Copious Notes

George Foreman, director of the Norton Center for the Arts, shown standing in the middle of Newlin Hall in August, as the theater was undergoing a rennovation, including replacing all the seats. Photo by Rich Copley | staff.

George Foreman, the impresario who made the Norton Center for the Arts an unlikely cultural hotspot, will leave at the end of this year to become the new director of the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center.

“I’m really excited, flattered and honored,” Foreman said, when reached at his office. “They have some wonderful things going on down there and I hope to build on that.”

The University of Georgia’s president is former Centre College President Michael F. Adams.

“It is a nice set of circumstances,” Foreman said of the prospect of working for Adams again. “I welcome the opportunity to renew that association.”

Foreman said Adams did not pursue him for the position but that Adams’ presence did pique his interest in the opportunity at a time when, “I wasn’t looking for a job.”

At Georgia, Foreman will oversee a concert hall, which is often featured on the public radio program Performance Today, recital hall, fine arts theater and the university chapel.

“I always think the best thing I have done in my career I haven’t done yet,” Foreman said, “and the best thing to happen for the Norton Center hasn’t happened yet.”

If that’s the case, over the last 26 years, Foreman has given himself and his successor tough acts to follow.

Since arriving at the Norton Center in 1983, Foreman brought a who’s who of classical music and popular entertainment stars – from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Dolly Parton – to the cultural complex at Centre College, a school with around 1,200 students in Danville, a town with a population of just over 15,000. For many acts that rolled through the Norton Center’s Newlin Hall and Weisiger Theatre, Danville was the smallest town they played.

In addition to entertainers, the Norton Center hosted the Vice-presidential candidates debate between Republican Dick Cheney and Democrat Joe Lieberman in 2000.

Reflecting on his tenure, Foreman zeroed in on the March performance by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the March 2001 performance of Morton Feldman’s 6-hour-long Second String Quartet by The Flux Quartet as highlights.

“I remember reading about that being done in New York, and I thought, the next place that should happen is Centre College,” said Foreman, who recalled students bringing a couch from the theater’s props department and plopping it in front of the stage for the quarter day performance. Similarly, he delighted that 500 Centre students – “nearly half the student population” – saw the New York Philharmonic.

“My first few years, I got to know the woman this center was named after,” Foreman said of Jane Morton Norton, a Louisville philanthropist. “I hope I have in some way been able to realize her vision of what she wanted this place to be.”

Most recently, Foreman oversaw a $3 million renovation of the Norton Center that will debut later this week with a season-opening presentation of a touring production of Camelot.

Foreman is also the founder of the Great American Brass Band Festival, an event that draws tens-of-thousands of visitors to Danville each year, and the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, which brings members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill Memorial Day weekend.

A press release from Centre said a national search for a new director for the Norton Center will commence immediately. Milton Reigelman, who has held many posts at Centre, including acting president, will serve as acting director of the center and Debra Hoskins will be the assistant director.

Quest Community Church's new state-of-the-art 2,400-seat auditorium was built with private funds. Could Lexington arts supporters do something similar?

What do you think of Lexington’s inventory of theaters and other venues for live performances?

Currently, leaving aside our behemoth of Rupp Arena, our major arts and entertainment venues are the Singletary Center for the Arts, which seats about 1,500, and the Lexington Opera House, which accomodates just under 1,000. Then, in the seats-a-few-hundred category, you have the black box theater in the Downtown Arts Center, the Lyric Theatre, which is currently being rennovated, and the Kentucky Theatre. There are also venues such as Studio Players’ Carriage House Theatre and the Lexington Children’s Theatre that are almost exclusively used by the groups that occupy them, and University spaces such as the University of Kentucky’s Guignol Theatre and Transylvania University’s Haggin Auditorium that are primarily used by the institutions.

Am I leaving any Big Kahunas out?

So, is that a good inventory. What do we lack?

Some lament we never got the major performing arts center that was supposed to happen where the courthouses now stand at Main and Limestone. Others say Lexington isn’t ready for a venue of that caliber. Others look at smaller spaces such as the Woodford Theatre’s venue in Falling Springs Arts and Recreation Center and wonder why Lexington couldn’t have something like that for groups that may see the Opera House as too big for their needs.

Still others say creativity trumps venues, and point to places such as Charleston, S.C., that have built vibrant performing arts scenes without an ideal inventory of venues. Here, we have examples such as Balagula Theatre at Natasha’s Bistro and Bar and the chamber music festivals that bookend the summer taking place in  an old tobacco barn at Shaker Village and Fasig-Tipton’s horse sales pavilion showing a creative use of non-traditional spaces in town.

Here’s another fly I’ll throw in the ointment: I just attended a concert last week in a new, state of the art 2,400-seat Lexington venue that would have been the envy of many area arts groups: Quest Community Church’s new sanctuary. If there is a desire for a new theater or theaters in town, do you need to have public funds to build it, or can the arts community come together to make something happen like, oh, Quest or a little baseball park near Broadway and New Circle that was built with private funds.

That’s sort of a distillation of conversations and thoughts I’ve had over the last several years about Lexington’s theater space.

So, what do you think? Hit the comment button and let’s talk.

Since we ran a story yesterday citing the current renovation project at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, which will be unveiled early this fall, it seemed like a good time to show a few other pictures we caught down in Danville that did not run with the story.

George Foreman, director of the Norton Center for the Arts, stands in the center of seatless Newlin Hall. The new seating will be more curved and comfortable for patrons. The crane, on stage, is for painters brightening up the theater interior. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

The lobby of the Norton Center is something of a staging area for construction. The wall to the women's rest room was built out to double the number of facilities.

Without ceiling tiles in place, you can see the top of the old lobby wall to the women's rest room that now fall's inside the expanded ladies facilities in the Norton Center for the Arts.

Charlie Snowden (standing) and Tim Abbott of Cincinnati-based Midwest Accessibilty work on the new elevator in the Norton Center that will help the theater comply with requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wes Chaffin, Karen Sherwood, Angie Young, Dana Bart and Deborah Hoskins have a laugh as the put together season brochures for the Norton Center for the Arts 2009-10 season.

The nearly completed Weisiger Theatre offers a preview of what Newlin Hall will look like when it is done. Photo courtesy of the Norton Center for the Arts.

Audiences packed the Meadow View Barn at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill for last years Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

• Check out our audio slide show from As It Is In Heaven.

Shaker Village of ­Pleasant Hill doesn’t necessarily need music.

The lush, green grounds of the community are a sustained pianissimo passage, frequently augmented by the songs of birds, whistling of the wind and rhythm of rippling water.

Leave your iPod behind.

But that does not mean that music cannot enhance the Pleasant Hill experience.

As Rachel in "As It Is in Heaven," Erica Solitaire Chappell sings in Pleasant Hill’s Meadow View Barn.

The Shakers, after all, are known for their songs - Simple Gifts, anyone? The University of Kentucky Theatre has been bringing some of those tunes to the stage of the Meadow View Barn the past two weekends with its ­production of Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven.

That production, which has its final performances today through Sunday afternoon, begins and ends with the women of the play ­strolling through the field adjacent to the barn raising songs to the tops of the trees.

The music does not stop there, though.

Next weekend brings the third annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, and if you are trying to come up with a more perfect ­marriage of music and venue in ­Kentucky, you have some work to do.

We tend to think of ­classical music as something to seal in a perfectly quiet concert hall, supposing that one obscured note would obliterate an entire work. Of course, perfect silence is rarely achievable in a hall full of people, with walls that aren’t impervious to honking horns and sirens.

Yes, Meadow View Barn is susceptible to the sounds of its environment, but a violin mixes so much better with a bird or a breeze than a candy wrapper or screeching tires.

At last year's Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, the lineup included the Orion String Quartet, featuring sibling violinists Todd and Daniel Phillips.

In the natural setting, at last year’s festival, the music seemed to open, with the instruments so close to their source materials.

And these are musicians to make the most of the environs.

All three years of the ­festival, the Norton Center for the Arts at Danville’s ­Centre College has engaged the Chamber Music ­Society of Lincoln Center to ­oversee its artistic direction. ­Pianist Wu Han has been the constant, and this year she brings ­violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Fred Sherry and ­clarinetist David Shifrin. If you pay attention to classical music, each is an ­internationally known practitioner of his or her instrument.

For the second year, the festival has engaged a second group, this time the Escher String Quartet, to play in its own right and mix with the Lincoln Center musicians in the festival’s four concerts.

Those combinations, like Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, scheduled for next Sunday night, are the real treats of the event.

The morning sessions, in the village’s ­Meetinghouse, focus on Ludwig van Beethoven on Saturday and J.S. Bach on Sunday. The evenings include music of Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

Debussy and nature? — makes sense.
As does trying to take the arts out to environments such as Pleasant Hill.

So often we try to hype the natural beauty of the ­Bluegrass, but then when it comes to presenting the beauty of the arts, we retreat to the city like everywhere else.

The Heaven performances, chamber music festival and other outdoor events show an arts community trying to get more in tune with our ­surroundings.

Norton Center for the Arts director George Foreman presents New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel with his Kentucky Colonel certificate. You can see video of the presentation at the New York Philharmonic website. This photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

As the New York Philharmonic has made its way through the Eastern United States, fans have been kept up to date with a photo and video tour diary on the orchestra’s website. The Danville edition posted late Monday with some great photos by NY Phil photographer Chris Lee and a video of Maestro Lorin Maazel receiving his Kentucky Colonel Award from Norton Center for the Arts impresario George Foreman. The photos take viewers from the tarmac at Bluegrass Airport to backstage at the Norton Center and after the show.

Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic accept applause from the sold-out crowd in the Norton Center for the Arts' Newlin Hall on March 5, 2009. Photos by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

There are two presumptions you could have made about Thursday night’s New York Philharmonic concert at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts in Danville.

This being a farewell tour for Maestro Lorin Maazel, 79-years-old today, you could assume this would be one of the last gasps of a tired old partnership, especially considering the Obamaesque press coming out of New York for Maazel’s successor, Alan Gilbert.

Lorin Maazel conducts in Danville.

Second, and somewhat contrary to the first presumption, Maazel being such a marquee name in classical music, you might assume he’d dominate the evening, and we’d be preoccupied watching the podium for the legendary maestro.

As often happens with presumptions, neither came true, this time in the best way possible.

The New York Philharmonic came to a sold-out Norton Center billed as one of the best orchestras in the United States, and it sounded like one of the best orchestras in the world. This was the orchestra of Mahler and Bernstein.

We often talk about the vast sonic difference between hearing music performed live and on recordings, and lord knows, we hear a lot of recordings and broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. Thursday night, as much any time I’ve experienced in Central Kentucky, you really heard that difference. When the orchestra needed to turn on a dime, it turned on a pinhead. Crescendos lifted the Norton Center’s Newlin Hall and pastoral passages were as sublime as the Boyle County countryside.

The orchestra impressed from the beginning, Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture springing off the stage, highlighted by Thomas Stacy’s English horn solo.

The Philharmonic played emotional pieces with the zeal they warrented, including Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor and Maurice Ravel’s arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. From the crystalline opening trumpets, Pictures was the evening’s starkest example of live vs. Memorex, and it came across as stunning as newly restored print of a Technicolor classic.

Looking over the roster, it is striking how many of the Philharmonic’s musicians are well-known names in their own rights: concertmaster Glenn Dicterow, cellist Carter Brey, clarinetists Stanley Drucker and Mark Nuccio, trumpeter Philip Smith, horn player Philip Myers and several others, all of whom were playing up to their reputations Thursday. Oboist Liang Wang seems to think he has the best job in the world, based on the zeal with which he played.

Notice, we’ve been talking about the orchestra.

Far from the podium showboat, Maazel was a modest presence who helped his orchestra shine. He had a subtle stick, seeming to elicit the sharpest passages with the most casual waves of his baton. At least on this night of a colorful program and two encores, Maazel looked like a hard act to follow.

A note, lest it seems like the big band has come to the provinces and easily impressed the country folk: The last time I saw the New York Philharmonic was at Lincoln Center in 2007, and it was far from impressive: some indifferent Beethoven followed by a hesitant concert version of an Alexander Zemlinsky opera under James Conlon’s baton. Maybe it was simply an off night, because this sounded like a much different group onstage in Danville.

Norton Center director George Foreman presents Lorin Maazel a certificate that makes him a Kentucky Colonel. Photo by Colin Misbach | Centre College.

Norton Center director George Foreman has made it an unofficial mission to bring the Top 5 orchestras in America to his stage. Bringing the New York Philharmonic to this town of just over 15,000 was quite an achievement.

Note: While in the Bluegrass State, Maazel was made a Kentucky Colonel. He didn’t don the white suit and string tie, but he did get a very nice piece of paper to take back to New York.

Outgoing New York Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel will conduct the orchestra in Danville Thursday night. Photo by Chris Lee | New York Philharmonic.

It didn’t start as a grand plan, although it is an ambitious idea.

Early in his career as director of the ­Norton Center for the Arts at Centre ­College in Danville, George Foreman brought in the Cleveland Orchestra for a concert. The 1983 performance of music by Franz Schubert, Dmitri Shostakovich and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, under the baton of Eduardo Mata, was undoubtedly a coup for the still-young arts center, which has since presented a veritable who’s who of classical and pop artists.

And Foreman wondered: What if he could bring the top five American orchestras to Danville during his career?

Cleveland was a start on the list, which at the time appeared to include the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“It was such a preposterous idea to bring all the great orchestras to Central ­Kentucky,” Foreman says.

It has been slow going, too.

It was 20 years before the next group, the Philadelphia Orchestra, played the ­Norton Center in 2003. But Foreman’s unofficial series seems to be picking up speed with Thursday’s appearance by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by outgoing music director Lorin Maazel. It took only six years to book Foreman’s third major.

The New York Philharmonic’s appearance will be its first Kentucky concert in more than 35 years. The orchestra’s last appearance in the ­commonwealth was at the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum in September 1973.

“What fills Memorial Coliseum other than winning Wildcats?” the Lexington Leader review asked, “Obviously the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Pierre Boulez.”

That concert attracted 9,000-11,000 patrons. It will be a considerably smaller crowd in the Norton Center’s 1,430-seat Newlin Hall on Thursday, but there is still a lot of excitement surrounding the concert by one of the majors.

The infrequency of major orchestra concerts helps explain that buzz, in part. But there is the reason you don’t see major orchestras on the Norton Center or anyone else’s schedule every season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before Joshua Bell strode onto the stage of the Norton Center for the Arts Monday night, I was talking to a gentleman who lamented the state of this classical music concert thing.

Joshua Bell. Courtesy of the Norton Center for the Arts.

Major venues across the state and across the country are turning their attention away from the classics and the artists with the skill to play them. In 10 years, will there still be an audience for this stuff?

Well, Newlin Hall was full, if not sold out last night for Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk. And this would be a pretty sad world if there wasn’t an audience for the music and musicianship that was on display during Bell and Denk’s four pieces and one encore.

Joshua Bell is one of the bona fide superstars of classical music. Audiences come to see him, regardless of what he plays. That gives him and Denk the freedom to play what they want.

What they came up with was exhilarating and enlightening: A first half of moody Janáček and luscious Brahams, a second half that traced a lineage from Franck to Ysaÿe to, by implication, Bell’s teacher Josef Gingold to the hands we heard masterfully playing last night.

Leoš Janácek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano is the sort of disjointed piece that makes some traditionalist audiences scream, and has probably sent many a musician into fits of profanity. Without perfect timing and control, it can melt into musical gibberish.

Bell and Denk were sharp collaborators, constantly locking in each other to fully form this piece that mixed sublimity with shouts, like the party guest constantly seeking attention. It was such a theatrical presentation, it begged the question, were Bell and Denk perfectly suited to it, or did they perfectly suit themselves to it?

The answer came in Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, a far different piece than the Janácek, but no less passionately played, with Bell showing stunning command of his bow to not only articulate but accent phrases, particularly long passages.

The second half contained what had to be the evening’s highlight (with apologies to Denk, who was brilliant) Eugène Ysaÿe’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, which featured Bell alone, navigating the violin master’s 1924 composition as naturally as if he was talking.

Far from being museum pieces of a dying art form, this is music of youth and passion, played by a guy who’s 41 going on 25.

Audiences don’t need to be told this is great. The virtuosity is there to see as plainly as it is in a Jimmy Page guitar solo. And while classical music may not hold the place it once did in American culture, there should always be an audience for this.