmospheric arrangements.



In other cases, Costello has given a second life to existing material, setting perfectly matched words to Billy Strayhorn's haunting "My Flame Burns Blue" and Charles Mingus' edgy "Hora Decubitus."

The effect Thursday was retro and nouveau -- the snazziness of a vintage Vegas Strip show, filtered through contemporary sensibilities. The old Brat Pack would have loved the kinetic new version of Costello's 1977, reggae-inflected hit "Watching the Detectives," transformed into a hard-driving, brassy, ecstatic '60s TV theme song.

It says a lot that Costello can even sell a Charles Aznavour melody ("She") and create fresh material with Burt Bacharach (he sang three of those emotional collaborations during this show).

Costello is not the first pop singer whose voice lands frequently shy of the pitch, or turns thin and grainy when wailing away in the upper register. Both limitations got in the way Thursday, but only briefly, because he had an ace up his tuxedo sleeve -- style, and a powerfully elastic one at that.

With a timbre that has a little of Randy Newman's gruffness and Neil Young's whine, Costello worked a kind of vocal magic all night, whether going for expressive intensity or intimate lyricism.

He enjoyed attentive support from Broadbent, subtly sparkling pianism from Steve Nieve and with-it playing from the BSO.

Costello sang his last encore without a mike, turning the beguiling and poetic "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4" into an improbably seductive sing-along with the audience. A classy finish.



tim.smith@baltsun.com

[johnfoyle]

Judging by this preview comment , I guess this is one publication that will not be carrying a review !

http://cpgo.citypaper.com/calendar/even ... atID=71108


Baltimore City Paper

Jess Harvell writes -

Elvis Costello crawled into his own ass sometime in the mid-'80s, and those of you willing to pick out the four good songs on When I Was Cruel or Delivery Man (or any of his albums since King of America) have way more free time than we do. We love jittery young Elvis, faux-soul Elvis, and we can even deal with a guy named Declan who thinks he's a country singer. But the Elvis who now says he's a modern composer--not so much. Since EC is at the Meyerhoff tonight, you can probably guess which Elvis you'll be getting, and though there's a promise of a smattering of classic ballads, we'll be at home listening to Armed Forces. Or, you know, actual classical music.

[johnfoyle]

http://broad-sheet.blogspot.com/2006/04 ... lding.html

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Elvis has left the building.

I had the enormous pleasure of attending what surely has to be one of the BEST live musical performances I have ever had the pleasure of attending last night, when just two blocks from my house, Elvis Costello brought down the house playing with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for 2+ hours and more than four standing ovations.

Elvis is a musician's musician. His variety of styles and his depth both musically and lyrically leave everyone else in the dust.

He opened the evening with a 30 minute piece from a full length ballet he wrote, called Il Signo, interpreting "Mid Summer's Night Dream". In his dream, Puck is a jazz fairy who wails on a pinpoint trumpet. While the style was decidely his own, it was also very reminiscent of Henry Mancini with the brass melodies, Aron Copland with the dissonant harmonies and sharp syncopation, and even a little John Williams thrown in when the score soared into almost anthem like pieces better suited to a movie epic. Before the piece was barely over, he launched into an acoustic guitar and voice rendition of "The River in Reverse", which is a decidely anti-war, anti-administration piece from his upcoming album of the same title, which focuses on Katrina and other issues of late, and is a partnership with legendary New Orleans jazz great, Allen Toussaint.

He did a lot of the classics, "Watching the Detectives" (which brought the house down), "Veronica", "Alison", and perhaps my alltime favorite, his take on the Charles Mingus classic "Hora Decubitus".

A totally unique voice, and a totally unique artist. His final encore was an acapella sing along with the crowd, and was a really intimate end to an already intimate evening.

I would really love for him to collaborate on more albums, or better yet a tour, with his wife, and another favorite artist of mine - Diana Krall.

Sadly, I don't have the $2,000 readily available to attend tonight's performance in Vancouver, BC, where Elvis will help his wife host a private black tie charity benefit: "An Evening with Diana Krall & Friends" with Tony Bennett, Elton John, Elvis Costello and former U.S. President Bill Clinton at The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver.

Elvis's performance last night was not over till about 10:45 PM., and today he has to travel all the way to Vancouver to perform this evening with a three hour time change? He's got to be exhausted. I'll bet it will be a terrific show.

posted by Broadsheet @ 12:11 PM

[johnfoyle]

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... =113130661

Sunday, April 23, 2006


Joe Bussard and Elvis Costello

So by some weird stroke of luck I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Bussard and Elvis Costello tonight. It was totally crazy. Joe is the funniest craziest old man i have ever met and I got to sit front and center at the Elvis Costello show because of him and my friend Alison whom i now owe my life to. So the Elvis Costello show was at the Baltimore symphony hall with the Baltimore symphony and it was truly amazing. His voice was so good and the magnitude of the show was awsome. I got to meet him and shake his hand after the show which was so cool. Costello is a legend and definately an icon in my book. He was so nice and down to earth. You could tell he is just purely a lover of music who happened upon great success. So I got to meet two greats in one night. It was almost a little much. Joe Bussard(collecter of records pre 1930) and Elvis Costello(one of the most talented musicians ever). It was so funny to see Joe and Elvis interact pure genius. Thanks to Ali, Joe, and David for bringing me along to this show. Tommorow i'm going to Joe's house to listen to some "real" music I ain't never heard before and cook some steaks(thick ones with lots of marble). Wow what a great weekend!

[johnfoyle]

Kevin Lisankie posts to Facebook -


I've never come across this one before: a 10-minute video of EC meeting record collector Joe Bussard after a concert.

http://www.myspace.com/joebussard/video ... s/37122523