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Recent American brass trio proves smart switch at chamber fest

Written by Greg Stepanich on 18 July 2011.

American composer Lauren Bernofsky.

The second concert of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 20th season underwent a programming change, but its tried-and-true finale, which didn’t change, worked its customary magic.

A large audience at the Crest Theatre on Sunday afternoon warmly applauded that last work, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810) of Franz Schubert. In one sense, the two pieces that came before it were warm-up acts, but to say that is to shortchange a deft swap-out on the musical menu.

Faced with having to jettison a wind septet by Eugène Bozza that had been planned, organizers of the festival could have gone for something twice-familiar or easy to put together. But to their credit, they chose a relatively new piece (2002) by a contemporary American composer. The Trio for Brass by Lauren Bernofsky, written for Del Mar College in Texas, is a clever, well-designed piece of writing for trumpet, horn and trombone, and with its Stravinsky-and-jazz harmonic flavorings it made a good case for Bernofsky’s belief that music should be enjoyable to listen to as well as play.

That’s not to say it was easy to perform. Trumpeter Brian Stanley, hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz, and trombonist Anthony McFarlane each had substantial solo lines in a piece that was more contrapuntal than not. The first movement, a martial, forthright piece, was especially tricky for Tomasiewicz, who had to play wide-ranging, snaky lines that topped out in the highest reaches of the instrument.

In the second, the horn set up a smooth ostinato pattern while Stanley played a melancholy modal tune that wandered over a lyrical landscape before ending with trumpet on top in a good old-fashioned Picardy third, and horn and trombone skittering away to support it with a widely spaced chord, evidence of how you can make big music with small forces.

The finale, more insistently march-like than the first, also had a bluesy feel throughout that caused Tomasiewicz some trouble when it came to a solo moment, but that overall gave the music a modern feel without being cheesy.

Again, a smart piece of programming, and it was followed by another, with a John McDonough arrangement for woodwind quintet of the best-known piece by the English composer Peter Warlock. The Capriol Suite, written in 1926, pays homage to Warlock’s love of Renaissance music, and in this version, unlike Warlock’s original for string orchestra, the archaism of the French sources comes through even more strongly; all that was missing were the drums.

The five players – flutist Beth Larsen, oboist Sherie Aguirre, bassoonist Michael Ellert, clarinetist Michael Forte and Tomasiewicz again on horn – performed this charming work with wit, aplomb and a high degree of delicacy.

The best performance of the suite’s six dances was the fourth, Bransles, in which the quintet played with an engaging sense of unity, bolstered by the muscle of Ellert’s race-to-the-bottom figures. The fifth movement (Pieds en l’air) was especially soft and gentle, and the sixth (Mattachins) had a full-on rusticity that made the suddenly daring harmonies at the very end even more surprising.

The second half of the program was devoted to the Schubert, and featured violinists Mei-Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron. This was a very fine performance of this repertoire staple, particularly in the second movement and the last pages of the finale. These four musicians are longtime friends and colleagues, and they clearly know each other’s styles thoroughly.

In general, this was a reading of the quartet that was conservative and clean; there was no room here for an outburst of ferocity at the beginning of the work or later on when the opening motif returned. Rather, what you had was a straightforward presentation of the first bars that made the next part of the music sound like a logical extension rather than an anticlimax. In other words, it paid due respect to Schubert’s Beethoven fixation by showing that the rest of the movement’s material truly was made out of those first 10 notes.

Ensemble was very solid throughout the entire piece, and the first movement had some especially fine playing with the smoothness of Luo and Kostic’s beguiling rendition of the secondary theme. But it was the second movement that impressed most, with a beautifully whispered opening (the song for which the quartet is named) that also avoided the tempting staginess of the drawn-out slowness to which some foursomes fall victim. This version kept the music moving, and the variations flowered naturally out of them.

Bergeron was particularly good in the solo of the second variation, playing with a lovely, burnished sound that her three partners carefully let float into the spotlight. Luo had the occasional difficulty in the very highest E-string theatrics here, but for the most part she handled her work expertly, and that’s always extra-tough in quartets of this period of composition, which treat the first violin much like a soloist.

If the Scherzo was attractive without being compelling, the tarantella finale had evidently been carefully rehearsed and polished, and it was thrilling to hear all four musicians spring along in this exciting music right in lock-step. Here, too, the triplet motif that began the quartet could be heard as the pulse of the last movement, tribute to the intelligent way in which these fine players met Schubert on his own terms and let him speak.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival offers its third concert of the summer at 8 p.m. Friday at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. The program features Martinu’s Serenata II for two violins and viola, Eric Ewazen’s Mosaics, for flute, bassoon and marimba, and the Clarinet Quintet (in A, K. 581) of Mozart. Tickets are $25, and a four-weekend ticket can be had for $85. Call 330-6874, visit www.pbcmf.org, or buy them at the door.

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Chamber fest’s Schoenberg falls short of transfiguration

Written by Greg Stepanich on 14 July 2011.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).

As one of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s performers rightly said in her remarks from the stage, the name of Arnold Schoenberg is “box office poison” for a lot of people, but that really shouldn’t apply to his early string sextet, Verklärte Nacht.

This important, beautiful work was one of the major events of the programs in the first weekend of concerts presented in the chamber festival’s 20th anniversary summer, along with the most well-known of Mozart’s wind serenades and an attractive trifle by a French master of the flute.

The Schoenberg sextet, a moody evocation of a poem about two lovers walking in the moonlight, and the confession by the woman that she is pregnant with another man’s child, was set by the composer in a Wagnerian, shape-shifting style, with a simple falling minor scale setting the stage for music of emotional tumult that ends in major-key radiance.

In performance Sunday afternoon at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach, the sextet came off rather drily, though clearly the players on stage were trying to emote as best they could. Intonation in the numerous unison octave passages was not what it should have been, which is problematic in music written in the thick, always-doubled fashion of late Romanticism.

And while the players handled their parts ably enough, the music didn’t have enough febrility, enough nervous emotion. Even the very beginning, with its deep, quiet octaves in the tonic, was too precise and pointed: Those low D’s beat time rather than summoned mystery. The beauty of this piece in addition to the quality of the themes and harmonies is its sense of feelings in near-manic flux; it needs to shimmer along with the dark landscape, lit now by the moon, then by nobility of action as the man of the couple accepts the child-to-be as his own.

Each change of mood needs to be starkly underlined, brought out in clear contrast to the one that came before, so that the journey to the major key at the end sounds like arrival. But this reading, while pleasant and competently played, was too careful and prosaic to be magical, and by doing so it fell short of the music’s point.

The concert opened with Médailles Antiques, a two-movement work by the French flutist and conductor Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941). The flutist was Beth Larsen, substituting for an absent Karen Dixon; she was joined by pianist Roberta Rust and violinist Mei-Mei Luo. This is expertly made, if not particularly distinctive, music, but it shows off each instrument well.

Rust played with force and bigness throughout, and Larsen’s tone was full and sweet. Luo played with her usual intensity, and while on the surface that might seem the wrong prescription for lighthearted French music, it actually worked rather well, bringing out the slippery harmonies and energy of the piece to good effect. The second of the two movements, Danses, was somewhat reminiscent of Chabrier, and the three musicians played it with high spirits and engaging athleticism.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Mozart’s Serenade (No. 10 in B-flat, K. 361) for 13 winds, known as the Gran Partita. The festival took the trouble to bring in two basset horns for the performance, a laudable gesture of fealty to the score, which an old tradition assigns to celebratory music for Mozart’s wedding in 1782.

All 14 musicians (including double bassist Jason Lindsay) blended nicely, playing with a fat, round sound, but not one that was overwhelming. It was, however, an approach overall that was somewhat too dynamically limited, and that may have been because the musicians played the piece without a conductor.

The famed third movement (beloved from the scene in the movie Amadeus when Salieri first learns who Mozart is), for instance, was a shade too heavy and too fast, which cost it some of the beauty of the Handelian solo oboe gesture with which it opens. Similarly, in the fourth movement Minuetto, with its two trios, there was much to admire in the spiffy solo work (particularly the bassoon in the second trio), but the music also had a sameness to its dynamic level that could have been easily altered with a good conductorial hand.

The bravura ending, which always brings cheers, did so Sunday afternoon as well, and in the important respects of technique, blend and harmony with Classical style, this was a strong, enjoyable reading of a monument of wind literature. It could have used more subtlety, though, to bring out all of Mozart’s light and shade, and for that it would have needed a director.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival offers its second concert of the summer at 8 p.m. Friday at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. The program features Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, arranged for woodwind quintet by John McDonough, Eugene Bozza’s Four Movements for Wind Septet, and the Schubert String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810, known as the Death and the Maiden Quartet. Tickets are $25, and a four-weekend ticket can be had for $85. Call 330-6874, visit www.pbcmf.org, or buy them at the door.

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Pianist Perez persuasive in music of Albeniz, Villa-Lobos

Written by Greg Stepanich on 12 July 2011.

Vanessa Perez.

In an ambitious and wide-ranging recital Saturday night at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton, pianist Vanessa Perez brought poetry and power to music from Mozart to Villa-Lobos.

It was in the music of South America and Spain that Perez, a native of Venezuela, made the strongest impact, though in the six years since I last saw her at the Steinway Gallery, she has become a more accomplished player in the older canonical repertoire, and that bodes well for her journey toward pianistic completeness.

In her opening work, the lovely Sonata in F, K. 332, of Mozart, Perez showed that she could play in the spare, pedal-minimum way that pianists usually perform this music, which puts a premium on evenness of notes and precision of harmony. Perez (who took the repeat in the first movement) gave us a large-toned, big Mozart, strong on drama and lyricism.

The special glory of this sonata is the second movement, an opulent operatic aria that is one of Mozart’s most beautiful such utterances, and Perez played it winningly, taking care not to overdo the elaborate variations of the theme in the second half. Overall, her execution needed to be a little cleaner, especially in the middle of the first movement, where she lost her way temporarily, and in the very tricky different sections of the finale: Without a pedal to cover mishaps, everything has to be as faultless as possible, or the music loses some of its cohesion.

Perez has just recorded the complete Preludes of Chopin, and the two five-flat ones, No. 15 in D-flat and No. 16 in B-flat minor, came next. In the No. 15 (Raindrop), we heard the most characteristic elements of Perez’s art, a highly colored, deeply Romantic style of hothouse languidness that was well-suited for the sweetness of the music. The tempestuous minor-key middle section could have used some more mystery and drama, which would have made the E major climax more exciting.

The No. 16 Prelude is a whirlwind, with cascades of angry scales running up and down over a thumping, leaping bass. Here, too, her runs were not as precise as they needed to be, particularly at the outset, but she finished in appropriately thunderous style.

The Chopin Fantasy (in F minor, Op. 49) that followed gave evidence of much hard work at the keyboard, and Perez was generally successful in giving her audience a good musical narrative that took listeners from the almost-offhand opening through the peaks and valleys of Chopin’s intense musical landscape. She built nicely from the dead-march of the opening through the first section, the proof being in the way she played the big unison octaves, setting them up each time as signposts for listeners to orient themselves by.

Her technique in the Fantasy was impressive, especially in the repeated climbs to the outer reaches of the keyboard, which are among the most perilous measures in the piece. In the B major Lento sostenuto sections, she was all dreaminess, all languor, making for a very effective contrast. The only part that lacked enough contrast was the marching-bass version of the theme, which works best when there’s a sudden change of dynamic and pianistic approach; here it was too much like everything around it. In sum, though, this was a strong performance of this masterwork.

With the second half of the program, music of Albéniz and Villa-Lobos, Perez was on very comfortable ground. The first of two pieces from the first Suite Espanola (Op. 47), Granada, eloquently showcased her attractive tone production, but in the well-known Asturias that followed, things were a little too dry, and the tempo on the slow side.

Perez has played selections from Iberia for years, and Saturday night she offered Triana, from Book 2. She played it with verve and plenty of color, letting the midsection theme sing out, and doing a good job of setting the final pages up for the surprise loud reentrance of the main theme at the end.

It was in the five pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos that Perez really made her mark at the recital. A Lendo do Caboclo (Legend of the Caboclo), which came first, is a moody, lush piece in which the pianist’s skill at playing with tenderness was evident. Her approach should make her an exemplary Debussy player, and it would be worthwhile to hear her in that repertory.

She closed with four pieces from Volume 1 of Villa-Lobos’s A Prole do Bebe (The Baby’s Family), which in this volume describes dolls of different types. It’s a landmark work from 1918, and it made a scandalous impression on Brazilian audiences of the time. In the brighter pieces – Branquinha, Moreninha and O Polchinello – Perez’s fingerwork was sharp and clear, and her sense of rhythm aggressive and exciting. In the other piece, A Pobrezinha, she played with a blurry intimacy that was most affecting.

Perez returned for an encore of Albeniz’s Granada, played for Piano Lovers founder Abram Kreeger, whose recording device was apparently not on when she went through it the first time. It was a kind gesture from Perez, and this performance was better than the first – warmer, deeper and prettier.

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Camaraderie keeps PB Chamber Music Festival going, 20 summers on

Written by Greg Stepanich on 08 July 2011.

Members of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, pictured this week at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. From left: Ellen Tomasiewicz, Rebecca Diderrich, Beth Larsen, Michael Ellert, Roberta Rust, Julia McAlister, Rene Reder and Sherie Aguirre. (Photo by Michael Price Photography)

It all began at Chuck and Harold’s.

On a long-ago day at the popular Palm Beach restaurant, bassoonist Michael Ellert noticed something right away about Michael Forte, a clarinetist and fellow New Yorker who had just moved to Florida, and with whom he was playing as part of a trio.

“I looked at Michael and I said, ‘Man, you and I must have learned how to play out of tune the same way, because we play amazingly well together,’” Ellert said, laughing. “It was just a lock, the first time.”

That sense of camaraderie is one of the things that led Forte, Ellert and flutist Karen Dixon, all members of the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, to found a summer festival of chamber music in Palm Beach County, a concert series that begins its 20th anniversary season tonight in West Palm Beach. And it is that collegiality that keeps the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival going, keeps its core players coming back each year, and keeps winning over audiences.

“The mission has stayed the same: Focus on the music, with South Florida musicians,” Forte said of the festival, which debuted July 10, 1992, at the Duncan Theater at what was then Palm Beach Community College in Lake Worth. “Rather than traipsing off somewhere to play chamber music or do something else at a summer festival, they can do it here.”

One not-incidental goal of the effort was to show audiences that the making of classical music wasn’t restricted to the season or to snowbirds. “We were trying to dispel that myth that there’s nobody in South Florida in the summer,” Forte said.

Michael Forte.

The festival started small, with just three concerts, but by 1996, it had grown to 12 concerts, given over four weeks and in three different venues. About 3,000 people turn out each July for the concerts, and Ellert, the group’s repertoire master, said the musicians have presented about 250 pieces in the course of its existence.

In so doing, they have created a South Florida summer cultural institution. But there is another legacy of the festival that is at least as important: The six discs it has recorded for Boca Raton’s Klavier label. The first, Buried Treasure, was released in 2000, the most recent, Ever Changing, in 2010, and the discs are exceptional for one overriding reason: The freshness of the repertory.

“One of the things important about the festival is performing pieces that have not earned their obscurity,” said Clark McAlister, a vice president at Edwin Kalmus, which owns Klavier, and the festival’s composer in residence. “A lot of them don’t. We’re rooting out the pieces that need to be heard.”

Each of the festival’s four programs is performed three times, in the south, central and northern parts of Palm Beach County. The concerts are set for 8 p.m. Fridays (July 8, 15, 22 and 29) at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach; 8 p.m. Saturdays (July 9, 16, 23 and 30) at the Eissey Campus Theatre on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens; and at 2 p.m. Sundays (July 10, 17, 24, and 31) in the Crest Theatre at Old School Square in Delray Beach.

As they have in past seasons, the musicians revisit some pieces that have worked well in the past, and chief among them this year is L’Histoire du Soldat, Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 tale of a soldier and the Devil, which will end the festival in Week 4. It’s a 20th-century masterwork, and organizers have retained the services of the three actors who performed it with them in a previous season: Joe Gillie, Barbara Bradshaw and Randolph Dellago.

Karen Dixon.

Another seminal work of modernism, Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, is heard in Week 1 along with the great Serenade No. 10 (in B-flat, K. 361) of Mozart, also known as the Gran Partita or the Serenade for 13 Winds. Schubert’s beloved Death and the Maiden Quartet (No. 14 in D minor, D. 810) is scheduled for Week 2, and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (in A, K. 581) is set for Week 3. Forte is featured in that work, and Dixon takes the solo spotlight in Week 4 with a septet version of the Orchestral Suite No. 2 (in B minor, BWV 1067) of J.S. Bach.

Each summer’s programs always feature one work for the three founders, and this year it’s Fragments, by the American composer Robert Muczynski, who died last year. It’s a brief, charming work that appears on the festival’s Buried Treasure disc and in Week 4. There’s always a wind quintet each season, and this time around it’s a John McDonough arrangement of the Capriol Suite, by the English composer Peter Warlock (Week 2).

The programs also feature less well-known music by Eugene Bozza, Philippe Gaubert, Bohuslav Martinu and a trio for flute, bassoon and marimba, called Mosaics, by the contemporary American composer Eric Ewazen.

Each piece in the festival gets from six to 12 hours of rehearsal, which is substantial, and all players regardless of their duties are paid festival-style: A flat rate of $500 a week. Dixon, 49, said it makes for a busy run-up to the concerts.

“The way our schedule is, we don’t have a day off,” she said.

Dixon said the planning meeting that the festival musicians always promise each other they’ll have after the festival ends never seems to happen, but dates at the venues are secured as soon as feasible. Musicians suggest wish lists of works they’d like to play in the concerts, and Ellert, a self-confessed addict of the far reaches of publisher catalogs, makes a point of seeking out underappreciated repertoire for possible inclusion.

This year’s selection of the Ewazen trio, for instance, came about as a result of a serendipitous late-night search on YouTube, he said, and the Bozza (Four Movements for Wind Septet, in Week 2), is completely new to the musicians.

The three founders say they’ve often received suggestions for expanding the festival to another week, perhaps by bringing in outside ensembles and giving the home team a rest. But the four weeks of concerts push the musicians to their limit.

“To do anything else, someone would have to do it for us,” said Ellert, 61. And doing concerts during the regular, event-crammed season isn’t workable either, they said.

Michael Ellert.

The 20 seasons have provided the expected collection of high and low points. The three founders look to the previous L’Histoire, the recordings, and a conductor-less reading of the suite from Aaron Copland’s Applachian Spring ballet score as musical peaks.

One of the low points was offered by a disgruntled patron of the series in the early years. Dixon had worked up the Duettino Concertante for flute and percussion of the 20th-century German-American composer Ingolf Dahl. “It was a really cool piece, and we really worked hard on it,” she said. “And I remember feeling that we did a really good job.”

But the audience member disagreed.

“I had someone at the Crest Theatre come up to me after the concert, at the reception, and say, ‘How could you subject me to that? That was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I would have left but I was in the middle of the row and I couldn’t get out,’” she said. “I was so taken aback, I was speechless.”

Those kinds of experiences, though, have been rare. For the most part, this has been a festival with a steady, loyal following, summer after summer.

“People say to us, ‘I really love coming to these concerts. It just looks like you guys are having a really good time out there,’” said Forte, 59. “And that means a lot.”

The three say they’re planning to keep the series going as long as they can, and say the festivals have become an extension of what the original concert was: A gathering of friends.

“That’s one of the great things about this,” Ellert said, pointing out that the core group of players has been with the series for more than 10 years. “Even though it’s just once a year, we all get back together on day one, and we go, ‘Oh, this works.’”

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival begins tonight at 8, at Persson Hall on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, and repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach. The program features Médailles Antiques for flute, violin and piano by the French composer Philippe Gaubert; Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Op. 4), for string sextet; and the Gran Partita (in B-flat, K. 361) for 13 winds and double bass, by Mozart. Tickets are $25, and a four-weekend ticket can be had for $85. Call 330-6874, visit www.pbcmf.org, or buy them at the door.

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Psychedelic Furs let strong catalog speak for itself

Written by Gretel Sarmiento on 03 July 2011.

The Psychedelic Furs at the Culture Room on Friday night. (Photo by Gretel Sarmiento)

The best furs don’t come from dead animals: they come with guitars, they jump and down, and they sing songs with a distinctive raw voice.

British rockers The Psychedelic Furs are very much alive and still on the run, and they proved it song after song Friday night at Fort Lauderdale’s Culture Room.

A simple stage, with no other adornment but the music, accompanied the band during their two sets, the first of which covered all the tracks from the 1981 Talk Talk Talk album including All of This And Nothing, She Is Mine, It Goes On and Pretty in Pink. The closer the fans got to frontman Richard Butler, the harder his obsure poetic lyrics seemed to bite.

There was no opening act. A video of David Bowie’s Reality tour warmed up the standing crowd while it waited to get cozy. Dumb Waiters opened up the concert around 9 p.m. The members had made their entrance and right away got into it. No hellos were said. No kissing up to the crowd. Songs now in their 20s and 30s suddenly sounded fresh, charged with all the energy and emotion accumulated over the years that they went unsung.

The songs were the true stars of the night, although everyone adored the impressive saxophone by Mars Williams. The band's current lineup also included Tim Butler (bass), Rich Good (guitar), Paul Garisto (drums) and Amanda Kramer (keyboards). The crowd also loved it whenever Richard Butler decided to smile.

The relaxed singer and songwriter, whose known first passion is painting, mostly kept to the lyrics and his amusing mannerisms. The crowd got to see exactly what his visual interpretations look like: If, to the mix of rebel child and mime, you were to throw in a little bit of Sid & Nancy's Gary Oldman, then you’d get the idea.

"Richard!" People kept calling out his name as if they knew him, and you couldn’t blame them. Even the last person standing in the room, pinned to the back wall, could have gone home and safely proclaimed: Butler was right there. And he was, dressed in black slacks and black blazer. Saxman Williams sported a military-style jacket while guitarist Good's sweat kept dripping from his feather-like hairstyle.

These are not the furs that rest, moribund and comfortable, on someone’s neck and shoulders. These got the fans singing and jumping in a tight room full of strangers and, I suspect, talking for hours after the show.

At 9:45 p.m., the band took a 15-minute break and came back with Sister Europe, Love My Way, Heartbeat and Heaven, among others. Maybe it was just me, but President Gas has never sounded better. On this night, the 1982 song had more guts and emotion than before. Perhaps it is the times we live that make it seem more relevant.

No lies, back in the government
No tears, party time is here again
President Gas is up for president
Line up, put your kisses down
Say yeah, say yes again
Stand up, there's a head count
President Gas on everything but roller skates
It's sick the price of medicine
Stand up, we'll put you on your feet again
Open up your eyes
Just to check that you’re asleep again
President Gas is President Gas again
He comes in from the left sometimes
He comes in from the right


After Heartbreak Beat Butler suddenly left the stage, and the rest of the band soon followed. It was clear that the Furs wanted the well-behaved crowd to lose it a little bit more, go a little wild, and ask to return to the stage, which they did with My Time.

Butler sang it in sort of a mellow way, more or less what he sounds like in Maybe Someday, one of the songs from the very personal solo material he produced while the band took a break in the ‘90s. During this time he and his brother Tim also formed Love Spit Love and recorded two albums.

Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler. (Photo by Gretel Sarmiento)

In 2000, the band fortunately regrouped and released a live album Beautiful Chaos: Greatest Hits Live, which also featured a new studio recording, Alive (For Once In My Lifetime). The ongoing Talk Talk Talk tour is all about celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album of that name. Following their performance tonight in Jacksonville, the band will head to Atlanta and Nashville.

But none of these appearances can really be considered the Furs' time to shine again. In reality, they have never stopped shining. A band that needs nothing more than a platform in a small dark room with a few bright lights to change your life is not like any other band. It can afford to go dormant for a while and go bare at a show. This is after all what fans love about them: the lack of small talk, the rawness.

At about 11 p.m., Butler said “Thank you,” and that was it. The confused crowd thought it could get one more song out of them but as Butler had just told them: My time is my time. The TV screen that had played Bowie at the beginning turned to The Rolling Stones. The crowd left.

Moments later a biker stopped at a red light sees a group of still hyped-up fans cross the street. He asks “Who was playing at the Culture Room?”

Someone responds: “The Psychedelic Furs.”

“Oh, man!” said the biker, realizing what he had just missed.

FIRST SET

Dumb Waiters

Pretty in Pink

I Wanna Sleep With You

No Tears

Mr. Jones

Into You Like A Train

It Goes On

So Run Down

All Of This And Nothing

She Is Mine

SECOND SET

Sister Europe

Love My Way

Heartbeat

President Gas

Highwire Days

Heaven

Heartbreak Beat

My Time