Saturday, June 26, 1999
Borge at 90: still deft, charming, hilarious
CONCERT REVIEW
BY JANELLE GELFAND
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Although he has never been this old before, Victor Borge can still induce waves of laughter.
Mr. Borge, 90, is one of the few comedians of his age group (and the only musical one) who is still on the road for 60 concerts a year.
In his appearance with the Cincinnati Pops at Riverbend on Friday night, the Danish-born humorist proved that the sharp wit, talent and genuine love of music that have served him for more than 70 years are still largely intact — and still largely hilarious.
He has slowed down a bit, and he misses a number of notes now (partly because of the Pops piano's heavy action, he complained), but his timing is impeccable.
He loves to talk to the audience, and began his two-hour show with “Are there are any children out there?” When he saw one, he ordered, “Out!” (He held a running conversation with Peter Frankenfeld, 11, son of violist Paul Frankenfeld.)
Many of his gags are familiar and, although he did not fall off of his piano bench, he kept the audience howling.
“Do you care for piano playing?” he asked them. Then, “Too bad.” He adjusted his bow tie in the music stand of his Steinway, and said he would play a waltz. “It's in the key of C. Where the hell is C?”
After rambling stories, he worked his way through “Happy Birthday” as invented by Brahms, Beethoven and Wagner (who was in a bad mood because he'd just heard one of his own operas), and Dvorak's “Humoresque” in wrong notes.
He could be remarkably spontaneous. When a train whistle interrupted, he broke into “I've Been Working on the Railroad,” and when a boom went off in the distance, he pretended to be shot. “He's the one who doesn't like piano players,” he quipped.
He is now white-haired and a little bent, but when he beams his familiar smile and his eyes squint in mirth, he has the audience in his palm — and he knows it.
The biggest laugh of the evening was to Smetana's Dance of the Comedians (a departure from the printed program). Stabbing the score onto the prongs of his music stand, he crumpled the pages up as he conducted, at one point making assistant concertmaster Sylvia Samis leave the stage for making a mistake. (Trumpeter Christopher Kiradjieff was also in on this joke.) By the time it ended, the audience of 3,232 was on its feet for the first of two standing ovations.
Sometimes the audience started howling before he could finish: “The first piano consisted of one big key. It was not until someone invented the cracks ... ” he began. He prefaced Debussy's “Claire de Lune” with “It's a lovely evening — somewhere.”
Amid the clowning, Mr. Borge, who is a classically trained pianist and a decent conductor, led Strauss' Overture to Die Fledermaus (the plural is Fledermice, he said), his own fantasy on themes from Puccini's La Boheme, and Mendelssohn's Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
It wasn't until the end, when he played excerpts from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, that we had a glimpse of his genuine artistry, the phrasing and tone of a bygone era.
It was a reminder that he could have been a concert pianist. But then, we wouldn't have known him as the “Great Dane.”
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