Music review: 2Cellos at Largo at the Coronet

The power of YouTube has struck again, thrusting an obscure pair of 24-year-old Croatian cellists, Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, into the big time with alarming speed.

Earlier this year, the pair -- who call their act 2Cellos -- posted a zany video of themselves converting Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” into a high-energy tour de force for two cellos.  The thing caught on, receiving more than 5.6 million hits to date.  Sony Masterworks noticed and released a CD of their rock retoolings in July.  Elton John had them as his opening act over the summer, and they’ll open for him at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for almost a month starting Sept. 28.

Having seen 2Cellos twice now -- opening for Sergio Mendes outdoors at the Americana in Glendale in August and at Largo at the Coronet Wednesday night -- one gets a clear picture of the originality and limitations of this act.

For one thing, these guys put a lot of genuine, unfeigned rock 'n' roll energy into performing these tunes; you don’t get any sense of slumming.  Their hair flies around, they press so hard on the strings that the horsehair comes off their bows in bunches, they push themselves physically with their skeletal-looking electric cellos about as far as you can go in a seated position. They endear themselves to the crowd with goofy pauses in their stage patter -- and they are flamboyant enough to get people excited.

Appreciation: Gilbert 'Magu' Lujan's Hollywood and Vine Metro station

The subway station at the fabled intersection of Hollywood and Vine is a Pop extravaganza, but it has much more than empty tinsel to offer hurried commuters. This clever, elaborately over-the-top design of an old movie theater interior asserts something distinctive -- and utterly unexpected -- for a place otherwise as prosaic as a subway station.

Artistically, the design slyly muses, the movies are the most profound form of mass-transit that the modern world devised.

Gilbert "Magú" Luján, the Los Angeles painter, muralist and sculptor who designed the station interior as part of the Metro Art Project, died Sunday at 70. The marvelous station will anchor his artistic legacy.

The station opened in 1998. Like all great Pop, its design plays against type. Public art meets site-specific art.

Luján, working with Altadena architect Adolfo Miralles, conceived a space that subsumes the sleek, up-to-the-minute motif of an epic, technological construction project burrowing beneath the civic sprawl within that of a fantasy movie theater reminiscent of Hollywood's golden age. Never heavy-handed, neither is it just an empty exercise in showbiz nostalgia.

'Dream With Me': A new album and TV special for Jackie Evancho

Last summer, Culture Monster followed the story of then 10-year-old singer Jackie Evancho as she captured the nation's heart as the mid-season Youtube audition contestant on "America's Got Talent."

We chatted with experts to see if she was the real deal, mused about the changes in her voice, had a look at other children with adult voices and speculated on what she might sing to bag the million-dollar prize.

In the end, Evancho placed second to bluesman Michael Grimm, a result some commentators put down to the voters' desire to protect her from the dark side of a career in showbiz, in particular the Las Vegas show that was also part of the prize.

The inevitable Christmas record, a four-track EP, was certified platinum, but for the most part, Evancho has kept a reasonably low profile. Her parents appear to be wisely playing the long game, doing their best to keep her in school and at home with her three siblings and various animals.

In recent week, however, she's been all over the place promoting her full-length album "Dream With Me" (released Tuesday) and a PBS "Great Performances" special with David Foster, "Dream With Me in Concert"  (Wednesday night at 9:30 p.m. on KOCE).

Just released: Watch Virtual Choir 2.0 Perform Eric Whitacre's 'Sleep' [Video]

On Wednesday we told you about L.A. composer Eric Whitacre's virtual choir project, which combined videos of 2,052 people singing either the soprano, alto, tenor or bass part to Whitacre's composition "Sleep" into one simultaneous performance.

Here's how it turned out.

What do you think? Choir is inherently social, yet these people aren't even in the same building. Does that make the final result more or less meaningful?

-- Marcia Adair

twitter.com/missmussel

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir will be unveiled Thursday

 
Orchestral musicians had their date with Internet destiny a few weeks ago with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Now the spotlight moves to choral singers with Thursday's release of the Virtual Choir.

Los Angeles-based choral composer Eric Whitacre created a choir that allows lone choristers from Lebanon, Kazakhstan and Madagascar to join 2,049 other singers from 50-plus countries in a performance of Whitacre's composition "Sleep."

The result will be revealed at 6 p.m. Thursday online and at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

The project, overseen by Whitacre, invited choral singers from around the world to submit a video of themselves singing either the soprano, alto, tenor or bass part of Whitacre's  "Sleep."  The audio was mixed into one track, so all four parts sounded at once as they would in a live concert.

Interest in the project has been intense, with more than twice as many videos submitted via YouTube than Whitacre dared hope for and many more than the 185 singers in last year’s Virtual Choir, seen in the video above.

Music review: YouTube Symphony Orchestra's final concert

 

As I write this -- 18 hours after watching the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Grand Finale concert -- the only musical thing that sticks in my mind is Romanian bassoonist Laurentiu Marius Darie's excellent playing in Stravinsky's "Firebird" and William Barton's mind-blowing didgeridoo beatbox. It's unfortunate but not terribly surprising.

The concert was performed on Sunday at the opera house in Sydney where the orchestra members chosen via  auditions by YouTube had been rehearsing for the week with Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

In an irony so acute it's almost painful, what will surely become one of the most-watched classical music concerts in recent memory was never really meant for an audience.  Like the final showcase after a week of band camp, when all the parents come to collect their children, Sunday's concert was all about the players' experience. The problem is: If you weren't there it doesn't really mean anything.

Making music is an intimate activity, so musicians tend to become friendly with each other quicker than, say, delegates at a dental convention --that is one of music's great gifts. What digital projections, sand artists, new compositions, star soloists, a massive budget and buckets of goodwill couldn't hide was that it takes more than a week to make an orchestra.

The biggest indicator of inward nature of the evening was the program.  By the time the last notes of "Entr'acte II" from Schubert's "Rosamunde" faded away, nearly three hours had passed. As often happens at band camp final concerts, Thomas chose egalitarianism over aesthetics and programmed several small, forgettable pieces featuring individual sections instead of a big symphony.

Theater review: 'The Frybread Queen' at the Autry National Center

In "The Frybread Queen," playwright Carolyn Dunn sifts the conflicts between tradition and modernity in the post-millennial Native American landscape into an ambitious yet over-stuffed saga of three generations of women and the beloved dead man who haunts them all.

Using the titular tribal foodstuff as all-purpose metaphor, Dunn frames both acts with a recipe monologue for each character, easily the play's best writing. The prologue introduces Jessie Burns (Jane Lind), a deceptively chipper Navajo matriarch preparing for the impending funeral of Paul, her firstborn, whose recent suicide raises the heat on a rapid-burning narrative oven.

Cue the daughters-in-law. Quiet-spoken Carlisle (Shyla Marlin), wife of Jessie's second son, arrives from Los Angeles, armed with self-rising flour, modern Indian attitudes and a tacit agenda. She plans it in tandem with foul-mouthed Annalee (Kimberly Norris Guerrero), Paul's ex-wife, whose portable oxygen tank portends the soap-edged fireworks ahead.

Enter disaffected Lily (Elizabeth Frances), Paul's teen daughter, the focus of Carlisle and Annalee's gambit, and revelations fold upon reversals. 

Dunn is a writer of talent and imagination, gifted at exposition and the telling detail, but her plot grows so over-seasoned -- spousal abuse, incest and spectral possession are but three complications -- that it cannot really breathe, and the explosively abrupt ending sorely needs an epilogue.

That said, each player has her tickling and/or arresting moment. Director Robert Caisley's staging certainly holds attention, as smoothly presented and flavorful as anything the Autry National Center's  Native Voices series has yet housed. It suggests what "Frybread" might yet become with remixed ingredients.

-- David C. Nichols

"The Frybread Queen," Wells Fargo Theater at the Autry National Center, 4700 Western Heritage Way, L.A. 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 27. $20 (323) 667-2000 ext. 354. or www.NativeVoicesattheAutry.org. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Photo: Elizabeth Frances, left, and Jane Lind. Credit: Tony Dontscheff.

A breakdown of the 2011 YouTube Symphony winners

The creation of the YouTube Symphony two years ago was intended to marry the populist, borderless ethos of online culture with the highly competitive nature of the classical-music world. The 2011 class of winners announced Tuesday shows that the YouTube Symphony continues to pull talent from the far ends of the globe, but in the end, U.S.-based musicians dominated the playing field.

The 2011 YouTube Symphony comprises 101 musicians from more than 30 different countries, ranging in age from 14 to 49 years old. The selection process involved an online audition period on YouTube last fall, from which 300 finalists from 46 countries were chosen.

The orchestra will have 97 members plus four improvisational soloists for a Mason Bates piece to be performed at the Sydney Opera House. The previous YouTube Symphony Orchestra had 96 members.

Winners are scheduled to arrive in Australia for a week of rehearsals and concerts from March 14 to 20, with a final performance on March 20 that will be live-streamed online. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas will lead the orchestra, as he did in 2009 in New York.

The most represented country in the orchestra was the U.S., with 43 musicians, followed by Australia, Canada and Italy with five each. But some of those were foreign students who used the country in which they are studying.

Twelve Days of Christmas Flash Mobs: A drop of golden sun

Time for another of our Twelve Days Of Christmas Flash Mobs and, also, a Friday. Why not take a few minutes and pass these four minutes of lovely around the office?

Happy Ho, Ho, Do, Re Mi!

Did anyone else see an elf dancing at 2:38?

Finally, some proof of what we've always suspected: Santa has spies everywhere. Even Belgium.

-- Marcia Adair
twitter.com/missmussel

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Twelve Days of Christmas Flash Mobs: Mind the gap

Wednesday's smile-inducing video is one of the original flash mobs, put on nearly three years ago by cellphone company T-Mobile at Liverpool Street Station in East London just after the morning rush.

It's not Christmasy per se, but it does fall nicely under the goodwill umbrella, even if it eventually is an ad. At least we think so. What are your thoughts?

Keep an eye out for the elderly woman cutting the rug at 1:54

The behind-the-scenes film is almost as entertaining as the dance: