Arts & Entertainment
8 About
It's Her Party
It's been more than 40 years since her
first hit — 1963's Its My Party" — and
30 years since she last recorded an album
that charted, but 60-year-old Jewish song-
stress Lesley Gore — born Lesley Sue
Goldstein — is back with a new CD called
Ever Since (Engine Company Records),
with 10 songs "as mature and wistful as
her early records
were brash and
bright:' says the
New York Times.
One of those
songs is a new ver-
sion of her pop
hit and feminist
anthem "You Don't
Own Me" — per-
haps a message to
her audience that
she has lived the
life she chose after
coming to the real-
Lesley Gore
ization in her 20s
Ail
that she is a lesbian.
Gore began hosting
episodes of PBS's
In the Life, which
focused on GLBT
issues, in 2004, and
she publicly came
out in 2005, acknowl-
edging that she had
lived with the same
partner for 23 years.
Lesley Gore appears at the Ark in
Ann Arbor 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 18.
Tickets are $35. (734) 761-1451 or
www.theark.org .
Piano Men
Two world-renowned Jewish pianists bring
their classical sounds to Metro Detroit
stages on Saturday, March 17.
Long devoted to chamber music litera-
ture, Emanuel Ax, 57, performs works by
Beethoven and Schumann in a Chamber
Music Society of Detroit solo recital, the
musician's only appearance in southeast
Michigan this season.
The Ukrainian-
born Ax, whose family
moved to the U.S. in
1961, captured public
attention in 1974 when,
at age 25, he won the
first Arthur Rubinstein
International Piano
Competition in Tel Aviv.
In 1975, he won the Michaels Award of
Young Concert Artists and, four years later,
took the coveted Avery Fisher Prize.
A frequent collaborator with the late
Isaac Stern, Ax has made a series of
acclaimed recordings with Yo-Yo Ma, hav-
ing won three Grammys for their perfor-
mance of Beethoven and Brahms sonatas
for cello and piano. In 2005, Ax contrib-
uted to a BBC Holocaust documentary
that aired on the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz; it was awarded an
international Emmy.
He resides in New York City with his
wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki, with whom
he has two children, Joseph and Sarah.
Ax performs 8 p.m. at the Seligman
Performing Arts Center, 22305 W. 13 Mile
Road, in Beverly Hills, on the campus of
the Detroit Country Day School. Tickets
are $41-$75; students $25. (248) 855-6070
or www.ComeHearCMSD.org.
Performing in Ann Arbor the same
evening is 59-year-old American-born
Murray Perahia. The principal guest con-
ductor of London's Academy of St. Martin-
in-the-Fields, with whom he has toured
as conductor and pianist throughout the
world, Perahia was awarded an honorary
KBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004, in
recognition of his outstanding service to
music.
Born in New York to Jewish parents of
Ladino descent, Perahia started playing
piano at age 4 and later attended Mannes
College, where he majored in conduct-
ing and composition. His summers were
spent in Marlboro, where he collaborated
with such musicians as Rudolf Serkin and
Pablo Casals. He shared a close friendship
with Vladimir Horowitz.
Perahia's discography of around 50
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Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
Old - Timers
Alan Arkin, this year's somewhat
surprise winner of the Oscar for Best
Supporting Actor, has signed on to
a film version of the 1960s hit TV
series Get Smart, which was co-cre-
ated by Mel Brooks
and Buck Henry.
Arkin will play the
evil head of KAOS,
while his Little Miss
Sunshine co-star
Steve Carell will
Alan Arkin
play the good guy,
CONTROL secret agent Maxwell
Smart (a character created by the
late Don Adams).
Actor Leslie Nielsen, 81, narrates
the new Discovery Health Channel
series Doctorology. It's a medical
info show (airing all this month) with
a bit of humor supplied by Nielsen,
the funny star of The Naked Gun
movies.
The series is filmed at three
Montreal hospitals, including the
city's Jewish General Hospital.
Nielsen, a Canadian, isn't Jewish,
but he received his first training at a
Toronto radio broadcasting school run
42
March 15 . 2007
by the late Lorne Green, a Canadian
Jew who was a top radio journalist in
Canada before he became a famous
actor on TV's Bonanza.
Nielsen is still waiting to hear
whether an NBC pilot he filmed,
called Lipshitz Saves the World, will
be aired next season. It's about a
young outcast who discovers his
secret powers. Nielsen plays his
mentor.
Vintage Simon
For his lifetime contributions to
music, singer-songwriter Paul
Simon, 65, has been selected as the
first recipient
of the Library
of Congress'
Gershwin Prize
for Popular Song.
The award is
named in honor of
Paul Simon
Jewish composer
George Gershwin and his lyricist
brother, Ira. The award will be given
annually by the Library of Congress.
Simon will perform in concert in
Washington, D.C., on May 23 to cel-
ebrate the event. Other artists, not
yet named, also will perform.
Simon told the Associated Press:
"I am grateful to be the recipient of
the Gershwin Prize and doubly hon-
ored to be the first."
New Winehouse
British Jewish singer-songwriter
Amy Winehouse's second CD, Back to
Black, has topped the British charts
since being released across the pond
late last year. Winehouse, 23, was
recently named Best British Female
Vocalist at the British
equivalent of the
Grammys.
Back to Black
had its American
release on March
13. Winehouse's
first album, the
Amy
jazz-inflected Frank
Winehouse
(2003), was a critical
hit, if only a moderate
seller on both sides of the Atlantic.
Winehouse's parents are both jazz
musicians, although her father mostly
made his living driving a cab, while
her mother works as a pharmacist.
The London-born Winehouse is a
classic "bad girl" - albeit a lot more
articulate and self-aware than most
pop singers.
She was kicked out of one high
school, and her short career has been
marked by her admitted use of mari-
juana and alcohol. One of the songs
on her new CD, which already has
received a lot of American airplay, is
the infectious "Rehab," with a chorus
that goes: "They tried to make me go
to rehab/ I said no, no, no."
Winehouse has apparently cleaned
up her act as of late, and it would be
a shame to see her waste her talent.
Her songs are musically sophisti-
cated, with her current CD having
the glimmer and emotionalism of the
best of 1960s Motown. Her voice is
described as somewhere between
Billie Holliday and the Shangri-Las (a
famous 1960s girl group).
Visually, she is striking, if not clas-
sically beautiful: small, very dark,
with a lovely figure and a face with
incredible sharp angles.
Good As It Gets
Comedian Richard Lewis, 59, was just
the subject of an interesting profile
in the New York Observer newspaper.
The famously neurotic comic told the
paper that his relations with women
were long dysfunctional - he cheated
on all his girlfriends (including Debra
Winger) - and he often sought out
very naive, much younger women or
"nasty" women ("because I was get-
ting what I deserved").