JOHN SCOFIELD & VINCE MENDOZA

Rudolfinum

January 25

Building a lush wall of sound behind the jazz combo.

It was SRO at the Rudolfinum on Wednesday night for the big-band extravaganza featuring American jazz stars John Scofield and Vince Mendoza. An enthusiastic crowd, strikingly younger and decidedly more rambunctious than the usual audience for classical music concerts, jammed Dvořák Hall. With the diplomatic set filling the main floor, even Czech jazz star Jiří Stivín was relegated to the cheap seats upstairs, where fans sat in the aisles behind columns to hear the music.

The occasion was the official opening of the Danish EU Presidency, which should happen more often if it comes with a celebration like this: Mendoza conducting the combined Danish Radio Big Band and Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra in a re-creation of 54, the Grammy Award-winning album that he and Scofield recorded in 2010. As Scofield said during a break between songs, “There’s a lot of different nationalities on stage here tonight. But we’re having no trouble communicating through the language of music.”

The EU should be so lucky – or so well-organized. The stage was split, with the string sections of the orchestra on the left, and a large group of horns (15 from the DRBB, and 5 from the orchestra) on the right. A percussion section down the middle was anchored by a drum kit up front, flanked by keyboards, standup bass, rhythm guitar and Scofield on lead guitar, arranged in a semicircle around the podium. The balance was excellent, with the jazz combo at the front of the stage working off lush walls of sound from the strings and horns behind them.

The minute Mendoza struck up the opening number, Door #3 (from Scofield’s 1996 release Quiet), it was like being transported to Los Angeles – a smooth, mellow sound with the golden burnish of southern California. That was basically a warm-up for “Carlos,” the opening cut on 54, which picked up both the pace and punch, with Scofield providing some tasty licks and the DRBB cranking up the brass. A nifty bridge by Mendoza added some percussive pop.

The next three pieces, also from 54 – “Jung Parade,” “Honest I Do” and “Polo Towers” – showcased the main strengths of both the album and evening, Mendoza’s energetic arrangements and Scofield’s smart guitar playing. The two men have been working together on this material for so long that there’s a natural flow to their performance, which features something fresh in every song. Scofield opened most of them with a solo that set the tone and tempo, then Mendoza would layer in the horns and strings – sometimes with gentle brushstrokes, as in “Honest I Do,” other times with vivid colors and driving rhythms, as in “Polo Towers.”

A fragrant finish.

The second half opened with an unannounced treat: Scofield took the stage with just the bass, drums and keyboard player for a straight-ahead version of Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In.” It offered a reminder of what makes the guitarist great – an incredibly fluid and inventive style, and a remarkable ability to take a simple phrase and do something special with it. Scofield then provided some of the best laughs of the evening when Mendoza missed his cue to come out with the orchestra, and with the whole house waiting, Scofield picked up the baton and said, “I guess it’s up to me now.” That brought Mendoza to the podium fast.

The real conductor fired up a lively version of “Beauty and Sadness,” a cut from his latest release, Nights on Earth, that featured some fine duet work by the bass and keyboard players. Then three more songs from 54 rounded out the program, with Scofield getting to his feet for a bluesy exchange with the horn section in “Twang.” “Say We Did” dropped back into the mellow mode, with an all-strings bridge adding a nice glow. The finale, “Out of the City,” lacked the edge that it has on the disc, but otherwise provided a snappy finish. For the encore, Scofield reeled off a brief, rockin’ reprise of “Carlos.”

A steady succession of DRBB players stepped up for solos throughout the evening, adding individual flavors to the mix and showing impressive proficiency. Well-versed in the jazz vernacular, this band can flat-out play. The orchestra stayed mostly in a supporting role, but showed some flair and crisp playing when Mendoza called for it.

“This is a very special event – it doesn’t happen very often,” Mendoza said at one point, which for once was not an exaggeration. From the free champagne and hors d’oeuvres at intermission to the brilliant collaboration onstage, it was a memorable and in some ways unprecedented evening. As Danish Ambassador Ole Emil Moesby pointed out in a speech before the performance, it was also a reminder of what can happen when two flagship radio stations cooperate on a cultural project. Here’s hoping for more.

For more on

John Scofield: http://www.johnscofield.com/

Vince Mendoza: http://www.vincemendoza.net

The Danish Radio Big Band: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR_Big_Band

The Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra: http://www.rozhlas.cz/socr_eng/about

Czech Radio photos by Petr Horník

ENCHANTIA

National Theater

January 14

The performers are overwhelmed by the special effects.

The new “family opera” at the National Theater, Enchantia (Čarokraj in Czech), has all the ingredients of a winner: well-established source material in Gerald Durrell’s The Talking Parcel; a brilliant production team headed by theatrical impresarios Petr and Matěj Forman; and a promising bestiary and pull-out map of Mythologia, the opera’s setting, in the program book.

But the Jan. 14 premiere was a classic case of overreaching, focused so much on form that the substance got lost in the process.

Every Forman production has a conceit. This one posits that intrepid explorers discovered a secret entrance to the enchanted realm of Mythologia under the National Theater – where, indeed, construction is currently underway – and persuaded its musically inclined inhabitants to offer a glimpse of their hidden world.

As the audience enters the theater, fantastic creatures are scattered throughout the hall. A talking parrot is holding forth in one of the loges. A huge phoenix flaps in the highest balcony. Angels with tiny wings and glowing headdresses are singing in the aisles. They slowly make their way to the stage, where other strange denizens of an underwater world are gathering beneath gargantuan, undulating plants. After the scrim rises, the magician Junketberry rolls onstage in a giant seashell to announce that the audience is privileged to witness a ritual that happens once every 50 years.

Exactly what happens after that promising start is hard to say. The ritual involves a talking book that is promptly stolen by the cockatrices, a nasty group of rooster-headed lizards who live in a spooky, Hieronymus Bosch-style house. To rescue the book, the parrot joins forces with a talking frog and Penelope, a young girl in search of her missing violin, and they sail to werewolf island to find a special plant.

After encounters with the werewolves, along with prehistoric fish, mermaids, weasels, moon calves and the occasional unicorn, the trio returns with the plant but somehow everyone winds up at the mercy of the cockatrices, whose leader declares, “Mythologia is ours!” In a nifty effect, the very curtains of the National Theater stage seem to be dissolving when the parrot flies in with a last-minute rescue, the precise nature of which still escapes this critic.

Presumably, it would help to know the source material. But even for someone familiar with it, the production is a murky affair. In many scenes, the elaborate masks make it hard to tell who is singing. The stage is kept unusually dark, adding to the effectiveness of the costumes but muddying the action. In the nonstop parade of special effects, what little narrative Enchantia has breaks down into a series of disjointed vignettes offering spectacular visuals but no coherence, making the rock ’n’ roll coda tacked onto the happy ending seem even more contrived and artificial.

What accounts for this? Clearly, the brothers Forman became so enamored of creating a phantasmagorical set and characters that they paid little attention to developing a clear storyline, perhaps assuming that everyone shares their enthusiasm and knowledge of Durrell’s book. And the libretto was created by committee – Petr Forman, Ivan Arsenjev and Radek Malý – which is almost never a good idea. The only unifying element is the original score by composer and conductor Marko Ivanović, who did a great job at the premiere leading the National Theater orchestra through some unusual musical gyrations.

The singing and acting were impossible to gauge. Most impressive were the animal imitations by the many singers and dancers, in particular the mermaids with their flapping, Monty Pythonesque fish tails, whose vocal trios brought to mind Wagner’s Rhinemaidens. The only hint of a personality came from the talking frog, who consistently got laughs, especially from the children in the audience.

In the end, they may be the only group that matters. Enchantia was created for Czech families looking for 90 minutes of harmless fun in the splendor of the National Theater, not cranky critics. If their reaction at the premiere was any indication, the production should do well.

Still, it’s a disappointment. Coming from anyone else, such amateurish lapses would be understandable. But the Forman brothers have shown themselves to be masters of the creative use of space on their theater boat, Tajemství. And their previous productions at the National Theater were models of sophistication and imagination. They won awards for their work with their father, Miloš Forman, on A Walk Worthwhile. And they wove a genuine spell of enchantment with their 2003 version of Philip Glass’ Beauty and the Beast. But the live horse they put onstage in that production made more sense than an entire herd of dancing moon calves.

For more on

Enchantia: http://www.narodni-divadlo.cz/Default.aspx?jz=en&dk=predstaveni.aspx&sb=1&ic=5691&pr=86292

A Walk Worthwhile: http://www.narodni-divadlo.cz/Default.aspx?jz=en&dk=predstaveni.aspx&sb=1&ic=4607&pr=67862

Beauty and the Beast: http://www.narodni-divadlo.cz/Default.aspx?jz=en&dk=predstaveni.aspx&sz=300&sb=1&ic=1582&pr=11997

The Forman brothers’ website (in Czech only): http://www.formanstheatre.cz/