Black Violin at Midland Theatre, Newark, Ohio, Oct. 15, 2017
If the goal was to smash stereotypes - and it was - Black Violin was a smashing success.
The duo proved young black men in street clothes can play classical music with verve and virtuosity.
They proved older white people in formal wear can groove to hip-hop beats.
They proved the music of Beethoven and Motown and Def Jam are not mutually exclusive.
And who ever heard of an evening concert ending at 8:40 p.m., anyway?
All of this and more occurred Sunday night in Newark’s Midland Theatre as Black Violin - violinist Kev Marcus and violist Wil B., joined by DJ SPS and drummer Nat Stokes and accompanied by the Newark Granville Symphony Orchestra - used their music to break down stereotypes and build bridges between musical styles and people in an 80-minute performance that was as rock ‘n’ roll as it was classical, that was as modern hip hop as it was centuries-old art form.
NGSO opened the show with a standard rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide Overture,” in what was to be the evening’s only nod to tradition. After another selection from a contemporary, Ohio-born composer, strobe lights flashed, drums pounded, the DJ coaxed pre-recorded sounds from this turntables and laptop and Marcus., playing a cut-away violin with just a frame and B., with a full-bodied violia he lovingly referred to as Tiffany, burst on stage and led the orchestra through a raucous rendition of the title track from their 2015 release Stereotypes.
This was powerful stuff - a performance that had the audience full of local students, symphony subscribers and curious music lovers moving in their seats and rewarding the track with a thunderous round of applause.
Before long, the house was on its collective feat, dancing to the music and hanging on the musicians’ stories of meeting in high-school symphony class and mixing what they learned with their love for Wu Tang Clan and other artists of the day. Marcus encouraged the young people in the audience to do whatever they wanted to do and be whatever they wanted to be and reported how he and B. had traveled the world and played for President Obama because they pursued their dreams, even though some of their peers thought they were crazy and/or uncool for doing so.
Early in the night, B. introduced Tiffany and asked the audience to indulge him while he serenaded her. What followed was an infectious performance of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” which found B. singing to his instrument as he held it in front of him and plucking notes from it as it if were a guitar as the audience clapped along.
A few numbers later, in what Marcus termed the “Freestyle” section of the show, the quartet improvised a piece that featured a smashing drum solo, a cacophonic showcase by the DJ and culminated with B. and Marcus trading licks as they used effects pedals to coax un-violin-like sounds from their instruments while they plied them with bows and played them with their fingers.
These untraditional moments were Classical BOOM - as the tour is known - at its best. Less-successful was when B. sat at a keyboard, Stokes straddled a cajón and Marcus playing gorgeous runs on his violin, played traditional-sounding, original pop songs like “Addiction.”
The audience’s relatively muted reception of this brief interlude indicated untraditional was what the fans and the symphony - which spent the time it wasn’t playing bopping to the beats and offering silent applause by shaking their bows - had come for.
And non-traditional was mostly what they got with number after number - whether rapped, sung or instrumental - eliciting whoops and standing ovations from the small, but enthusiastic audience.
And though Black Violin spent the entire evening smashing stereotypes, they also managed to prove one very important cliché.
Music - unlike any other form of communication - is a universal language; a language capable of uniting disparate groups of people and reminding them that our similarities are much more important - and dramatic - than our differences.
Grade card: Black Violin at Midland Theatre, 10/15/17 - B+
