Arts News

Dallas Arts District Foundation awards $25K to a dozen arts nonprofits

Bruce Wood Dance presents Love, Bruce: A Valentine Cabaret

Bruce Wood Dance is one of the deserving recipients.

Photo by Sharen Bradford

The Dallas Arts District Foundation has awarded 12 arts and cultural organizations $25,000 for innovative projects in 2020.

This is an annual ritual: Since 1997, the Dallas Arts District Foundation at Communities Foundation of Texas has awarded 452 grants to area organizations totaling $1,202,267.

This year has an increase in funding, thanks to a partnership with Hall Group on their photography book, Through the Lens: Dallas Arts District.

The 2020 grants are awarded for original, diverse, multidisciplinary programs that will be produced in the Dallas Arts District and reflect dance, music, theater, visual art, video/film, writing, and arts education. This is the widest array of organizations so far, and several are first-time recipients.

And the envelope, please:

Junior Players. January 2-5: Andrew Lippa's Wild Party, directed by Joel Farrell, Moody Performance Hall.

Shakespeare Dallas. January 10-19: Indoor Winter Season, Jane Austen's classic, Pride and Prejudice, Moody Performance Hall.

Make Art With Purpose. MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain is commissioning 10 female artists to produce flags honoring a woman who has had an impact upon broader culture and society. A flag and reading space designed by Texas artist Beili Liu will be installed at the Crow Museum of Asian Art. The Crow and MAP will co-produce a public talk that includes artist Aram Han Sifuentes. Ms. Liu and Ms. Sifuentes' work addresses similar themes connected to women, motherhood, and immigration.

The Women’s Chorus of Dallas. March 4: TWCD’s sixth annual Voices of Women concert, Travelin’ Voices, will showcase the transformative power of women’s voices in unity. This concert, taking place during Women’s History Month, will see TWCD onstage with local college choirs and high school singers from Dallas ISD, putting 300 young and adult women ages 15-70+ singing together onstage. Moody Performance Hall.

Sammons Center for the Arts. April 8: Dallas Jazz Appreciation Month (D’JAM) includes more than 12 organizations and educational institutions who present jazz events and education. D’JAM’s goal is to increase public awareness of the legacy of jazz as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s national initiative celebrating jazz every April. Moody Performance Hall.

Avant Chamber Ballet. April 17-18: "Beauty and Beyond," features the company premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s "Five Movements, Three Repeats"; world premiere commissions by Kimi Nikaidoh and Jennifer Mabus as part of the 2020 Women’s Choreography Project; and Katie Cooper’s "Aurora’s Wedding: Sleeping Beauty Act III" with Tchaikovsky’s iconic score and the grandeur of classical ballet.

Lone Star Wind Orchestra. April 26: "Bringing awareness to Alzheimer's focusing on brain health in music" is the goal of this concert, which will feature Grammy Award-winning soprano Hila Plitmann, guest composer John Mackey, and guest conductor Daniel Cook. Moody Performance Hall.

Bruce Wood Dance. June 12-13: Ten Year Celebration. Artistic Director Bollinger has curated outstanding programming to recognize Wood's lineage and legacy. The mixed bill will feature the Dallas premiere of "Elemental Brubeck," by the great 20th century choreographer Lar Lubovitch; Wood's groundbreaking all-male, multigenerational work, "I'm My Brother's Keeper"; and the Dallas premiere of Wood's poignant work about the power of community, "Chichester Psalms," and set to the Leonard Bernstein choral score. Moody Performance Hall.

ArtsVision. ArtsVision Performing & Visual Art Summer Programs 2020. During the two-week summer program, students receive an intensive arts experience. Professional teaching artists from as far away as New York come to the Dallas Arts District to teach acting, dance, voice, and instrumental music. Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing & Visual Arts.

The Writer’s Garret. Summer 2020: Rail Writers. Building on three successful previous summers, the teaching artists of Dallas Poetry Slam under executive director Sherrie “Candy” Zantea are slated to facilitate the majority of the rides, plus community partners such s the Dallas Museum of Art, Klyde Warren Park, and Nasher Sculpture Center.

Cry Havoc Theater Company. October 30: “Satyam/Bias” is one of eight performances selected to participate in the 2019/2020 season of AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Elevator Project. Presented by Indique Dance Company (IDC), CHTC will partner with the dance group to depict the progression of biases in each of us through the combined artistic mediums: theater and dance. AT&T Performing Arts Center.

Video Association of Dallas. October 31: Two screenings of "What’s Opera Dallas." Dallas VideoFest will present iconic American cartoons with their classical music scores live performed by local musicians and actors from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds from around the city. Moody Performance Hall.

For more info, visit www.cftexas.org/dad.

downtown

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

dso luisi ring wagner recording concerts music symphony