Arts & Entertainment
Magical music nights
Great concert week in DC with the Mac, Mika and Cameron Carpenter
Mika on stage in Washington Wednesday at the Sixth & I Synagogue. (Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
It was a great week for live music in Washington — Fleetwood Mac brought its “Tour 2013” to the Verizon Center Tuesday night, out pop singer Mika brought his acoustic show to the Sixth & I Synagogue Wednesday night and on Friday, queer organist Cameron Carpenter made his Washington-area debut at the Strathmore in Bethesda. The proceedings were stellar all around — I’ll dissect chronologically.
Many, many years of following various pop and rock acts has brought me to the realization that so many acts sort of “train” their audiences what to expect and the Mac is a perfect example. Its members — namesake rhythm section Mick Fleetwood and John McVie along with singer/songwriters Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham — talk in interviews as if they’re dutifully restricted from mixing things up too much because even with longtime songstress Christine McVie long gone (only one of her songs was performed — the chestnut “Don’t Stop”), they still have a truckload of ground they feel obligated to cover with songs like “Second Hand News,” “The Chain,” “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Go Your Own Way” and the list goes on and on.
Thankfully the Mac — touring a second consecutive time now without a new album out — is throwing in a few surprises. Nicks has revived the long-dormant “Tusk” track “Sisters of the Moon” for the first time since the “Mirage Tour” in the early ’80s. There’s also one all-new track (“Sad Angel”) Buckingham says is slated for an imminent EP and the ancient-but-never-released song “Without You,” a ballad that featured perhaps the loveliest Buckingham/Nicks harmonies of the evening.
Except for some very anti-Mac-like remix-type looping touches brought into “World Turning,” the arrangements were tried and true. Nobody could argue the Mac doesn’t know how to give the masses what they want. Which can be a little disappointing for the die hards who go hear them every time they tour. Or even the more casual fans who tend to be more musically adventurous. Though many of the suggestions thrown about are utterly absurd — Thomas Conner’s naive op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times last week is a great example — I could have gone for maybe 10 percent more adventure. A good starting point would have been “Soldier’s Angel,” the haunting duet Buckingham joined Nicks on for her brilliant 2011 album “In Your Dreams.”
With some acts — Madonna for one — you know you’re not going to hear every hit every tour. The Mac has never been like this, yet a few more unexpected moments would keep them a notch or two further away from the “cashing in/gravy train” bandwagon they’re clearly on. If you think for a second this is about the music and not the money, recall the arm twisting it took to get Nicks to agree to this. There was a well-publicized ballyhoo in 2012 when Fleetwood whined in a Playboy interview that he doubted the Mac would ever tour again when Nicks insisted on giving her solo album another year of touring. It was so wildly overstated that here they are on tour the very next year. (Nicks said later three years — and she’s right — feels like a good amount of time to go between Mac tours.)
Fleetwood Mac on stage at the Verizon Center Tuesday night. (Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
While the band has been more about money than music for eons, I will say a few quick things: one, the music at Tuesday night’s show was scary good. Nicks, though she doesn’t scream and growl as she used to, has developed into a very solid singer. There wasn’t one off-pitch sound that came from her mouth the whole night. And Buckingham’s guitar work was as great as it has ever been. If there’s one upside to the lack of Mac recordings in the last 10 years or so, it’s that Buckingham’s solo career has soared off in the other direction with a trio of masterfully conceived and executed solo albums (2006’s “Under the Skin,” 2008’s “Gift of Screws” and 2011’s “Seeds We Sow”).
Given the way the Internet has decimated album sales — especially new work from veteran acts — one can hardly argue with their “let’s just tour” approach. Still nobody seemed to notice the irony of the situation when Buckingham spoke about not wanting to run something that worked (“Rumours”) into the ground when it came time to make “Tusk.” Sadly now the band is doing almost exactly that — touring clearly works (I’ve never seen the Verizon Center so packed and on a weeknight no less) so why be bothered with doing a new album? While the night was great fun, the reality that the Mac seems highly uninterested in doing much beyond trudging out the staples — Nicks is the chief foot dragger — lent the proceedings a bittersweet air.
And why can’t we all just agree to let Christine McVie do what she wants? Legions of the Mac faithful seem to be holding out hope that she’ll one day rejoin them for one last outing. While yeah, that would be cool for “old time’s sake” (McVie said recently she would consider joining them on stage in London if they ask her later this year), they’ve already done that. Why do we need another “The Dance”-type outing (the name of a ’97 reunion tour with the classic lineup), especially if McVie’s heart is not in it? I would feel differently if they’d never done “The Dance,” but since they have, it’s time for everybody to move on.
Mika’s show the next night was an interesting study in contrasts — from a veteran band reliving its glory days to a young singer (he’s 29) only on his third album playing a small, atmosphere-heavy synagogue (it’s actually a great concert spot — much more music-friendly than the much-lauded 9:30 Club) with a throng of young fans at fever-pitch excitement throughout the evening. Touring behind his near-masterpiece album of last fall “Origin of Love,” the obscenely talented popster poured his passionately creamy falsetto-hued vocals and drivingly percussive piano playing through a nearly two-hour set that was the furthest thing from phoned in you could imagine.
Working with a tight two-man band — players who seemed to grab any instrument of the dozens on stage they could quickly get their hands on — Mika radically reinvented several songs from their studio versions (a ballad version of dance cut “Stardust” from the new album was perhaps the most radical), led several all-out audience sing-alongs (and the crowd knew every word) on “Grace Kelly,” “Love Today” and “Celebrate” among others, and even stepped away from the mic for nearly two full numbers just to savor the acoustics — which are stellar — of the venue. All were show-stopping in the best way.
Mika truly has it all — killer voice, great songwriter, solid musical chops and just-left-enough-of-center looks and charm to never be mistaken for a “Bachelor” contestant. He’s sort of our queer Justin Timberlake — with a much better current album out too, by the way.
Switching gears radically was Cameron Carpenter’s organ recital Friday night which, despite a few logistical head scratchers (more on that in a sec), was a musical accomplishment of Herculean, truly other-worldly proportions. Watching and hearing him play is much akin to the scene in the classic “Outer Limits” episode (“The Sixth Finger”) in which a scientist figures out a way to push evolution ahead a million years and suddenly the protagonist can play Bach he just picked up. Carpenter is almost in that league, having been something of a child prodigy who claims to have mastered “The Well-Tempered Clavier” in adolescence.
Cameron Carpenter at the Strathmore Friday night. (Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
The first oddity was why Carpenter — with all the amazing pipe organs in Washington — was at the organ-less Strathmore at all. Playing an electronic Rodgers three manual brought in just for the occasion, Carpenter got more sonic contrast out of the thing than probably anybody else could have, but from the massive instrument at the National Cathedral, the new pipe organ at the Kennedy Center (where he’s rumored to be playing next year sometime) or even the glorious five-manual behemoth at National City Christian Church in Thomas Circle (which could just about have housed the somewhat disappointing turnout — of the Strathmore’s three balconies, only the lowest one was about half-full; the upper two sat empty), it seemed just plain dumb to have him there. It could be a harbinger of things to come — Carpenter’s most insistent recurring theme is his endless frustration at having to adapt to a different organ for each town he plays. Let’s hope whatever touring instrument he ends up with — he says it’s almost finished — has a little more sonic heft than the Rodgers. Which sounded OK — I’m not trashing it altogether. One could clearly tell, though, that it was a sound coming from speakers, not pipes.
That said, what Carpenter did with it was beyond staggering. His musical instincts — as sharp and deadly as Wolverine’s knife claws — are in a league of their own among organists, at least to my knowledge. He plays with a pianistic-like virtuosity that’s stunning to watch (a screen above him amplified his finger work). Often playing two manuals simultaneously with one hand, leap-frogging between the choir, great and swell like an Olympic sprinter and displaying the most nimble pedal work I’ve ever seen, Carpenter truly is a talent for the ages. Granted, the Rodgers had a minimal number of stops it appeared — it looked like a child’s toy compared to, say, the National City console — yet Carpenter changed registrations like most people blink. One five-minute improvisation he played featured more than 40 registration changes. That amount of tone painting just through stop changes was impressive in and of itself, forget about the actual note playing.
His wildly eclectic 100-odd minute show (played entirely from memory) featured everything from Bach works written for organ, transcribed for piano, then adapted back to organ (by Carpenter), two Liszt Transcendental Etudes he said were “nearly impossible to play,” a wickedly playful transcription of Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture and a playful encore/fantasia on — of all things — “Shortnin’ Bread,” a whimsical-but-no-less-dramatic way to end the evening. The highlights for me were a moody and languid — yet endlessly colorful — transcription of Isaac Albeniz’s piano work “Evocacion” (the first movement from “Iberia”) and a fantastically creative Marcel Dupre arrangement of a French Noel that Carpenter tackled in a deliciously subversive way, nearly matching the macabre wit Dupre brought to it originally.
Though nearly as night and day as one could fathom, all three shows were utterly magical and evenings I will never forget.
Fleetwood Mac’s set:
1. Second Hand News
2. The Chain
3. Dreams
4. Sad Angel
5. Rhiannon
6. Not That Funny
7. Tusk
8. Sisters of the Moon
9. Sara
10. Big Love
11. Landslide
12. Never Going Back Again
13. Without You
14. Gypsy
15. Eyes of the World
16. Gold Dust
17. So Afraid
18. Stand Back
19. Go Your Own Way
ENCORE
20. World Turning
21. Don’t Stop
ENCORE 2
22. Silver Springs
23. Say Goodbye
Mika’s set:
1. Grace Kelly
2. Toy Boy
3. Lollipop
4. Blue Eyes
5. Billy Brown
6. Popular
7. Love You When I’m Drunk
8. Underwater
9. Stuck in the Middle
10. Emily
11. Big Girls
12. Origin of Love
13. Happy Ending
14. Lola
15. Relax, Take it Easy
16. Stardust
17. Celebrate
18. Love Today
19. Over My Shoulder
Cameron Carpenter’s set:
1. Bach — Prelude 1 from “Well Tempered Clavier”/Fugue No. 15 in G Major
2. Bach/Busoni — Cello Suite No. 1
3. Bach — Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor
4. Albeniz — Evocacion from Iberia
5. Dupre — Variations on a Noel
6. Liszt — Feux Follets
7. Liszt — La Campanella
INTERMISSION
8. Bernstein — Candide Overture
9. Ives — The Alcotts from Concord Sonata
10. Improv
11. Improv
ENCORE
12. Chopin — Minute Waltz
13. Shortnin’ Bread
The 44th annual Queen of Hearts pageant was held at The Lodge in Boonsboro, Md. on Friday, Feb. 20. Six contestants vied for the title and Bev was crowned the winner.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
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Books
New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences
Tuesday marks four years since Russia attacked Ukraine
Journalist J. Lester Feder’s new book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians and their experiences during Russia’s war against their country.
Feder for “The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine” interviewed and photographed LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kyiv, the country’s capital, and in other cities. They include Olena Hloba, the co-founder of Tergo, a support group for parents and friends of LGBTQ Ukrainians, who fled her home in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha shortly after Russia launched its war on Feb. 24, 2022.
Russian soldiers killed civilians as they withdrew from Bucha. Videos and photographs that emerged from the Kyiv suburb showed dead bodies with their hands tied behind their back and other signs of torture.
Olena Shevchenko, chair of Insight, a Ukrainian LGBTQ rights group, wrote the book’s forward.
The book also profiles Viktor Pylypenko, a gay man who the Ukrainian military assigned to the 72nd Mechanized Black Cossack Brigade after the war began. Feder writes Pylypenko’s unit “was deployed to some of the fiercest and most important battles of the war.”
“The brigade was pivotal to beating Russian forces back from Kyiv in their initial attempt to take the capital, helping them liberate territory near Kharkiv and defending the front lines in Donbas,” wrote Feder.
Pylypenko spent two years fighting “on Ukraine’s most dangerous battlefields, serving primarily as a medic.”
“At times he felt he was living in a horror movie, watching tank shells tear his fellow soldiers apart before his eyes,” wrote Feder. “He held many men as they took their final breaths. Of the roughly one hundred who entered the unit with him, only six remained when he was discharged in 2024. He didn’t leave by choice: he went home to take care of his father, who had suffered a stroke.”
Feder notes one of Pylypenko’s former commanders attacked him online when he came out. Pylypenko said another commander defended him.
Feder also profiled Diana and Oleksii Polukhin, two residents of Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that is near the mouth of the Dnieper River.
Ukrainian forces regained control of Kherson in November 2022, nine months after Russia occupied it.
Diana, a cigarette vender, and Polukhin told Feder that Russian forces demanded they disclose the names of other LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kherson. Russian forces also tortured Diana and Polukhin while in their custody.
Polukhim is the first LGBTQ victim of Russian persecution to report their case to Ukrainian prosecutors.
Feder, who is of Ukrainian descent, first visited Ukraine in 2013 when he wrote for BuzzFeed.
He was Outright International’s Senior Fellow for Emergency Research from 2021-2023. Feder last traveled to Ukraine in December 2024.
Feder spoke about his book at Politics and Prose at the Wharf in Southwest D.C. on Feb. 6. The Washington Blade spoke with Feder on Feb. 20.
Feder told the Blade he began to work on the book when he was at Outright International and working with humanitarian groups on how to better serve LGBTQ Ukrainians. Feder said military service requirements, a lack of access to hormone therapy and documents that accurately reflect a person’s gender identity and LGBTQ-friendly shelters are among the myriad challenges that LGBTQ Ukrainians have faced since the war began.
“All of these were components of a queer experience of war that was not well documented, and we had never seen in one place, especially with photos,” he told the Blade. “I felt really called to do that, not only because of what was happening in Ukraine, but also as a way to bring to the surface issues that we’d had seen in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.”
Feder also spoke with the Blade about the war’s geopolitical implications.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 signed a law that bans the “promotion of homosexuality” to minors.
The 2014 Winter Olympics took place in Sochi, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine a few weeks after the games ended.
Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown has continued over the last decade.
The Russian Supreme Court in 2023 ruled the “international LGBT movement” is an extremist organization and banned it. The Russian Justice Ministry last month designated ILGA World, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, as an “undesirable” organization.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has sought to align itself with Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after a 2021 meeting with then-President Joe Biden at the White House said his country would continue to fight discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Zelenskyy’s relationship with the U.S. has grown more tense since the Trump-Vance administration took office.) Zelenskyy in 2022 publicly backed civil partnerships for same-sex couples.
Then-Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova in 2023 applauded Kyiv Pride and other LGBTQ and intersex rights groups in her country when she spoke at a photo exhibit at Ukraine House in D.C. that highlighted LGBTQ and intersex soldiers. Then-Kyiv Pride Executive Director Lenny Emson, who Feder profiles in his book, was among those who attended the event.
“Thank you for everything you do in Kyiv, and thank you for everything that you do in order to fight the discrimination that still is somewhere in Ukraine,” said Markarova. “Not everything is perfect yet, but you know, I think we are moving in the right direction. And we together will not only fight the external enemy, but also will see equality.”
Feder in response to the Blade’s question about why he decided to write his book said he “didn’t feel” the “significance of Russia’s war against Ukraine” for LGBTQ people around the world “was fully understood.”
“This was an opportunity to tell that big story,” he said.
“The crackdown on LGBT rights inside Russia was essentially a laboratory for a strategy of attacking democratic values by attacking queer rights and it was one as Ukraine was getting closet to Europe back in 2013, 2014,” he added. “It was a strategy they were using as part of their foreign policy, and it was one they were using not only in Ukraine over the past decade, but around the world.”
Feder said Republicans are using “that same strategy to attack queer people, to attack democracy itself.”
“I felt like it was important that Americans understand that history,” he said.
More than a dozen LGBTQ athletes won medals at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics that ended on Sunday.
Cayla Barnes, Hilary Knight, and Alex Carpenter are LGBTQ members of the U.S. women’s hockey team that won a gold medal after they defeated Canada in overtime. Knight the day before the Feb. 19 match proposed to her girlfriend, Brittany Bowe, an Olympic speed skater.
French ice dancer Guillaume Cizeron, who is gay, and his partner Laurence Fournier Beaudry won gold. American alpine skier Breezy Johnson, who is bisexual, won gold in the women’s downhill. Amber Glenn, who identifies as bisexual and pansexual, was part of the American figure skating team that won gold in the team event.
Swiss freestyle skier Mathilde Gremaud, who is in a relationship with Vali Höll, an Austrian mountain biker, won gold in women’s freeski slopestyle.
Bruce Mouat, who is the captain of the British curling team that won a silver medal, is gay. Six members of the Canadian women’s hockey team — Emily Clark, Erin Ambrose, Emerance Maschmeyer, Brianne Jenner, Laura Stacey, and Marie-Philip Poulin — that won silver are LGBTQ.
Swedish freestyle skier Sandra Naeslund, who is a lesbian, won a bronze medal in ski cross.
Belgian speed skater Tineke den Dulk, who is bisexual, was part of her country’s mixed 2000-meter relay that won bronze. Canadian ice dancer Paul Poirier, who is gay, and his partner, Piper Gilles, won bronze.
Laura Zimmermann, who is queer, is a member of the Swiss women’s hockey team that won bronze when they defeated Sweden.
Outsports.com notes all of the LGBTQ Olympians who competed at the games and who medaled.
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