Virginia Arts Fest features 'hot' women, kicks off Tuesday

The women of this year's Virginia Arts Festival are hot, in a promotional sense.

The 13th annual fest begins on Tuesday with pianist Gabriela Montero, who was seen by millions performing with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman for President Barack Obama's inauguration.

When Rob Cross, director of the arts festival, watched the inauguration, he was flabbergasted. He had been pursuing Montero for more than a year and had just booked her last summer. "I was like, 'Oh, this is unbelievable.'"

Montero will be heard in a much more comfortable setting than the bitter outdoors of January in Washington. The Venezuelan artist will perform solo in the intimate - and heated - Kaufman Theatre at the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Two other top acts also netted national attention.

Liza Minnelli, a film star and concert artist, was the cover story for Parade magazine earlier this year. She'll perform in Norfolk on April 24.

Around the same time, Patti LuPone, the powerhouse Broadway vocalist, appeared on NBC's "30 Rock." She will perform in a rare cabaret setting on May 24 in Williamsburg.

And in recent weeks, jazz vocalist/bassist Esperanza Spalding, set for the Attucks Theatre on May 13, has been pictured in full-page ads and billboards for Banana Republic.

No wonder the arts festival had sold more tickets by mid-March to out-of-towners than they had by March of 2008, Cross said.

Given the economy, he's floored by the box-office-sales graph. "We're stunned. We keep staring at it."

That uptick softens the blow of sluggish local sales. "There's no question that everyone's having to look very carefully at everything they do in terms of managing their budgets," he said of potential ticket-buyers.

The festival is trying to accommodate tightened purse strings by creating numerous free and low-cost options, and by setting ticket prices as low as $20 for even top acts like the Mark Morris Dance Group. The Brooklyn, N.Y., company is performing a new dance in early May that was co-commissioned by the festival to Prokofiev's original score for "Romeo and Juliet."

"That's just $20 to see one of the most important pieces of new dance in the past year," he said of the piece already written up by national publications such as Symphony magazine.

"If I knew a year and a half ago what would be going on in the world today," Cross said, "we would be having a little bit smaller festival this year." That's how far ahead he contracts artists.

At this point, he wouldn't cancel an event for slow ticket sales. "You would lose the trust of the community, and the trust with artists.

"Those are long-term investments in relationships. We feel like we've stayed true to our mission. We're really trying to bring the best to Hampton Roads from around the world."

This year, the festival has an especially strong lineup of women.

Besides Minnelli, LuPone, Montero and Spalding, there's also country/folk singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris and Anoushka Shankar, who will perform with her father, sitar legend Ravi Shankar, and numerous other women performers, plus a composer and a choreographer.

Cross said the high percentage of women was a coincidence; he doesn't think in terms of gender when crafting a festival. More than male or female, he strives to balance a season with a variety of musical presentations by top-notch performers representing various genres and nations.

"Artistically, I think it's the strongest festival we've ever had," he said. "A lot of things fell into place that we've been working on for a long time."

Cross had been trying to book Lupone for two years. LuPone won a Tony Award last year for best actress in a musical for the Broadway revival of "Gypsy," which closed in January. She played the mother of Gypsy Rose Lee, who belts out "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and whose lines include "If I coulda, I woulda."

Her festival show is titled "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," and delves into her own life between showstopping songs from the catalogs of Sondheim, Joni Mitchell, Richard Rodgers and more.

Minnelli's manager called Cross, offering his client's latest New York show. "It was totally luck that she was doing that Broadway run in December and was willing to add some spring dates."

"An Evening with Liza Minnelli" at Chrysler Hall is likely to incorporate that recent show at the Palace Theatre. Her mother, Judy Garland, had a legendary run at the Palace. During Minnelli's show, she sang the same medley of songs her mother had in the 1950s.

"That didn't initially go over too well with some people," Minnelli told Liz Smith for the Parade story. "It was like, 'Oh, singing your mother's songs now?' I did it because one of my most vivid early memories of my mother is on stage at The Palace. For the first time, I realized the power of her voice."

Cross has tried to book Emmylou Harris since the festival kicked off in 1997. "I had the opportunity to work with her almost 15 years ago, and it was one of the best concerts I've ever played in my life." Cross is a percussionist with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Harris was performing a pops program in Virginia Beach.

Last summer he finally landed her. Three weeks later, he got a call from her manager. "She'd like to tour with this group. Would you consider that?"

In the end, he said yes to an all-star act featuring Harris with singer-songwriters Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller. The foursome will be at the Ferguson Center for the Arts in Newport News on May 30.

As a percussionist, Cross is better equipped than most to assess the distinctive qualities of Evelyn Glennie, who is a rare classical percussion soloist. He's heard her play lots, at percussion festivals and elsewhere. "She plays the instrument at the level of a concert pianist," he said.

Before Glennie, only a handful of compositions for solo percussion existed, Cross said. She has commissioned dozens of works and performed them.

One drummer onstage alone for an evening could sound monotonous. "Because of the variety of her percussion instruments, and the different types of repertoire, she gets a wide spectrum of colors and sounds from the instruments," Cross said. "And she very much engages and pulls the audience in."

Vocalist Carla Cook is the opener on April 25 for four consecutive Saturday-night concerts at the Attucks Theatre. Pianist John Toomey, who directs the jazz studies program at Old Dominion University, organized this year's series, which features all New York artists.

"She's an amazingly talented jazz vocalist," Toomey said of Cook. "She's got a great swing feel, really sings the blues well."

Spalding plays upright acoustic bass and sings, and has performed at such top outlets as the Newport Jazz Festival. Four years ago, at age 20, she joined the faculty at Boston's Berklee School of Music and was its youngest instructor.

Composer Ellen Zwilich's "Piano Septet" was commissioned by a consortium of about 20 funders who form New Art Now, a support group founded by the arts festival about two years ago.

Zwilich's septet will be premiered by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and Miami String Quartet on May 6 in Portsmouth.

"The festival made a decision in the last couple of years," Cross said. "We really want to start commissioning new work," because that is what builds a festival's reputation and places it more firmly in the national arena.

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com