New Year’s concerts — famous, festive, and now franchised — are an old Austrian tradition.

You know, like sacher tortes and California governors.

[How did the Austrians come up with something real to do on New Year's Eve when the rest of the world just kind of fumbles around?]

Anyway, Gina and I, two avid ballroom gals, look forward to the swelling sound of Vienna waltzes.

We’ll raise a misty eye, skyward, to Mr. Balanchine, who loved this music too.

Even though it’s a Sunday matinee, I’m planning on wearing my ball gown … in the remote possibility that a latter day Emperor Franz Josef may wish to spin me round the room.

Happy New Year, to one and all, from arts•meme!

Choreographer Neil Greenberg, who performed in the piece while a Cunningham dancer, gives us a heads up: “Roaratorio is a great piece,” says Neil, who recently attended its rehearsal in New York. “It’s a unique work in Merce’s canon. It’s very human-scaled. You sense that Merce really liked the people he was making the dance on.”

The collaborative venture with composer John Cage — Cunningham’s choreography shares space and time with [an original recording of] Cage’s complex 1979 score, an Irish circus on “Finnegans Wake” — gets three performances at Disney Concert Hall June 4 – 6.

Renae Williams Niles, Director of Dance Presentations for the Music Center, made this proud thing happen for Los Angeles. Teaming with Festival Montpellier Danse 2010 and Théâtre de la Ville/Festival d’Automne à Paris, the three presenters ponied up to underwrite the significant costs of restaging the work.

“We had booked the company and were planning to stage an “event,” explained Williams Niles. “But after Merce’s passing, I wanted to do something more substantial and make it a celebration. Remounting a piece can be very expensive; it entails additional rehearsals, new costumes, and many added costs. But everything came together well with the French.”

The presentation of Roaratorio in our sensational concert hall is cause for jubilation. The visual splendor of dancers painting Cunningham’s dappled moves around Frank Gehry’s rarified space makes the heart pound in anticipation.

It’s our good fortune to be one of forty global cities in the Cunningham “Legacy Tour” after which the company will disperse. For me, and surely for many in the Los Angeles dance community who have not fully reckoned with Merce’s passing, it’s a difficult occasion. Cunningham has had a most profound influence on my creative sensibility, more than any single artist. Attending his concerts has marked my life.

The notion that this performance will be my last is so emotional as to overwhelm. The best is to encourage everyone to get tickets now … and enjoy!

And I must prepare to say good-bye.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company | Walt Disney Concert Hall | June 4 – 6, 2010 | tickets

Still curious? Read more:

• Choreographer Neil Greenberg chats about “Roaratorio”
• Anna Kisselgoff’s 1986 New York Times “Roratorio” review’
• 2005 La Opinion piece on Merce 
• Merce Cunningham dies, arts•meme

Halfway through “Songs of Ascension,” the final work of Sunday evening’s Monk tribute, the singers wandered circular stage of Disney Concert Hall intoning the composer’s primitive, rhythmic monosyllables.

It was revelatory. Liberated from the oppressive bleacher arrangement that codifies chorale performances, breath and life infused the chanting. 

“Ascension” began with Monk seated on the stage floor, a small solo figure with trademark long braids running down her back. Her legs straddled the shruti box that accompanied her song.

Cupping her hands ’round her mouth, this odd and wonderful artist yodeled into Gehry’s Temple of High Art. A grand procession of fiddlers and flautists entered, playing as they went, meandering for moments that could have happily stretched on for hours. Then in strolled the chanting Master Choralists — a joyous parade.

Monk’s new work “Weave,” a co-commission of the Master Chorale and St. Louis Symphony, was the event of the evening. Mezzo-soprano Kati Geissinger and baritone Theo Bleckmann, soloists, stood amidst a small orchestra. Singing a capella, they swapped turns gurgling Monk’s mystical sound-syllables to a semi-shocked audience ~ nung, nung, nung, a liquid popcorn machine. The gobbledy-gobble turkey noise percolated pleasantly, and soon harp, violin, and xylophone contributed their own burbles. It was highly coherent magic — the golden light pouring on stage prolonging the music’s reach in the rarified air.

Exiting the performance, it somehow fit to hear that rarest of natural sounds: a heavy rainstorm hammering downtown Los Angeles.

The ever-handsome, now grey-haired Los Angeles homeboy interspersed jazz standards — Fascinating Rhythm, Paper Moon, Let’s Face the Music and Dance, Laura — with Brazilian fare, the expertise of his wife, singer Lani Hall.

Herb and Lani’s clear love connection was only one of the evening’s soothing elements. Together they sang, arm-in-arm; from our seats behind the stage we could see Lani tap rhythms on her husband’s back. At one point, praising the mellow-voiced chanteuse, Alpert said, “That’s my bride.”

Alpert blows his horn with a trademark super-light touch. His swing is solid and he sputters in tasty percussive fillips. Hall, granting him space, chimes in as his equal with swinging vocals, excelling particularly in the Portuguese patter that marked her samba and bossa nova days as Sergio Mendes’s lead singer.

The sound-intensive House-that-Gehry-Built allowed Alpert to play sans microphone and also to sweetly chit chat with his fans as they called from their seats. Mocking protest when audience members requested Tijuana Brass hits, he went on to play a medley of them: Lonely Bull, Taste of Honey, Tijuana Taxi, Whipped Cream, Spanish Flea. All old friends! He proudly proclaimed the most important fact of the evening: he is a graduate-alum of Fairfax High School.

Not one week later, we attended the gallery opening of Herb’s astonishing totem-pole sculptures. On display at Ace Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.  [click photo for better view]

arts•meme previously wrote about Herb and Lani’s magnificent philanthropic giving and in the Jewish Journal of  Los Angeles concerning one of the Alperts’ arts-education grant recipients, a teenage ballerina.

_{photo courtesy of hank garcia}