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October 12th, 2008
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Around Town

Ears are ringing

By Frank Kuznik
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 23rd, 2008 issue

There was a time, not very long ago, when Prague was a musical wasteland in July and August. Every serious player packed up their instrument and split for summer festivals or the cottage, leaving only tourist music for the culturally starved. So it’s heartening now to run a couple days of festivals and see programming worthy of any weekend during the regular season.

Prague Proms brought German chanteuse Ute Lemper to town Sunday for an orchestral cabaret night — an inherent contradiction, but Lemper pulled it off with the grace and charm of a pro. Sweeping onto the stage at Obecní dům in a black evening gown with four male backup singers, she served up a dark, cool rendition of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Seven Deadly Sins, invoking the spirit of Lotte Lenya. Unlike a classic cabaret singer, Lemper’s voice is high and clear, and rode like a wave above the orchestra — with the aid of a mic, which unfortunately added a sharp edge to her vocals.
Lemper managed to create a clublike intimacy in the second half of the concert by talking the audience through the lives and works of cabaret stars like Jacques Brel and Edith Piaf, half-singing and half-acting their songs. She was amazingly down-to-earth for a megastar, and had the audience in her hand for the closing numbers, “Cabaret” and “All That Jazz.” The crowd responded with a standing ovation and four curtain calls.
On Monday night, Prague Proms offered a megastar from a different genre: George Mraz, the expat Czech bassist who has played with many of the biggest names in American jazz. Reduta Jazz Club was jammed, though largely with people who didn’t seem to know what the attraction was. “Which one is the famous cellist?” a clueless American woman asked halfway through the first set, surprised to learn that the famous player was the nerdy-looking guy on the right with glasses and a bad shirt.
The performance was like a boys’ club gathering in a big basement rec room, with Mraz and fellow bassist Antonín Gondolán trading licks, backed by sidemen on piano and drums, on mostly safe standards like “Caravan” and “Round Midnight.” Reduta is a strange place, with an MC who introduces every song and an atmosphere, as one local music critic noted, “like a cross between a David Lynch movie and a trip back in time.” But Mraz has some of the most supple hands in the business, and it was a treat to see him play difficult, inventive lines and make them look easy.
In between those concerts, one of the oddest musicians to come through town this year gave two delightful performances, at the Loreto and Strahov Monastery. Boudewijn Zwart is a Dutch specialist in carillon music, which is to say, playing church bells. Late Monday afternoon, he entranced a Summer Festivities of Early Music crowd with a set of Baroque pieces on the Nativity Chapel organ — sounding astonishingly good for an instrument built in 1738 — and then ascended the Loreto bell tower to play Dutch folk songs on the Loreto’s 27-bell carillon.
Then the audience moved on to Strahov, where Zwart had set up his mobile carillon — an amazing instrument mounted on a small flatbed that looks a bit like an organ, with  wooden handles instead of a keyboard and 50 bells inside instead of strings. After a planned set of four Baroque pieces, Zwart cheerily kept playing, soliciting requests and gonging his way through Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. It was one of the most remarkable and distinctive performances this reviewer has ever seen in Prague.
All that, and we didn’t even get to the biggest name in town on Monday night, Tom Waits. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com


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