Bizarre monodrama was a risk worth taking

by Wilma Salisbury

THE PLAIN DEALER

Before the monodrama began, stage director Gregory Keller introduced bass-baritone Dean Elzinga as the Mad King. Roaming through the audience nearly naked in a torn white hospital gown, he pulled on gray boxer shorts and settled into a makeshift throne when he reached the stage, and imaginary asylum defined by a freestanding light grid.

Performing with strong physicality and throat-splitting techniques, the singer poured out the King’s fears and fantasies in excruciating outcries. Playing his vocal cords like a percussion instrument, he howled, moaned, gargled and barked.…Interacting with the violinist, he angrily smashed the player’s instrument. Mourning his own death, he made a regal exit accompanied by a booming bass drum. Sheffer and the musicians were alert to every cue, and the performance made a powerful impression.

Considered Opinions on the 11/01/03 Concert by Red, an orchestra

by Frank Hurby

W.C.L.U

[Dean Elzinga’s] performance was a brilliant tour de force of both acting and throat sounds…The conductor and artistic director of Red, Jonathan Sheffer, kept this madhouse on pace, with appropriate spirit. Stage director Gregory Keller lent the work a real sense of the king’s frenzied fears and foibles.
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by Jermone Crossley

W.C.L.U.
Given the theatrical nature of the experience, stage director Gregory Keller risked disaster by reconceiving the set in such a way that the work’s central conceit – the image of the deranged King attending to the singing of his pet birds – was pretty much abandoned. This tossed out, not just the dramatic context of the piece, but layers of symbolic meaning that depend on that context. Fortunately, the six instrumentalists navigated the challenging score the remarkable agility. And the performance by bass-baritone Dean Elzinga, both as a musician and as an actor, was absolutely staggering.

Eos Orchestra and the Music of a Mad King

by Fred Volkmer

THE SOUTHHAMPTON PRESS

Music lovers and the merely curious who were lucky enough to be in the audience last Friday, July 27, at the East Hampton’s John Drew Theater were treated to one of the most extraordinary riveting musical events of this or any season…This was a stunning performance by the astonishing Mr. Elzinga of a brilliant work.

A Singer’s Tormented Journey Into the Mind of George III

by Anthony Tommasini

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The American colonies were not all that George III lost during his long reign on the British throne. He also lost his mind. What this must have been like for him was the focus of an imaginative program that the conductor Jonathan Sheffer devised for the Eos Orchestra on Thursday night at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

The centerpiece of the program was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's 1969 dramatic work for singer and chamber ensemble, ''Eight Songs for a Mad King,'' which takes us, quite viscerally, inside the head of the unhinged monarch. The vocal lines for the soloist portraying the king are not exactly notated. Much of the text (by Randolf Stow) is delivered in Sprechstimme, or speech-song, the vocal technique devised by Schoenberg for ''Pierrot Lunaire,'' clearly a model for Sir Peter's work. Great freedom is allowed the singer, who must do a lot of scooping and shrieking. The bass-baritone Dean Elzinga brought mesmerizing dramatic intensity to his performance.

While the stage was still being set, Mr. Elzinga appeared, looking like some escapee from a mental ward, wearing only a hospital gown, his feet bare, his head shaved, his look an eerie mix of blankness and hostility. Sir Peter's eclectic score keeps shifting styles: skittish 12-tone music, volatile atonality, a ''wrong-note'' Haydnesque piano sonata; mock Baroque opera arias; ''Comfort Ye'' from ''The Messiah'' turned into cocktail lounge piano music. The audience is meant to experience the music as through the malfunctioning brain of the king; and you did with Mr. Elzinga in the role, who sounded by turns like an opera singer, a falsetto crooner, a Tibetan monk and Yoko Ono.

As staged by the director Gregory Keller, the mad king sat crazed atop a pathetic throne (a wheelchair covered with a sheet); sang an elegy to a bedpan full of urine; needled the flutist playing a twittering solo; glared at the percussionist making birdcall sounds; and, in a frenzied fit, grabbed the instrument from the violinist and smashed it to bits. (A junk shop violin is a requisite prop whenever the piece is presented.) This was a shattering performance of a brilliant work.

Because George III was a great patron of music, Mr. Sheffer surrounded the ''Eight Songs for a Mad King'' with works that the king supported and heard in his lifetime. First came the Overture to the opera ''Orione'' by Johann Christian Bach (J. S.'s youngest child), who settled in London and had a great success as a German composer writing Italian operas for English audiences. The concert concluded with Haydn's ''London'' Symphony (No. 104 in D). Apparently the king was so impressed with Haydn, who was making his celebrated visit from Vienna, that he tried to persuade him to stay. Haydn went home.

Both performances under Mr. Sheffer were stylish and buoyant. You could just imagine the king in his clearheaded days relishing the sense of enlightenment, rationality and well being that this music conveys.

As if to reassure us that he had not ruined his robust voice as the mad king, Mr. Elzinga returned for an encore with the orchestra: Handel's ''Comfort Ye,'' this time sung the right way.

Madness of a King – Eos Orchestra balances Bach and insanity

by Jeremy Eichler

NEWSDAY

...Elzinga’s performance was masterful, and frighteningly convincing. His character’s next move was so unpredictable that one could not help feeling slightly uneasy while sitting in the audience.