Sat 3/15 @ 8:30PM
Note: This show, originally scheduled for the Masonic Auditorium, will now take place at the Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
For almost 20 years, music lovers with wildly eclectic, international tastes and a keen, sophisticated sense of the absurd have had the opportunity slake their musical thirst with Pink Martini.
The mini-orchestra was founded by classically trained pianist Thomas Lauderdale in Portland, Oregon in 1994. Since then they’ve play their multi-genre, multi-lingual music all over the world, with orchestras, in concert, and at high-profile special events, like the re-opening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art after its remodeling. Like Jerry Lewis, they are especially popular in France.
In addition to more than 50 orchestras, Pink Martini is known for its diverse collaborations, some — like Broadway chanteuse Carol Channing, the Sesame Street cast, or ’50s film bombshell Mamie Van Doren — very oddball indeed. A recent collaboration involved the von Trapps — the four great-grandchildren of Maria and Georg von Trapp of The Sound of Music fame, with whom Pink Martini has been working for the last couple of years.
In fact, Pink Martini’s new album, their tenth, Dream a Little Dream, co-stars the von Trapps. It not only includes a couple of tunes from The Sound of Music (as well as other off-the-wall song selections like ABBA’s “Fernando” and the title tune which is indeed the ’30s pop song popularized by the Mamas and the Papas in 1968) but features as one of its guest vocalists Charmian Carr, who appeared as the oldest von Trapp daughter in the 1965 film.
Could it get any stranger? You bet it could! Other guests on the album includes Irish ensemble the Chieftains, Las Vegas lounge lizard Wayne Newton, and former director of the Columbus Zoo, Jack Hanna. And on it they sing in French, German, Chinese, and in the native language of Rwanda.
That album will have just hit the streets or your computer when Pink Martini and the von Trapps arrive to perform together at Cleveland’s Masonic Auditorium downtown.
Tickets are $39.