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Music & March Mark Center's World AIDS Day Observance |
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by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
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Following a complementary brunch of juice, coffee, tea, fruit, bagels, and pastries, Downtown Music Productions (DMP), led by Artistic Director Mimi Stern-Wolfe, gave a noontime concert, at the LGBT Community Center, on December 1, of music by composers lost to AIDS in honor of World AIDS Day. The concert was billed as "Sudden Sunsets," which is also the title of DMP's CD, which includes some of the works performed here, as well as other compositions that have been featured on DMP's Benson AIDS Series, named for late musician Eric Benson.
With Stern-Wolfe at the piano, heldentenor Gilles Denizot sang Chris DeBlasio's song cycle "Villagers," with poetry by Ilsa Gilbert and Perry Brass, movingly considering music, Nature, love and loss, and soprano Kristin Norderval and flautist Andrew Bolotowsky performed composer Deolus Husband and poet Louise Glück's "Here are my Black Clothes," a bleak, angular and mournful statement of a speaker on the verge of dying. |
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In Robert Savage's "Sudden Sunsets," violinist Michael Nicholas, cellist Daniel Barrett, flautist Bolotowsky, bass clarinetist David Hopkins and pianist Alexandra Joan, under Stern-Wolfe's baton, evoked those sunsets in haunting jagged, propulsive and melancholy strains. With Stern-Wolfe at the keyboard, vocalist and guitarist Richard Barone proffered Nicholas Schaffner's wistfully lilting rock song "Journey's End."
American Run to End AIDS (AREA) President Brent Nicholson Earle announced that this was the 20th anniversary of the start of AREA, the 19th World AIDS Day, the 16th candlelight march to mark the day, and AREA's sixth collaboration with the Center on its observance. He offered statistics both encouraging and discouraging and informed the assembled about 'Godfather of Disco' Mel Cheren's terminal illness.
Carrying his "Out of the Darkness" banner, Earle then led a group of about 100 on a candlelight march, despite the daylight, to the south end of Union Square Park, where he and Peter Schwartz, Mr. Eagle NYC 2008, read names of those we have lost. The observance, with a theme of "It's Not Over (Till It's Over)," ended with a spirited chant of, "Act Up, Fight Back, Fight AIDS." |
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photos by Bruce-Michael Gelbert |
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