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Ruca Malen has spent several years developing an appealing wine that is affordable. Developed for younger wine drinkers, the approachable wines are for wine drinkers of all ages.

Heimaey is the only inhabited one of the fifteen volcanic Westman Islands on the southeast coast of Iceland. Rising from the cold sea, the island has a rugged appearance which belies its natural beauty and friendly people. Visiting Heimaey is a moving experience to learn about volcanic devastation and people's resilience to rebuild and to preserve the island's nature-made beauty.

The renowned former Whitney Museum director, David A. Ross, in an exclusive statement posted to Berkshire Fine Arts strongly opposes plans initiated by the Berkshire Museum. “This is a sad affair. Perhaps the board, if unwilling to raise funds in the way all museums have to, should resign (along with its feckless director). My feeling is it should merge administratively with another educational non-profit in the region, and then begin the process of stabilization. It would be preferable to see the museum close for a few years of re-organization, than to forever destroy the core of its irreplaceable art collection.”

From 9 AM to noon there was an ordely and peaceful demonstration in front of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Pickets came and went with between 40 and 80 individuals linuing the sidewalk at any given time. Most passing cars honked their support. There was a media presence. While museum director, Van Shields, remained hunkered down in the bunker, board president Elizabeth "Buzz" Hayes McGraw delivered her boilplate message to a TV crew from Albany.

Netia Jones has combined tenor Ian Bostridge's thirty year passion and a brilliant "compositional interpretation" of the piano music for orchestra into a hydra-headed tour de force with video, sets and the suggestion of cabaret. Bostridge has the perfect voice for the wanderer, a stranger at the start and at the end. The staging works well.

Lawrence Brownlee, tenor, showed us his stuff, ranging from the baroque to Lead Belly.. We changed rooms at the Park Avenue Armory, moving from the regal Officers Room to the Veterans Room as we moved forward in musical time. At the Armory, music is presented for pleasure, for illumination and surprise.

The Festival of Contemporary Music is a highlight of the Tanglewood season. Curators assemble concerts from commissioned works and also from composers whose works form the canon of the contemporary music scene. Opening night suggested how rich this repertoire has become.

The exhibition to celebrate 'Centerbeam’s' 40 th anniversary has been open since mid May in Karlsruhe. On September 2nd ZKM will host ten representatives of the original participants on location or via skype. The symposium should deliver lively discussions of the past and perhaps a way forward to recreate 'Centerbeam,' a third time, in the near future.

To help the audience experience what takes place inside the head of Christopher, director Elliott employs the full technical arsenal of the Ahmanson that is available to her. The set design by Bunny Christie, is a huge three sided space staging area with colored LED lights both on the walls and the floor that are cued by Christopher’s dialogue and stage movement. It’s all very technical and very eye-popping. In a transfer from Lodon “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” won a Tony Award in 2015.

Much of the criticism of this work is noteworthy but inappropriate. Complainers argue that the opera misses much of the play, which must be expected unless you want a five-hour opera. This is the same argument people use when they’ve read a long book and then see the movie.

On Friday, August 11th, the Trustees of Reservations and Naumkeag, located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts host a free day of fun and education for the entire family.

The artists and their supporters in the Berkshires will take to the streets on Saturday, August 12, from 9 AM to noon. There will be picket lines in front ot the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. They will provide a visible presence of those protesting the pending sale of 40 choice works and plans to gut and "reboot" the historic museum and collections.

The music of The Chastity Tree is very much of its time and place. From the classic era, it still embraces baroque traces in tinkling harpsichord and clipped recitatives. The Bay Area is blessed with and attracts an abundance of great young opera singers, and West Edge always casts well from this enviable pool.

Shakespeare-centric theater companies like Oregon Shakes must provide a balance of Elizabethan era works with other offerings to attract sufficient audiences. Sometimes, a hybrid, and especially a sophisticated comedy that is about Shakespeare or one of his plays can be well received. So it is with Shakespeare in Love, the U.S. premiere of the stage version of the highly successful film.

After development at music venues, the musical revue "Blues is a Woman" has begun a theatrical run at Custom Made Theater in San Francisco. In a memorable production, six women wail and moan and plead in a rewarding evening of blues standards and original music by lead singer Pamela Rose in a format that is as informative as it is entertaining.

This concert at Mostly Mozart was billed as a musical offering from Brahms, Bach and Mendelssohn. It seemed a stretch to hear these works without the centerpiece composer featured, except as an artist who liked to spell Bach's name in notes. The spirit was Mozartian, full of joy and inviting melodies, Featuring Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis as soloists, who brought Schumann to the table in the slow movement of his violin concerto, it was a rich evening of music. A delightful offering.

Broadway and cabaret artist Barbara Cook was 80 wehen we first saw her perform at Ozawa Hall and several times after that. In Indiana we enjoyed a concert wth Michael Feistein and an interview for critics that followed. We have compiled a collage from those reviews.

A half century later in the spirit of the Summer of Love there is a revival of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Two and a half generations of later it still casts magical spells. Nancy Bishop takes on a trip down memory lane.

St. Francis Gallery, once a church, hosts a gallery opening and artists reception this weekend in Lee, Massachusetts from 3-6pm on Saturday, August 12th

Imagine nearly 14,000 attendees of the long awaited, Yo-Yo Ma concert of Schumann's 'Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129, in awe after the concert artist shuns the audience's applause, with an appeal for a concerted effort to help find Maestro David Zinman's lost puppy.

Jiehae Park’s innovative and fast moving world premiere play, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, touches on a dizzying number of themes including familial relationships, aspirations, wishes, creation mythology, international relations, cross-culturalism, and even a humorous twist on racism.

Issue-packed, yet taut play receives strong production at suburban Miami's GableStage. Informed Consent is unsettling, but is leavened with humor and optimism. Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer directs a talented quintent of performers in a riveting production of her play.

Moving on from an endemic fixations with plays about milennials Barrington Stage has progressed by a generation with This by Melissa James Gibson. The focus is on the trials and tribulations of friends who met in college. Add to this a dark and sexy stranger in a French doctor without borders,

Members of the JACK Quartet are scattered across the eighth floor exhibit space at the Whitney Museum in which many Alexander Calder mobiles hang and stand. In the center of the room on the south wall, cellist Jay Campbell and violinist Austin Wulliman are conventionally seated with their music stands before them. They do not seem to notice violinist Christopher Otto who stands at the east entrance, only a music stand dividing him from a roaming, and finally seated and standing-still audience. At another entrance Jay Pickford Richards, violist, is completely in his own world, oblivious to in your face cameras, and the wandering audience. John Cage wrote the Quartet they will perform, not for a quartet, but for four soloists.

This is the second producton of the musical A Legendary Romance with music and lyrics, Geoff Morrow, book by Timothy Prager. While it needs more work, the norm for musicals, starring Jeff McCarthy and Lora Lee Gayer it is the best work we have seen this season from Wiliamstown Theatre Festival. It is a tragic love story set to music about lives and careers ruined during the 1950s when Holywood was on trial for its alleged communism.