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University Daily Kansan, September 15, 1981
Spare time
Troubadours, jesters frolic in Bonner Springs
By STU LITCHFIELD Staff Reporter
The Renaissance of 16th century Europe is remembered as a festive, colorful age of cultural rebirth; an age of exploration and discovery.
Four centuries later, this era of rebirth and revival is not so distant as it may seem. Peanants, magicians and troubadours still wander gavily through the streets: Artisans dispel their wares, and jesters Queen and saintly for the delight of the King and Queen and their court.
The adventure and revelry of the Renaissance is still alive and full of color at the fifth annual Renaissance Festival, a benefit for the Kansas City Art Institute.
The festival, which began last weekend and runs through Oct 18, tries to recreate a harvest festival on the island.
In the past four years, the festival has grown in size and attendance. In 1977, its first year, the event attracted only about 3,600 people. Last year, over 100,000 people visited the festival, located at the Agricultural Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs.
According to Nancy Parks, a promoter for the festival, great effort was made to research the Renaissance so that the event would be as authentic as possible.
"We want it to be authentic," Parks said. "So, all participants must present their crafts to a jury to be accepted, and the costumes and eniments are worked up according to styles of the period.
Alan Yarkmack, a craftsman from Cotopax,
Colo. and a festival participant, had told them
had seen the fireworks.
"I look at it as a fantasy world," Yarkmard said. "Almost like Fantasy Island. You can come here and get away from it all. During the week, I long to come back."
Yarkarm is one of many participants who traveled to Bonner Springs to be part of the team.
According to Parks, there were a lot of festival gypsies who travel to the 10 establishment festivals in London.
Hansa Hall, also from Colorado, displays his birds at the festival. Hall brought seven mcaws, two cocotates and one parrot. The birds are on stands in the center or on shoulders, or they predict a visitor's fortune.
Many of the participants are local artists or performers. Velda Calbert, a Kansas City, Mo., beautician, is known to festivalgoers as "Velda-the-Mvict."
Calbert, a board member of Psychic Research, a Kansas City organization, is a three-year member of the festival. Calbert does psychic predictions for her customers, reading Tarot cards, looking into a crystal ball or performing psychometry, the interpretation of vibrations from a personal object of the customer.
Calbert, who has been in the psychic business for more than 30 years, said she was serious about it.
"My mother was a mystic, so I was raised in that environment," she said. "I'm serious. I'm serious and people take me seriously. Sure,
people come as a joke, but I tell them something pretty accurate and they know it's not a joke."
In addition to the craft exhibits and other booths, a variety of entertainment is offered. From the theatre groups and singers to jugglers and mimes, the festival is full of merriment.
A new attraction at the festival is Marco Polo's Marketplace. According to Jerry Swert, section of entertainment for the Marketplace, this section of the festival follows the travels of an explorer of the 18th century, who is famous for his introduction of Eastern culture to Europe.
Switched said the Marketplace had possibilities for future expansion.
"I'd like to see the show follow Polo's travel more closely," Swett said. "Perhaps we could add dances from Arabia or Siam, or other places that Polo had been."
According to Parks, each year the festival coordinators added new attractions and expanded up old ones. Last year the festival had grown to 13. Parks, said, but this year it had grown to 13.
"We traveled to other festivals," Parks said. "We want to add new things to keep people coming back, but we also want to keep the feeling of intimacy. This festival in comparison spirit has a lot more community spirit. It's a village atmosphere, instead of being spread all over."
Parks said that since the festival was a benefit, it helped to retain this feeling of intimacy. She said that Kansas City's was the least commercial of all the festivals.
Marriner and Minnesota work in harmony
By DIANE MAKOVSKY
Staff Reporter
Staff Reporter
Neville Marriner's British accent flowed Saturday afternoon with the same grace he displayed conducting the Minnesota Orchestra Saturday night in Hoch Auditorium.
Marriner flew in from his London home to
tour the countryside, early tour of
cultures, such as art and small town
He said he could have sent someone else to do the tour but his appearance on the trip showed that he was not really in the mood.
"This is what I need to be my first fully-devoted year to the orchestra," Marriner said during an interview at the Radisson Muehlebach in City, Mo., before Saturday night's concert.
Trips are always good for an orchestra, Marriner said.
"It's good for morale, living together morning till night." he said.
This is his third season with the symphony. He said that in the past he had other commitments that kept him from being totally a part of the group.
"I suppose I feel close to him than ever
about his relationship about his relationship
with the orchestra提问
"'Labor laws are much more evident here than in Europe,'" he said.
Part of the closeness comes from Marriner's adjustment to American musicians' union laws.
Martner tried in that Europe art came first for the artists. In America there is more of a focus on modernism than on the past.
Marriner said when he first started working with the Minnesota Orchestra he had trouble understanding and accepting union laws, but now he had adjusted to them, bringing him closer to understanding the views of the musicians.
The labor laws make the musicians in the 94-piece orchestra very competitive. It is not all bad, Marriner said, because the competitiveness adds vitality.
"It takes a long time to put your mark on an ensemble like this," he said. "I've changed the words."
Marriner said he had changed the orchestra's musical balance. Specifically, he said he struc
for a "voluptuous string sound, always."
by developing the string sound, he must then get a
string sound that matches the original.
Also, he said he had "to suppress an overbrilliant brass section."
American orchestra have strong brass sections, which are loud sections, he said. He says that marching band training leads to this condition.
The location of the orchestra in the Midwest is just fine with Marriner because he said he loved it.
"I feel much more at home with this work
and I feel much safer, comparing Minnesota to
California, where I am."
California "working conditions were pretty
Neville Marriner
sterile," but hard work and European descendants in Minnesota are more to his style, he said.
Marriner's name and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Orchestra are almost inseparably linked. This orchestra, first formed 21 years ago, had no name, no place to practice, music to play, and it had no intention of performing because it was meeting for pleasure. Marriner said.
The harpsichordist, John Churchill, was music director at the Church of St. Martin and asked the group to perform.
Although he is still director of the Academy, Marriner said he was a titular head. He wants the Academy to rejuvenate itself artistically, letting loose to changes.
Things kind of took off from there, Marriner said.
It was through the Academy, however, that Marriner made several recordings.
The Academy would "send gramophone records out like greeting cards," Mariner said. Once it had started performing, it sought audiences through its recordings.
A taste for classical music was something that took a long time to develop, Marriner said. He likened the development to a child's acquiring a sense of the good that he claimed not to like, such as spinach.
"I think music education in America is primitive," he said. When there is a budget cut, the arts are likely to be neglected.
Marriner also said that "music spewed forth from television is of quite reasonable quality", but the viewer's attention span was limited to the minutes and then there was a commercial.
Classical music needs a longer attention span than people seem to be conditioned for by text.
Marriner described himself as a former musician. He was lead second violinist with the London Symphony for 13 years. Now he doesn't play an instrument.
"I played chamber music five or six years ago for pleasure," he said, adding that there was little pleasure in it because he could not play at all and when he was a regularly performing musician.
But also, he said, people don't like to be confused when someone tries to be both musician and conductor, and conducting is what he has been doing so do. He has been conducting for nearly 25 years.
At 57, Marriner thrives on a busy schedule. He is already penciling in his 1984 calendar. He does try to schedule a lengthy vacation in the summer; requests come for him to perform, and he goes.
"I get fairly fidgety to work again after 10 days," he said.
King Arthur (Arthur Campbell) and Queen Anne (Phoebe Mooney) enjoy the entertainment while dining at their Court at the Renaissance Festival Sunday.
Marriner and the orchestra played before a crowd of at least 2,500 people on Saturday night, according to Jackie Davies, director of the KU concert series.
Fleisher's classes inspire students
By DIANE MAKOVSKY
Staff Reporter
Occasionally looking down at the piece of music in his lap, Leon Fleisher watched the pianist on the Swarthout Recital Hall stage, then opened a cigarette, then critiqued the student's work.
Fleisher, University of Kansas' pianist-residence, arrived last Thursday to conduct master classes in piano over the weekend. Students chosen by the faculty at finals last spring played pieces for Fleisher, and during their sessions, worked on specific sections with him.
The pianist-in-residence program was set up to allow the pianist to continue his normal touring and come to the University three times a semester to teach master classes.
Master classes in piano are classes in which a student plays a composition, then is critiqued by the visiting artist. The public is allowed to attend the class, but cannot participate.
Fleisher, in an interview Friday evening, said that he loved teaching. He has been a faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore since 1959.
Fleisher said his responsibility to students was two-fold. First, he must increase the student's desire to find deeper interpretations of a piece to aim for more than they think is obtainable, and secondly, he must show them a way to achieve their aims.
During the Friday classes, Fleisher defined homework to a student by saying, "If it's more a feeling than a task, I will do it."
And when the student tried the new emphasis
treatment, he tried the treated result with
an epiphragmatic "That's It."
"He is a fantastic teacher." Paul Santiago, Barcelona, Portugal graduate student, said. He said that Flesher was one of the reasons he came to KU to study piano performance.
"He can get you very excited," Randy Bush, Pola senior, said. "He can be very demanding to me."
"He can transfer a lot of excitement back to the piece," he said. "And no matter what you do, there will be something to work on."
Fleisher, who has been conducting master classes at KU since 1978, said that this year he will be teaching.
It will also be Fleisher's last year as conductor of the Annapolis Orchestra. He has worked there
Fleisher was resident conductor of the Baltimore symphony for five years until 1979. He also conducts internationally. He will be conducting in Lisbon sometime during the next two
Though he said that conducting was fun, Fleisher's first love is performing as a pianist.
Fleisher first prize in the International Queen Elizabeth Concourse in Belgium in 1952. In the mid-60s, he developed partial paralysis of his brain, and has since performed mostly left-handed.
Although an operation last January did not cure his paralysis, the occurrences are less frequent, he said.
In the meantime, Fleisher also sits on juries at piano competitions.
"It's just possible that those problems (with the paralysis) may be resolving themselves," he said.
Having won an international competition, Fleisher said that he had a responsibility to sit on juries, although he said he did not like competitions.
Fleisher said the quality of a person's performance could be judged, but there was no way to know.
Today someone might just have a piece in better shape than another, also, but that might not be the case.
"I guess the artist who finds in any given piece of music the greatest riches, and is aware of the greatest implications, is a great pianist," he said.
Fleisher left yesterday to return to Baltimore, but plans to return to KU in early October to continue teaching his master classes.
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