Music Times Two With Cape Symphony
Guest conductor Francisco Noya will lead the Cape Symphony in “Better Together” at the Barnstable Performing Arts Center (744 West Main St., Hyannis) on Saturday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, April 7 at 3 p.m. The concert also features guest performers Christina and Michelle Naughton, twin sisters who perform as a piano duo.
Noya, currently the music director of the Boston Civic Symphony and a member of the conducting faculty at Berklee College of Music, has guest conducted orchestras around the world. He says the program for the upcoming Cape Symphony concert particularly excites him.
“The concert begins with a delightful piece for woodwinds,” says Noya. That piece, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” was composed by Gordon Jacob in 1959. Its four movements recall old English folk songs. Next on the program is Francis Poulenc’s 1932 Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, which Noya describes as “wonderful, accessible music”: “It has a lot of imagination, and, of course, French flair,” he says, adding that twin pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton provide a uniquely unified musical presence. “Two pianos make a wonderful noise,” he says in the program notes for the concert. “It’s loud! I love it, I love it.”
After intermission, the concert will conclude with Bela Bartok’s 1943 Concerto for Orchestra. Described as “Mount Everest for musicians” in the concert’s program notes, the five-movement work “is an outstanding piece of repertoire for any orchestra,” says Noya. “It’s very demanding for every section. Every section has something important to say. You have to play at the top of your game in order to do justice to the piece.”
For Noya, the opportunity to conduct the orchestra is a privilege. “The podium is the focal point of the orchestra,” he says. “Not only are your ears enjoying the sound, but your whole body feels the vibration of the notes. I have the best seat in the house. Except it’s standing room only.”
Tickets are $32 to $72 at capesymphony.org. —Eve Samaha
Raising Awareness of Violence and Domestic Abuse
An upcoming exhibition at the Wellfleet Public Library (55 West Main St.) is part of a three-decade Cape Cod-based project to raise awareness about the victims and survivors of violence and domestic abuse against women.
According to its website, the Clothesline Project began in 1990 with an exhibition in Hyannis when members of Cape Cod Women’s Agenda hung a clothesline across the village green that displayed 31 shirts designed by survivors of assault, rape, and sexual abuse. Currently based in Yarmouth Port, the project has expanded to include hundreds of exhibitions in dozens of places all over the U.S. and across the world in countries as far afield as Lebanon, Namibia, Australia, and Taiwan.
The website also explains the color key used for the shirts on display, which are designed by survivors or those making shirts in memory of someone who has died. White shirts represent women who died from violence. Yellow or beige shirts represent battered or assaulted women. Red, pink, and orange indicate survivors of rape and sexual assault, while blue and green shirts represent survivors of incest and sexual abuse. Shirts and materials are made available at each exhibition for visitors who wish to design a shirt for the project onsite.
The exhibition is affiliated with Hyannis-based Independence House, a social services agency for those affected by domestic and sexual violence, with offices in Hyannis, Falmouth, Orleans, and Provincetown. The agency also runs a 24-hour telephone hotline for abuse survivors, which can be reached at 800-439-6507.
The exhibition at the Wellfleet library, one of the first iterations of the project since the death of founder Carol Chichetto in July 2023, will be on view on Wednesday, April 10, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Visit wellfleetlibrary.org for more information about the exhibition; visit theclotheslineproject.org to learn more about the history of the project. —John D’Addario
‘Renewal Through Color’ at Berta Walker Gallery
The exhibition “Renewal Through Color” is currently on view at Berta Walker Gallery (208 Bradford St.), which is celebrating its 35th anniversary in Provincetown this season. The show includes figurative, expressionist, and abstract works by artists represented by the gallery and feels ideally suited to welcome springtime.
“I noticed as we started to select the art for this exhibition that many of the pieces seemed to anchor in the color orange,” says Walker in a statement accompanying the exhibition. “Orange is the body’s second energy chakra, the creative chakra. It enhances the feelings of warmth, enthusiasm, stimulation, nurturing, happiness, freedom, fascination and relates to our ability to experience pleasure. We are emerging from a long very emotional winter worldwide, feeling compassion alongside our angst over our inability to solve the horrors of war, fires, earthquakes, poverty, starvation. But the miracle of the arts — visual, musical, rhythm, in words and movement — is that they very importantly nurture the spirit.”
A large field of orange — almost like a sunrise heralding the arrival of spring — dominates Budd Hopkins’s 1969 painting Saratoga. With a powerful use of rigid shapes and lines, the piece could be interpreted as a landscape, with a white sun rising across a new sky. The sun hangs low on the horizon line in Lucy Clark’s Pamet Evening, in which two translucent bubble-shaped clouds float above the shifting waters in twilight.
Color is used throughout other works in the show in different and often surprising ways. Erna Partoll uses simple bold shapes of single colors in Nude in Yellow (Will Barnet class) as well as faded gray lines to render curves and maroon stripes to describe the sofa the subject lies on. The subject’s blank face and lack of tone in her body create a negative space; coats hang behind her in the background, creating a sense of depth. Everything is simple, sketched-out, only partially done. With her back turned to us, we are unable to make out any details: we are allowed only to have a sense of her shape, volume, and color.
The gallery is open weekends from noon to 4 p.m. through mid-May — “or by chance, and always by appointment,” according to the gallery website. See bertawalkergallery.com for more information. —Pat Kearns
Songwriting as a ‘Divine Process’
Kat Edmonson grew up watching old movies. She names “Fred Astaire movies, Marx Brothers movies, Singin’ in the Rain, all of the Judy Garland pictures, and everything that Henry Mancini scored, be it The Pink Panther or Peter Gunn or Charade” as influences. For Edmonson, the songs in those films weren’t just background music. “The lyrics actually tell you something new about what is happening,” she says. “The music activates the imagination.”
An award-winning self-taught singer and songwriter with six albums, Edmonson still takes inspiration from the music she grew up with. “I tell stories throughout my performances,” she says. She will perform at the Cape Cinema on Saturday, April 6 at 7 p.m. as part of the Payomet Road Show series.
Edmonson describes her songwriting as a “divine process” in which “the music just comes to me. I’m going about my day doing ordinary things, like dishes and errands, and I hear music.” Her songwriting begins with recording preliminary versions of songs using the voice memo app on her phone. She hears orchestral lines and countermelodies as rhythms and arrangements play out in her head.
“Then it’s my job to transcribe it all,” she says. “I keep working it out in my mind, like a puzzle to be solved.”
Her songs — which Edmonson describes as being about “hardships, hopes, dreams, love, and loss” — span the gamut of human experience, with lyrics that she says are “more to the point than ambiguous, more illustrative than abstract. I know what I mean to say when I write.” Her distinctive voice has an old-fashioned tone and timbre, which she uses with captivating and emotive effect. “People in the audience tell me that they tend to feel like they’re there, in the places and events that I describe,” she says.
At her Payomet Road Show, Edmonson will perform a set of mostly original songs, with a few covers. Although she usually performs with a band, she’ll be accompanied by a single guitarist, an arrangement she says is especially exciting for its improvisational opportunities.
“Playing with a band is like driving a bus,” she says. “In a duo, it’s like driving a Porsche.” That sort of improvisatory freedom, she continues, is “the thing I look forward to most when performing. The crowd can see that we’re going off-roading. They can come along.”
Tickets are $28 to $38 at tickets.payomet.org. —Dorothea Samaha
