Flames, kilts and bowling pins. It’s probably best to check out this show.

DETAILS

CPO with The Flying Karamazov Brothers
Jack Singer Concert Hall
Jack Singer Concert Hall
Saturday, March 13 - Saturday, March 13 Friday, March 12 - Friday, March 12

More in: Classical

Two men playing the same guitar while juggling with each other is something you don’t see everyday, but it’s just another routine act for The Flying Karamazov Brothers. This well-travelled vaudevillian quartet, which will play with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, doesn’t just stick to the slightly off-kilter, though.

“One guy is playing half of the pennywhistle while the other guy is playing the other half of the pennywhistle while he is blowing on a baritone horn and another guy is fingering the baritone horn while fretting the guitar with another guy strumming, and the two end guys are juggling with each other and two guys are singing in harmony with each other,” says Paul Magid (a.k.a. brother Dmitri), describing one of the outlandish routines audiences can expect. That’s something you don’t see, well, ever.

“It was pretty hard to learn this one,” Magid concedes, with poetic understatement. He’s speaking from his New York home while sirens wail and car alarms clamour in the background. Magid sounds like a normal, grounded fellow, despite the fact that he has been performing wacked-out shenanigans for nearly four decades. “I’m still able to keep up with them, the younger ones,” he says matter-of-factly.

While studying theatre as a youth, he found himself caught up in the juggling craze that was sweeping through college campuses and hooked up with fellow musician and juggler Howard Jay Patterson (brother Ivan). “He juggled in a play I was doing, and then we juggled on the street in a Renaissance fair and someone gave us some money as they were passing by. We were singing some bawdy Elizabethan song and the next thing you know, somebody had dumped $1.65 next to us and we went; ‘Oh wow!’”

Ever since this humble beginning, all subsequent Karamazov siblings have been both jugglers and musicians. This deep integration of music and physical performance is what sets the Karamazovs apart from their carny kinfolk.

“We think of juggling as music,” says Magid, who plays clarinet and saxophone. “It’s rhythmic, it’s symmetrical, it’s all done to a beat. When we write out patterns that we’re going to do with each other, we write them out on staff paper. We just think of it as visual music.”

That harmonious vision caught on big time. The Karamazovs are now a global phenomenon and have performed on Seinfeld and in the movie Jewel of the Nile. The Brothers don’t just juggle pins, balls and cleavers, though; they also balance jazz, traditional Japanese idioms, classical music and original compositions by resident composer Douglas Wieselman.

They also embrace modern technology to atypical and comedic ends. “We do a piece from [Beethoven’s] Ode to Joy where we juggle, and at the same time we have drum triggers in hockey helmets that are attached to transmitters,” says Magid. “Every time we hit ourselves in the head with the juggling clubs it triggers a note. It’s very funny and we also have the conductor hitting himself in the head, which is very good.”

To date, the Karamazovs have performed well over 200 shows in collaboration with symphonies and philharmonics all over the planet. For their Calgary Philharmonic collaboration, publicist Sheryl Ratcliff promises a full-on circus atmosphere in the Jack Singer lobby, replete with palm readers, human statues and stilt walkers, not to mention a fiddler and a magician. For Magid, it’s the obvious culmination of the Karamazov’s unique oeuvre.

“Nobody’s really thought of what we do in terms of music like we have, and the orchestra gets that right away,” he says. “Often, when you’re dealing with some pretty stuck-up orchestras, like the Cleveland Orchestra, they go: ‘Who are these people?’ And then they realize they’re going to have a hard time playing the music and they go; ‘Oh my!’”