BY CHRIS VARIAS
Enquirer contributor
The only thing missing was the smell of elephants.
A circus of sorts came to Riverbend Friday, as the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra performed in conjunction with a collection of clowns, jugglers and animals for the 11th annual Symphantasy, a night, as Pops conductor Erich Kunzel described it, for "using the eye with the ear."
As concertgoers entered the front gate, they were welcomed by the stylings of a magician and a juggler, as well as a horde of bubble-blowing clowns.
Inside the pavilion, Mr. Kunzel's crew was up to some clowning around of its own, welcoming the crowd of 3,587 with circus tunes of the Barnum and Bailey variety, along with Stravinsky's Circus Polka ("Dedicated to a young elephant," Mr. Kunzel said), and two selections from Carnival of the Animals, titled "March of the Lion" and "The Elephant."
Those last two songs provided the backdrop for a march of animals, but there was neither a lion nor an elephant. Instead came a procession that included some of the Cincinnati Zoo's most popular attractions: a hawk, a boa, an alligator, Maya the cheetah and Seymour the camel.
Mr. Kunzel's human attractions held the audience's interest, too. Alexander Streltsov, a 19-year-old Russian acrobat, swung from two white cloths suspended from above the stage.
The Flying Karamazov Brothers, a four-man comedy troupe that incorporates into its act juggling and dialogues of the Abbott-and-Costello, communication-breakdown variety, were the featured entertainers of the second half.
Their juggling item of choice was the bowling pin. They juggled sometimes to the Pops' accompaniment, other times to a musicless rhythm of their (and Dave Brubeck's) own. A juggling display in 5 - 4 time was one of the crowd's favorites.
Cincinnati Pops Orchestra's Symphantasy XI -- A Circus Extravaganza repeats today at 8:30 p.m.
