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The Bakersfield Californian Thursday, July 12, 2012
Eye Street Editor Jennifer Self | Phone 395-7434 | e-mail jself@bakersfield.com
Index ‘Troubadour Blues’ screening .................. 16 David Nigel Lloyd ...................................... 16 Irish Heritage Club.................................... 17 Arts Alive .................................................. 18 ‘Grease’ review ........................................ 19 The Lowdown with Matt Munoz ............ 20 Batman trivia .......................................... 21 Calendar .............................................. 26-27
Yanni: Show goes on and on There’s no quit in this resilient performer BY ALAN SCULLEY Contributing writer
F
ew performers would release a concert DVD that gives the inclement weather top billing over the star. But then few concerts have been as dramatic as the one staged by Yanni in 2011 at a castle in Puerto Rico. “Mother Nature dealt us a pretty tough blow,” Yanni said in a recent phone interview. “I had never in my whole career been rained out. We almost made it, almost made it. ... I just could not take the risk. It was dangerous.” Conditions won’t be so brutal when Yanni performs Tuesday at Rabobank Arena. This is July in Bakersfield, so the only potential for calamity would be if the air conditioning goes on the fritz. The current tour is a welcome stateside reprieve for the performer, famous for staging concerts in unusual venues like the Kremlin and the Acropolis and farflung locales that include Oman, Dubai and South Korea. But it was his unforgettable concert at Castillo San Felipe del Morro, chronicled on the DVD titled “Yanni: Live at El Morro, Puerto Rico,” that stays with the performer. It had rained every day in the month leading up to the concerts, the first of which was cut short by rain. “I can’t begin telling you,” Yanni said, describing his feeling before the second concert. “First of all, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re very nervous. You know you’re only going to have a shot, maybe two, to capture the concert. And I am very aware of everything, lights, cameras, angles, I make sure everything is good and everybody is lit correctly. It’s an extremely complicated undertaking. We had to build everything, the staging, the bleachers where the people were going to sit. And lighting the entire castle, I mean we had something like 25, 30 cameras, lots of cameras. It was an enormous amount of cameras.” As luck would have it, there was a good deal of wind that Saturday night — obvious in the “Live at El Morro” video — but no rain. Ironically, Yanni said he thinks the uncertainty of that second
PHOTO COURTESY OF YANNI
Yanni hits the Rabobank Tuesday. “The concert is going to be over two hours, so they’re going to get quite a lot of music,” he said.
Yanni When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday Where: Rabobank Theater, 1001 Truxtun Ave. Tickets: $56.15 to $164.90; ticketmaster.com or 800-7453000.
show helped create a feeling in the performance that translated to the DVD. “What sets this video apart from every other video is the fact that we all had to fight for it,” he said. “Nobody was on that stage that second night thinking ‘Oh, we’ve got it.’ No, we were there in the back of our minds, there was like ‘any minute now we could get rained on.’ “It shows the energy,” Yanni said of the DVD. “Something happens, the fighting spirit inside you wakes up and you go ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen.’ People were praying, however they pray, everybody, we
held hands (before the show) and said nothing is going to happen. This is our last chance. It’s going to happen. And it did.” In contrast, this year’s tour through the States has been more conventional for Yanni, his 13piece orchestra and his pair of singers, Lauren Jelencovich and Lisa Lavie. They’re touring behind Yanni’s latest studio CD, the 2011 release “Truth of Touch.” That album features a few surprises. In particular, songs like “Voyager,” “Flash of Color” and “Vertigo” displayed a rhythmic heft and a bold sound that Yanni has rarely brought to his music. His usually peaceful and pastoral compositions earned him recognition (derision from some) as one of the founders of New Age music. As performances of “Voyager” and especially “Vertigo” on “Live at El Morro” show, the assertive sound of “Truth of Touch” carried over and was even more pronounced in the live setting. Yanni
said fans on the current tour can expect to experience their share of uptempo moments to go with the lush, melodically rich music they’ve come to expect from Yanni during a solo career that began in 1984 with the release of his first CD, “Optimystique,” and now includes 19 CDs. “The energy level has kicked up quite considerably, because once you start playing songs like ‘Voyage’ or ‘Vertigo’ — now ‘Vertigo’ live — it’s a rocker,” he said. “It’s straight out. I’m not holding back anything. “I will give them their energetic moments,” Yanni said. “(But) you can’t just beat them over the head for two hours and you can’t just be playing soft stuff on the piano for two hours, either. It’s a combination of the two.” Fans who watch “Live at El Morro” won’t have to worry that Yanni’s concert will be the same as the performance captured on the DVD. For one thing, the DVD is only an hour long, which allows
Coming Saturday Demi Lovato, who performs at the Rabobank Sunday, talks to music writer Matt Munoz about dealing with the pressures of fame.
it to be aired on PBS and other outlets. “The concert is going to be over two hours, so they’re going to get quite a lot of music,” Yanni said. “And the sequencing is going to be different, and (so will) the way I start the concert. “People can expect to hear a lot of the classics, which no matter what I do I can’t get away from. I have to play those songs,” he said. “And then I have to refresh the concert enough and surprise them enough to where they feel like they’re seeing something new and experiencing something new. It’s like telling a story when you do a concert. You have to have the audience go for a little trip.”