Rock / Opera



So as I mentioned previously, last weekend was the CMJ Rock Hall Music Festival (photo gallery available). I was really excited to volunteer at the Festival Village on Friday afternoon, since that would be my only time to attend Festival activities (other than the Futureheads show, which will be up soon). I got there and was shocked to see how few people were there!

I got all setup at our booth with the Cleveland Port Authority and walked over to the food tent thing. There I ran into Roger Hoover who would be performing at 5:00pm (last show at the Festival Village). He had told me that yesterday they had only sold 12 tickets to the village at the door! It had looked like they were struggling to meet that goal on this day as well.

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around to the vendor tables and checking out all the free stuff. I do have to say that the village was a pretty sweet setup. Great music related vendors, food & beer vendors, and dueling stages that were staggering shows every half hour! I was so bummed to see so few people. My only guess was that it was poorly advertised.

After some pretty mediocre bands, Rosavelt came on stage. I've seen members of this band play with Roger Hoover at a show I saw at the Winchester, and this time two members of the Whiskeyhounds were playing with Rosavelt. They sounded pretty good, playing to only about 10 people in a huge open parking lot. I was standing there thinking that I should get back to my volunteer duties, but with so few people standing there watching, I felt bad walking away (that it would be so obvious).

Five-o-clock came and it was time to see Roger Hoover play, but then the storms decided to make an appearance, bringing dark clouds, thunder and rain. Roger had mentioned that this is like the 13th consecutive time that they have tried to play outside and it has been cancelled due to rain. They were supposed to play the next day at noon, so I'm curious to see if that happened.

That night, my friend Matt (who's in town working on the Kiss Me Kate show for the Cleveland Lyric Opera) had asked me to attend an opera performance with him that night at Spaces Gallery. Now I like all kinds of music, but I think opera has to be pretty low on the list. I can respect it, but it's just not that accessible to me. But he was going to be watching my dog that weekend, so the trade off was that I joined him.

It turned out to be a pretty interesting show. Nine people performed single pieces, either from opera or from popular music. Most of the performers didn't catch my ear, except one named Michael Gentile (tenor), and I swear it's not because he was the cutest.

It was interesting to see the Spaces Gallery. They had an exhibition called "Dissent," focusing on challenging the manufactured mainstream ideas. The work was pretty interesting, but this was my favorite piece. One interesting point is that the blood coming from Mickey (though not really named that for copywrite sake) was laid out in the shape of the United States of America.



Posted: Sat - June 18, 2005 at 06:52 AM           |

©