7960401468?profile=original

By Greg Stepanich

The very first piece of art Tim Wride tried to buy was a drawing by Edward Gorey, which he saw at the old Gotham Book Mart while he was a college student in New York.
    Although he ended up not being able to afford the drawing, Wride has had ample time to examine plenty of Gorey’s work as curator of the Norton Museum of Art’s current exhibit, “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey,” on display through the rest of this month at the West Palm Beach museum.
    “His legacy is this really lovely singularity,” Wride said, which was that of a culturally omnivorous bookmaker who preferred that medium to the world of the galleries. “He impacted a huge number of artists and non-artists because of the vehicles of dissemination of his work that he chose.”
    Gorey (1925-2000), Chicago-born and Harvard-educated, created a huge body of illustrative work, much of it gently macabre (like his drawings for the PBS series Mystery!) and evocative of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It includes hilarious — or bizarre, depending on your point of view — works such as The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), an alphabet in which children meet horrible, outrageous deaths (“B is for Basil, assaulted by bears”).
    And while his angular, quirky, detailed pen-and-ink drawings make up much of the world we know as Gorey’s, Wride said the artist considered himself a writer first, perhaps not surprising for someone who was the poet Frank O’Hara’s roommate at Harvard in the late 1940s.
    “When he was doing his own books, it was about the words first, and the images after,” said Wride, 57, who is the Norton’s recently appointed photography curator. “Even when he was doing other people’s work, he had to have the whole story first before he could begin to conceive where he was going to go with it.”
    The exhibit includes more than 170 artworks by Gorey, including book illustrations, sketches and unpublished drawings, as well as a stage set in which patrons can have their pictures taken and be part of a Gorey drawing. Wride said he ranks with three other legendary American masters of line drawing who had a significant impact on the culture: Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Charles Addams.
    “He really is this idiosyncratic, singular voice. I don’t think he even acknowledged anybody outside his own inner drive,” Wride said. “To me, that’s one of the beauties of who he is.”
    “Elegant Enigmas” is on display through Sept. 2 at the Norton. Admission is $12, $5 for students; Palm Beach County residents get in free on the first Saturday of each month. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, except for Thursday, when the museum is open until 9 p.m. Call 832-5196 or visit  www.norton.org for more information.
                            ***
7960400890?profile=original    In addition to the just-ended Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, there is another group busy during the summer with small, chamber-style concerts.
    The Symphony of the Americas, which has been performing in one incarnation or another for 25 years, is in the middle of its annual Summerfest series. The Fort Lauderdale-based orchestra brings its summer show to Palm Beach County on Aug. 4, with a concert at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach.
    It will be a string orchestra concert that also features guest flutist Marilyn Maingart, and it will feature members of the Mission Chamber Orchestra of Rome. The Italian ensemble’s director, Lorenzo Turchi-Floris, has contributed a new piece to the effort called Tarantango, for piano and strings, a work that marries the Italian tarantella with the Argentinian tango.
    “He’s a wonderful composer and a wonderful performer, and the work’s phenomenal,” said the symphony’s founder and director, James Brooks-Bruzzese.
    The festival, which is in its 21st year, has taken its participants to every country in Central America, to four South American countries, and six countries in Europe, Brooks-Bruzzese said. In Florida, it’s appeared from Vero Beach south to Key West on the east side, and Tarpon Springs down to Naples on the west, and played at the State Department in Washington, D.C., as well as at the Kennedy Center.
    “So it’s become quite a national and international festival now. It’s quite large, and we’re very proud of it,” he said. Late last month it played eight days in Panama, familiar to Brooks-Bruzzese, who grew up in the Canal Zone.
    In addition to Turchi-Floris’ piece, the concert will include a Maingart arrangement for flute and strings of the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso of Saint-Saëns, a staple of the virtuoso violin repertory. The Baroque era will be represented by a concerto grosso (Op. 6, No. 5) of Corelli, and the transitional period of Baroque to Classical by one of the marvelous short symphonies (No. 2 in B-flat, Wq 182/2) of C.P.E. Bach.
    “It’s really striking,” he said of the work by the second of Bach’s composer sons. “It has a major-key beginning and then moves and shifts from darkness to sunshine, back and forth. And it’s also really exciting.”
    The second half of the program contains, in addition to Tarantango, three movements from the English Suite of Hubert Parry, an arrangement of the second movement of Borodin’s Second String Quartet (which was copped for the 1950s pop hit And This Is My Beloved), and one of the early string symphonies of Felix Mendelssohn (No. 10 in B minor), written when the precocious composer was 14.
    The Delray Beach concert begins at 7 p.m. Aug. 4 at the Crest Theatre in Old School Square. Tickets are $25 to $45 (the higher price includes a post-concert reception at D’Angelo Trattoria, at 9 SE Seventh Ave.). Call the box office at 243-7922.

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of The Coastal Star to add comments!

Join The Coastal Star

Activity Feed

The Coastal Star posted a blog post
17 hours ago
Mary Kate Leming posted an event
yesterday
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
yesterday
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 20
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 20
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
Mary Kate Leming posted a blog post
Mar 19
Mary Kate Leming posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 19
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Mar 17
Mary Kate Leming posted photos
Feb 28
The Coastal Star posted a blog post
Feb 28
More…