REPEATER: Believe it or not, the Phoenix actually got a free promo copy of the latest Fugazi album, The Argument (Dischord). That’s a first from the notoriously bare-bones, press-shy conscience of post-punk — and it just happened to be our favorite Fugazi album since ’92’s In on the Kill Taker. Promos or no, the rest of the Fugazi engine still functions the way you remember it: their shows are cheap, all-ages, and bombastic, and the details are a little sketchy. But we can tell you that Fugazi’s appearances on April 19 and 20 at the MassArt Gym, 621 Huntington Avenue, are being put on by the folks at MassArt’s Eventworks festival, and that there’s a pretty good chance tickets will be gone by show time. If you want ’em, your best bet is to go to Smash City Records, at 304 Newbury Street; they’re $7. Eulcid open on the 19th; the Poster Children open on the 20th. Call (617) 879-7726.
SEARCHING FOR N.E.R.D.: As the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo have broken most of the rules of hip-hop production, inaugurating a stripped-back style that’s topped charts relentlessly (very partial list: Mystikal, Jay-Z, ODB, Britney, Backstreet) and made even funkless white overbiters (namely us) trip over themselves in awe. As N.E.R.D., they made In Search Of, which yielded the lascivious club hit "Lapdance" — just before the album disappeared from the Virgin release schedule, but not before the duo made our jaws hit the concrete with a rare performance (a stageful of strippers in Dubya masks were involved) at last year’s FNX Best Music Poll Party. While the hot, much-bootlegged In Search Of was being released as-is in Europe, the N.E.R.D. dudes went back into the studio and re-recorded the entire album, track for track, with a live band. This version, also titled In Search Of (Virgin), has just been released in the US. And N.E.R.D. are coming back to Boston with a gig on June 3 at the Paradise, 969 Comm Ave. Tickets are $15; call (617) 423-NEXT.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Robert Pinsky & the Takacs
Anyone who’s ever heard Robert Pinsky read knows how attuned he is to the sensuous nature of the spoken word. One of the main tenets of his Favorite Poem Project is that poetry must be read aloud if its true meanings are to be grasped and its full joys experienced. Now he’s taking that idea one step farther, collaborating with the distinguished Takacs Quartet in an evening of music and poetry titled "All the World for Love." Pinsky will weave readings from the likes of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and Louise Bogan (as well as his own work) around string quartets by Leos Janacek, Samuel Barber, and Benjamin Britten. Local poet and Phoenix classical-music editor Lloyd Schwartz will give a pre-concert talk.
"Poetry is a musical medium," a release from the Quartet explains. "And when poetry is read aloud, its performative nuances — phrasing, breathing, cadences — make its musical aspects perfectly clear." Pinsky (who in addition to being the 39th poet laureate of the United States is a saxophonist) agrees, seeing a deep similarity in the temporal form common to both. "It’s exciting how bringing together two arts that happen in time — music and poetry — can emphasize the way emotion can come from pauses, changes of pace, variations of repetition, the way resolutions and irresolutions fall out."
The specific pairings were made with the idea that poem and quartet would illuminate each other. The sensual longing of William Carlos Williams’s "Love Song" precedes Janacek’s Intimate Letters Quartet, which was inspired by the then 73-year-old composer’s love for a 27-year-old woman. Barber’s famous Adagio (from his only string quartet, Opus 11), so often played as an elegy, is here placed in the context of the earthy, lusty passage from Vergil’s Georgics that’s said to have inspired it. And poems by Frank Bidart and Louise Glück provide the emotional framework for Britten’s Third Quartet, a work that grew out of the haunted love story in his opera Death in Venice.
The performers are equally well matched. Pinsky’s deep, strong baritone is a great companion for the rich tone and passionate style of the Takacs, which formed in Budapest in 1975 and now includes two English members. And these performers share an intrepid spirit. "We are curious how interweaving spoken and played music may change the way performers and listeners respond to each," the Quartet writes. Pinsky concurs: "The theme of love is really just an occasion for challenging and easing some of the conventions and habits of the traditional poetry reading, the traditional concert. But if shaking things up and defying expectations is the goal, what better theme than love to make the point?"
"All the World for Love" will be presented by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series next Friday, April 19, at 8 p.m. (Lloyd Schwartz’s talk begins at 7) at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street. Remaining tickets are $38 and $42. Call (617) 482-6661.
BY DAVID WEININGER
