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Music - Metropolitan Desk  - September 24, 1992  - New York and Region News  

He looked like Elvis and shook like Elvis but he sure didn't sound like the King. MARK JANICELLO still captivated the judges Tuesday at the finals of the Musical Feast contest for the nation's best street performer in Grand Central Station. Dressed in a leather jump suit and black wig, he sang an aria from "Tosca." He also did "It's Now or Never" and "O Sole Mio," hips gyrating Elvis style. He claimed they were actually the same song.

Health - Published: October 17, 1993  -- By ELISABETH GINSBURG

Taking Music to Audiences in Hospitals and Jails

MARK JANICELLO, a young operatic tenor, recently performed for a small audience of cancer patients at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.

"Close your eyes and your spirits start to soar," sang Mr. Janicello, assuming the character of the tormented hero of a Broadway musical, "The Phantom of the Opera."

The audience, some of whom were receiving medication intravenously, listened with rapt attention as the singer used his vocal skills to transport them beyond the confines of the hospital. At times, Mr. Janicello's voice even drowned out the hospital's public-address system.  The performance was one of hundreds that will be produced during the 1993-94 season by Music for All Seasons, a Plainfield-based nonprofit organization now starting its second season of offering live music to people in New Jersey hospitals, nursing homes and prisons.  Characterizing any kind of institutionalization as a "dehumanizing process," Brian Dallow said the organization sought to take entertainment to its audiences. Mr. Dallow, along with his wife, Rena Fruchter, is a co-founder of Music for All Seasons. A Forum for Musicians --  In addition to supplying confined audiences with performers, Music for All Seasons provides musicians, especially young musicians, with audiences. The organization came about because of such a need.

Two years ago, Ms. Fruchter, a concert pianist, was preparing for a series of out-of-state recitals. Hoping to try out her program locally, Ms. Fruchter, who also writes about music for the New Jersey Weekly section of The New York Times, called nursing homes and hospitals to find out whether the institutions would welcome piano concerts.

The response, she said, was overwhelming. "I ended up playing nine performances in 11 days," she said. Music for All Seasons was born.

As Ms. Fruchter and Mr. Dallow, who is also a pianist, began to organize more concerts, they found that audiences, especially those in nursing homes, were eager for live music. "Some of the residents had been concertgoers all their lives and had not heard live music since entering the nursing home," Ms. Fruchter said.

While hospital and nursing-home administrators welcomed the concerts, corrections officials were more cautious. "The first couple of prisons we approached thought it was a very strange idea," Ms. Fruchter said. Inspired by the story of the actor Charles Dutton, who turned to the footlights after reading Shakespeare while in jail, Ms. Fruchter persisted.

Now, with a record of success in county jails, the organization has been approached by the State Department of Corrections to provide concerts for inmates in state prisons. The only impediment to such concerts is financing, Mr. Dallow said.

Like all concert promoters, Ms. Fruchter and Mr. Dallow consider the makeup of the audience when deciding which artists will perform. Margo Hennebach, a folk singer and trained music therapist, was a hit with an audience of children undergoing rehabilitation at the Children's Specialized Hospital in Mountainside. Years Serenading Commuters

Mr. Janicello, who spent five years serenading commuters at Grand Central Terminal in New York, is comfortable in a variety of situations and has given performances for Music for All Seasons at both a county jail and University Hospital. "If you can sing at Grand Central, you can sing anywhere," he said.

Like the other artists who perform with the organization, Mr. Janicello has a varied repertory. He won applause at the University Hospital oncology unit for his performance of the aria "Nessun dorma" from the opera "Turandot," then switched to an Elvis-style rendition of "Can't Help Falling in Love With You" and concluded with Gounod's "Ave Maria."

From the beginning, the organization's mission has been to educate and inspire as well as entertain. The artists introduce their own programs and discuss the pieces as they are performed. Interaction with the audience is an important component of every concert, and some performers encourage audience participation.

When Ms. Hennebach sang "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at the hospital at Mountainside, her audience joined in. Later in the same concert, she handed out a variety of rhythm instruments and encouraged the children, some of whom were breathing with the help of respirators, to shake, tap or rattle the instruments in time with the music.

Performing at the Middlesex County Jail, Pepe Santana, an Ecuadorian-born folk musician, also gave his listeners percussion instruments. At the end of the performance, Mr. Santana, who had taken an array of South American string instruments to the jail, invited the prisoners to touch and examine them. 'She Got So Close to Them'

Closeness between performers and their audiences is a hallmark of Music For All Seasons. Donna Provenzano, a recreation therapist at Children's Specialized Hospital, said the children there were excited about Ms. Hennebach because "she got so close to them."

Staff members at University Hospital were enthusiastic about Mr. Janicello's concert. "Many more people than I had realized stopped to hear," said Sheila Paris Klein, vice president for public and community affairs at the hospital.   The artists find themselves touched in return. Mr. Janicello, the father of a 3-year-old girl, was moved by the faces of the pediatric patients who surrounded him as he sang "The Eensy Weensy Spider" and other childhood favorites. "I couldn't help but think of my daughter," he said.

Institutions contract for eight concerts a season, four in the fall and four in the spring. Mr. Dallow and Ms. Fruchter serve as volunteers, but the performers are paid from funds that are collected from private sources. Johnson & Johnson underwrote the cost of Mr. Janicello's concert, prompting the singer to tell one of his audiences that he was being "paid in shampoo."

After presenting about 75 concerts in the 1992-93 season, the organization plans to put on 300 to 400 performances within a year and half. Eventually, Mr. Dallow hopes that the group will serve audiences in southern New Jersey, Manhattan and the Philadelphia area, as well as in its original central New Jersey locale.

The music can offer some respite for the confined audiences. During the concert at the Children's Specialized Hospital, injured children transformed the line "Rain, rain, go away" into a personal statement: "Pain, pain, go away."