Fridays@7 @ Severance Hall 10/9/09

We went to the first production of Fridays @ 7, Cleveland Orchestra's performance of what press materials refer to as "a double helping of Ludwig," Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor and his Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, followed by Cyro Baptista's Beat the Donkey, a very different kind of musical experience.

We're not sophisticated music critics and must admit that we enjoy going to Severance Hall at least partly as much for the visual pleasure of the space as well as the aural pleasure of the music. Fridays @ 7 affords a welcome opportunity to spend a little more time in another exquisite space, the Bogomolny-Kozerefski Grand Foyer of Severance, with Baptista's group lending it a decidedly casual, cabaret atmosphere.

We went at 7pm, even though the doors and the bars open at 5:30 pm, and despite a capacity crowd, the parking was not bad. There's plenty of parking within a few blocks of Severance, lots of it free.

As advertised, the Orchestra dispensed with intermissions and presented the 2 Beethoven pieces in about 75 minutes. It was our first listen in quite a while to Mitsuko Uchida's keyboards and we were interested to see how her showmanship has developed over the years into a very spare kind of dance presenting its own metaphor for the music.

Franz Welser-Most's account of the Fifth Symphony sounded fast forward to one of us (an old complaint). One of us had no problem with it at all, happily remembering playing the Fifth in high school orchestra; needless to say, there can be no comparison. The bold color and subtle nuance Welser-Most brought out of the orchestra showed us new and wonderful things in this performance of this beloved, familiar work. We rather liked, also, that Welser-Most, dressed down in causal black, as were the all the orchestra, seemed to be channeling Beethoven's hair.

Beat the Donkey could be heard from the foyer as soon as the applause for the Orchestra ended. For some in the audience this was a difficult transition from the sublime 5th to the thuds and clangs of world percussion. We overheard one skeptic ask, "Is that music?" But as time went by and the crowds thinned out we noticed some of the orchestra's musicians hanging out and listening. [Click on the window at left to view video.]

For us, crowding was the main problem as the capacity audience tried to fit itself into the grand foyer, a glorious space, but one designed for large numbers of people to pass quickly through rather than linger in - complicated by the fact that Beat The Donkey took up at least a third of the foyer floor space. For a while it was impossible to enter, to leave, or to move. We might have just listened to Beat the Donkey from our seats for a while, but instead we plunged into the fray, catching entertaining glimpses of the chicken hats, the retro eye glasses, and the coca cola gong.

For all the over the top showmanship and goofing around, Baptista et co. laid down a solid groove and as the crowd thinned out we were better able to see the intermittent dance acts and the amazing percussion instruments. Cyrobaptista.com gives a look and listen to what you missed, but Friday night included a number of innovations, including pvc pipes played with flip flops.

Trying for a better view, we wandered upstairs to the second level - definitely the prime spot for observing what goes on in the space below. We met friends by chance and stayed on, chatting, a social interaction in which one simply would never indulge during the serious music presentations of the Cleveland Orchestra. It was nice to enjoy Severance in this more informally social way. We stayed until 9:30pm, with no sign of an end when we left.

We think Friday @ 7 is a great idea, both for local folks who might find the offering of two such diverse experiences appealing, but also for tourists who could end a day feasting on the cultural amenities of University Circle by going to Friday @ 7. What a way to end the day.

You can go to htp://www.clevelandorchestra.com to view the Orchestra repertoire and personnel for the 4 remaining Fridays @ 7 programs November through April, but no groups or artists are named for the foyer performances. The website refers only to "artists brought together by Jamey Haddad, world music, jazz, chamber music." Much as we like to know what to expect, Haddad's combination of born-in-Cleveland and his world-wide collaborations with the like of Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, Yo Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Joe Lovano, Brazil's Assad Brothers, and the Paul Winter Consort is impossible not to trust.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.