Ensemble for the Romantic Century – Inspired Theatrical Concerts
It’s about manifesting a soul.
Eve Wolf, Founder/Artistic Director of Ensemble for the Romantic Century (since 2001) is a pale, delicately-boned woman with sophisticated bohemian style. She speaks with precision, passion, ease and listens with complete focus. The company’s long time Director of Theatrical Production, Donald T. Sanders, is a tan, robust, sartorially distinct man with infectious grin and easy laugh. Comrades in arms, the two are mutually appreciative and deferential. Combined breadth of cultural knowledge is, to say the least, wide reaching. I sat with the collaborators to ask about the remarkable company they represent.
A Sample of Productions
Wolf majored in Art History at Columbia University continuing lifelong music studies on the side. She was already a performing pianist. Like many artists, the young woman cobbled together a living. She taught, worked with singers, and did administrative work. “I started to notice that people weren’t listening at concerts. Music is riveting to me. A story is going on in my mind whenever I play – musicians’ biographies or something made up.”
At the time she was asked to do a concert for the Bar Association, Wolf was reading about the Schumanns. Surmising that people are often unaware of history and context, “I invented this little script called Lawsuit for Love.” It seems Clara had to sue her father in order to marry Robert Schumann. The pianist presented two actors in addition to her own playing. “You could hear a pin drop.” Something clicked. Words and music together had power.
“One of my main goals from the beginning was to bring classical music to people who generally haven’t been connected with it. This way they often find a door to discovering it isn’t stuffy and boring, but rather emotionally meaningful.”
Having just accepted a position running a city wide chamber orchestra program, Wolf unexpectedly had a Eureka moment. “I watched a segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show – I love Oprah – about visualizing your future. It said the wall separating you from what you want to do and what you actually do, is just doing it. The very next day, I quit the job. I had to cover for six months and my name was a little muddy…and I started the company.”
Wolf is a diehard romantic, raised on the idea that art affects, that music is spiritual, and that there’s a purpose and meaning to it all. Thus: Ensemble for the Romantic Century, elevating the human condition through art. And yes, she wrote a letter to Oprah, but, alas, never mailed it.
First step was to form a Board of Directors. Colleague and pianist Max Barros became Co-Artistic Director. With a tiny budget, Ensemble launched productions at The Kosciuszko Institute on East 65th Street. The beautiful, old mansion evoked a salon which is where Wolf best imagined setting the concerts. Zealously, she sold tickets, swept the floor, wrote scripts and played. At the beginning, members of the fledgling company brought in their own props, clothes, and even furniture. The founder didn’t draw a salary for more than ten years.
Ensemble debuted with Paderewski in Paris: Fin-de-Ciecle Sensation featuring dialogue and music “with a little dress-up.” Jan Paderewski was “a red-headed phenomenon,” a Polish pianist, composer, statesman, and spokesperson for national independence.
A few years later, Wolf invited Director Don Sanders and his wife, Vanessa James, to see Robert and Clara Schumann: A Love Story in Music. “At that point Max and I didn’t know anything about theater. I remember Vanessa said to me, ‘Deah, have you ever considered turning the lights off?’ It didn’t even occur to us.” She smiles almost sheepishly. In 2004, Sanders and James joined the Ensemble.
In Sanders, they found a highly literate, broadly curious, amply seasoned theater director and Chevalier dans L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; with James, an author and professional designer who received an Emmy Citation and two Emmy nominations.
When the company produced Peggy Guggenheim Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (Wolf has a penchant for great titles), James, now responsible for both sets and costumes, felt it would be impossible to address Guggenheim without seeing artwork. The designer recreated 1942’s iconic Art of This Century Exhibit formatted by an architect in which paintings were hung from the ceiling on three-dimensional cubist shapes. She projected art onto similar forms.
Kate Konigisor as Peggy Guggenheim
“I kept pinching myself,” Wolf recalls. It was the first time Ensemble integrated projections. Later David Bengali, now a core member, would design the visually enveloping, 2017 production of Van Gogh’s Ear for which he earned a Drama Desk nomination. It was like being inside the artist’s head, sometimes as the image was being created. “David’s a great artist and very musical,” Wolf adds. Also onboard now is Lighting Designer Beverly Emmons with seven Tony nominations under her belt.
It takes highly accomplished editing skills to plow through historical material including letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and poetry emerging with material for an illuminating, entertaining script – entirely, it should be noted, without training in the genre.“I just go on Amazon and order every book secondhand. It’s fun!” she modestly shrugs.
Chad Johnson and Carter Hudson as Vincent in Van Gogh’s Ear
Script writing is now shared with esteemed musicologist (“art historian, film person”) James Melo who also runs a parallel program of scholarly, interdisciplinary seminars at CUNY and is the author of Ensemble’s deft, historical program notes. Ability to juggle is requisite.
The process often begins with Wolf’s creating an image bank for each subject, occasionally noting concepts on her script. Respecting confederates, she then leaves them to it. “You don’t want to water down others’ visions.” She might suggest to Sanders that because a piece of music demands attention, action should be limited or to James, that a decorative sleeve is too long to comfortably play. “Only something that it’s my right to comment on. That’s why we work so well. There’s no micromanaging.”
“It’s similar to what City Ballet was at the beginning,” Sanders muses. “Ensemble was always beautiful, strong, and completely authentic, but the feeling was it could grow even more enhanced.” A succession of venues challenged the company not only to fully occupy space, but also to take advantage of fresh creative opportunities. Signature Theater is now their home.
“She understands her work,” he continues referring to Wolf. “It’s like a Kurt Schwitters collage. I think Eve is very moved by background situations and what each artist has produced. She combines aspects into a portrait. The subject being written about attracts certain music.” By this Sanders means that music included in a piece, for example, doesn’t have to always be by the same composer, but rather by whatever speaks to illuminating a character and the portion of his/her life depicted.” (Nor are all the subjects musicians.) “It depends what things mean,” Wolf adds.
“It’s not always biographical,” she continues. “When we did a piece about Freud, some people commented that he didn’t like classical music. That wasn’t the point. It was the milieu of psychoanalysis; composers like Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg are practically psychoanalytic.” Nor is everything set in the Nineteenth Century. Romantic Century is a way of thinking and being. “We don’t realize how radically shocking it was,” Sanders comments. “The idea that one could be a driving force outside the structures of religion, government, etc…Coleridge defined the romantic as the eternal `I’ as in `I am.’”
Jeremy Irons as Fryderyk Chopin
Dance was first integrated serendipitously when the company arrived in Italy to present Letters From Majorca, a story of Fryderyk Chopin and Georges Sand at The Tuscan Sun Festival. (This iteration starred Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack. No one seems to refuse Ensemble.) Producers had arranged that well known ballet partners were to perform in the production. Sanders worked his integration magic. “It’s a hop, skip, and a jump from singing to dancing,” he observes.
Last year, the art was twice employed. In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, which told parallel stories of the author and her creature, the monster with a human soul was manifest by dancer/choreographer Robert Fairchild. Wolf decided she could avoid breaking up pivotal variations by utilizing movement. A silent film idea had been proffered when Sanders thought of Fairchild.
“Not so many dancers are actors,” he notes. In the piece, physical pain was as palpably realized as emotional despair. Symbiotic Romantic music included Liszt, Bach, Schubert, and Busoni stunningly performed on piano, organ, harpsichord, oboe and vocal.
Robert Fairchild as Frankenstein; Robert Fairchild and Mia Vallet
In Tchaikovsky: None But the Lonely Heart, a story of the “invincible power of a disembodied love” shared by the composer and his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, a male ballet dancer wove his way through dramatization signifying not only Tchaikovsky’s preference for young men but also his fantasy life. “Whatever an artist creates is about his/her own life,” Sanders remarks, raising a verbal eyebrow.
Shows come together quickly, four to six months of writing a script. Each is then volubly discussed over a series of genial group dinners. Wolf estimates two months for development, two weeks of rehearsal. I find this extraordinary based on the complex nature of what I’ve seen.
Joey Slotnick as Tchaikovsky and Shorey Walker as Nadezhda von Meck
Each of three productions is given a six week run. “When you think about all the changes during preview performances of Spider Man…” (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) Wolf reflects trailing off. “People get worn out. Classical musicians can’t do this for six months. The way the system works, they do a concert and move on. This is an eight show week with no microphones.”
In fact, it’s what the principals call a collision of two worlds-in a good way. “The sacred and the profane,” quips Sanders. Musicians are shocked that actors show up still on book and surprised to enjoy costumes and make-up. Actors don’t understand why musicians don’t know to sign in. If they ever move to Broadway, a rotating cast of classical musicians will be needed. Much of this is due to the extremely high caliber of those who perform.
The backlog of proposals is long. There’s a rough draft on Andy Warhol called Andy Warhol: A Divine Comedy that has the subject traveling to the Ninth Circle of Hell with Truman Capote as Virgil and Shirley Temple his Beatrice. It ostensibly takes place in the 1 ½ minutes Warhol was technically dead after being shot by Valerie Solanas. Wolf compares the artist’s work with medieval Iconography. “The piece has a lot of Baroque music in it.” Glenn Gould is also in the pipeline.
Jonathan Hadary as Jules Verne and Samantha Hill as Nellie Bly
Politics are of particular interest. Ensemble did a piece about The Dreyfus Affair, Nellie Bly made an appearance in one about Jules Verne, The Trial of Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson’s feminism in Because I Could Not Stop (both by James Melo), Toscanini’s stand against fascists in Maestro are examples. Other subjects have included, in part, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Eleonora Duse, Nietzsche, Heine, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Fanny Mendelssohn, poet Anna Akhmatova and Marcel Proust.
After 18 years, Ensemble for the Romantic Century has hired general management in hopes of taking productions beyond the festivals to which they’ve been invited as well as reviving more pieces in New York. They’re also amenable to licensing. None of these fascinating theatrical concerts have limited shelf lives.
Donald T. Sanders and Eve Wolf
Wolf and company refuse to be stuck in a form. I ask whether there’s a medium waiting on the visionary’s bucket list. There are two: virtual reality and holograms. “They told me we can’t afford those yet,” she says. I conjecture it’s only a matter of time.
Photos:
All Production Photos Courtesy of Ensemble for the Romantic Century
Opening: Max Barros – piano, Sean Lee – violin, Jiyong Lee – cello
The 2018/2019 season features: Because I Could Not Stop: An Encounter with Emily Dickinson script by James Melo, Maestro (conductor Arturo Toscanini), and Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined, scripts by Eve Wolf.
Expect the unexpected.
“From the very first time that I read a poem by Emily Dickinson I was immediately struck by the beauty of the images and metaphors, and the mysterious quality of her language. I felt that her poetic style was psychologically profound, steeped in an almost manic observation of nature and the motions of the human psyche. She is a poet of inexhaustible richness and beauty.” James Melo
“Toscanini attracted me because of his stand against fascists (against Hitler and Mussolini), his helping Jews with trips to Palestine to conduct an orchestra made of Jewish refugees. It shows the world can raise their voices against totalitarianism.” Eve Wolf
“Andersen attracted me because of the fairy tales I grew up with, but now I’m deeply interested in his life and how he rose above his background and childhood traumas. The author was gender fluid. He fell in love but had unrealized relationships. I hear the music of Benjamin Britten very strongly when I think about Andersen’s inner life.” Eve Wolf
Go to the website: Ensemble for the Romantic Century
