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Boston Lyric Opera Tosca
Fine Cast but a Misguided Production
By: - Oct 20th, 2017Puccini's "Tosca" remains one of the most popular operas in the world 117 years after its debut. Today with its portrait of fascist tyrants taking women forcibly for their own pleasure, it has renewed relevance. In her American debut Russian soprano Elena Stikhina made the role her own.
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Gordon Getty Unearths Ghosts
A Pair of Seasonal Operas
By: - Oct 20th, 2017The Center for Contemporary Opera is presenting the premier of a pair of operas by Gordon Getty. One is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The House of Usher. The other, on Oscar Wilde’s sympathetic take on a ghost who cannot die, poor guy.
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Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera
James Morris' 1000th performance at the Met
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Turandot is Giacomo Puccini’s final, unfinished work. It is a a grand fantasy of legendary China as reimagined through the lens of Italian romanticism. It is a farm tale, the story of an ice-hearted princess and the fearless Prince who wins her hand. It is seen (wrongly) as the end point of the genre of Italian opera. It is also, along with La bohème, the last of the Metropolitan Opera’s giant Franco Zeffirelli productions, crowded extravaganzas that evoke the opulence of a bygone era. (In this case, we’re talking about the 1980s.)
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Barnatan and Weilerstein at Carnegie
Woo Too with Mendelssohn and a New Steven Mackay
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Listening to two great artists performing cello sonatas at Zankel Hall, you are let in on a secret that should be widely broadcast. In intimate chamber music, performed with only two instruments, you enter the deep, developed world of great composers whose work is the subject of conversation. Chorale to recitative, pluck to bowed, arpeggios to long, sweet lines. Never a moment to rest as we are pulled closer and closer to the essence of a composer.
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Musical America Announces Awardees
Andris Nelsons, Sondra Radvanovsky, Mason Bates Honored
By: - Oct 17th, 2017The prestigious Musical America annual awards have been announced. The BSO musical director Andris Nelsons is artist of the year. Sondra Radvanovsky is vocalist. We interviewed Nelsons in 2011 before his first concert with the BSO at Carnegie Hall. Radvanofvsky has been on our radar since Peter Gelb tried to oust her and Placido Dominago stormed into his office and told him he could not remove an important artist from the Met roster.
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Thomas Ades and Friends at Carnegie Hall
Warm up for The Exterminating Angel
By: - Oct 16th, 2017Thomas Adès will be Artistic Partner to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the next three years, helping to fill their Maestro's wish for abundant new music. Adès' gifts as a composer were on display in Zankel Hall. Principals from the cast of his third opera, about to have its North American premier, sang. The music, his own, and that of Schubert, Britten and Purcell among others, could count as the music of his friends, from long ago and now. As a pianist, Adès has a special touch.
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The Home Place at Irish Repertory Theatre
Brian Friel's Play Directed by Charlotte Moore
By: - Oct 14th, 2017The Last Rose of Summer and Minstrel Boy were written by Irish poet and lyricist Thomas Moore and are at the heart of the Irish soul. Satisfying direction by Charlotte Moore, undoubtedly a descendant, brings the poetry and music home in Brian Friel's "The Home Place."
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American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
Doing What's Right
By: - Oct 13th, 2017A peculiar sense of existential dread hung over Wednesday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the first of the young season featuring the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its long time music director Leon Botstein. For this concert, titled “The Sounds of Democracy”, Botstein chose 20th century music by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland, leading lights of American music in the last century but now largely ignored by the fast-food reality-television culture of the 21st.
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Group Fundraises to Block Berkshire Museum Sale
Save the Save
By: - Oct 13th, 2017“This is a classic case of confronting a well-organized, well-financed, misguided inside group, hoping to lead them to their better angels,” said Leslie Ferrin, founder of Save the Art. “That’s why we’re crowd-sourcing Save the Art’s legal action fund. We want to invite people to step up at whatever level they can, and say, “we support finding a better solution.”
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Agostino Steffani's Vocal Duets Rediscovered
Italian-born Composer Worked in Germany
By: - Oct 12th, 2017Agostino Steffani (1653-1728) was important in his day, serving as a priest and diplomat as well as a composer, but he was forgotten after his death. The BEMF has devoted much of its attention to resuscitating his vocal works over the past 6 years. Its most recent research led to an enchanting concert of vocal duets, featuring local favorite Amanda Forsythe and colleagues from around the world.
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The Odd Couple Warhol and Rockwell
Populism as Commonality Explored at Rockwell Museum
By: - Oct 12th, 2017The artists Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol became rich and famous for giving the public what it wanted. It is this shared populism which is explored in an evocative exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Not surprisingly the exhibition has been mobbed with visitors.
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The Crucible at Steppenwolf
Miller's Witch Hunt All Too Relevant
By: - Oct 12th, 2017Steppenwolf Theatre’s new production of Arthur Miller’s 1952 play, skillfully directed by Jonathan Berry, is a chilling allegory of the McCarthy era’s assault on freedom. Staged for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults series, the play pulls no punches in telling the story of guilt and accusation during the Salem witch trials.
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The Sound of Music on National Tour
Rodgers and Hammerstein Musical Stops in South Florida
By: - Oct 11th, 2017A new production of The Sound of Music dusts off the cobwebs from classic musical .A vibrant company performs Rodgers and Hammerstein classic in national tour. Award-winning director Jack O'Brien's new production allows us to rediscover a classic.
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The Song of the Nightingale
Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette California
By: - Oct 10th, 2017The Song of the Nightingale is comprised of numerous clashes – the well being of the poor fishermen who must provide fish for the Emperor’s banquets versus the pleasure of Emperor; the needs of the Emperor’s sister who is the brains behind the administration versus the ego of the Emperor; and the young fisherman Xaio versus the girl that he loves, Mei, who aspires to higher goals and has been lifted from the fishing village to become a maid in the palace.
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Languedoc, A Land Of Diversity
Quality Wines Exist In the Region
By: - Oct 09th, 2017Languedoc ,in southern France, has gone from an over producer of bulk wine to a region thatcreates high quality wines with many blends that focus on grapes from the region.
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Opera at the Apollo
We Shall Not Be Moved Triumphs
By: - Oct 09th, 2017We Shall Not Be Moved opened at the Apollo last weekend. Under the bright lights on the Apollo marquee on 125th Street in Harlem, the gathering crowd was dressed in high fashion, from tinsel and glitter to designer jeans and platform heels. Talk was all of the subject matter and the artists who had created this opera. Bill T. Jones is well-known, but the composer and librettist not so. People were going to see the work of their own community.
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Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton at Barrington Stage
Illuminating Vintage Psychological Thriller
By: - Oct 09th, 2017For community and school based fall programming Barrington Stage has revised the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight. It's best know for its second of two film versions in 1944 which starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton and the ingenue, Angela Lansberry as the frisky maid Nancy. The Barrington production, while well cast and crafted, given the zeitgeist and setting of the 1880s, is dark, somber and drab.
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The Humans In Suburban Miami
Tony Award-Winning Play at GableStage
By: - Oct 09th, 2017One can't overstate The Humans relevance to modern times. Stephen Karam's play is humorous, heartbreaking and creepy. The cast offers multi-dimensional performances in a first-rate production.
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Morgan Bulkeley Retrospective at Berkshire Museum
Last of the Mohicans
By: - Oct 08th, 2017It was thrilling, poignant and terribly sad last night when many artists, friends and community packed the Berkshire Museum for a vernissage of the sprawling, eclectic, and dazzling retrospective Morgan Bulkeley: Nature Culture Clash. It may be the last such project focused on a Berkshire based artist. As a part of its New Vision the museum is dumping 40 works of art and reconfiguring. Van Shields and the board refuse to discuss the fate of the remaining collection of 40,000 objects and the role if any of the fine arts in its plans.
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Crossing at BAM
Whitman Focus of Composer Matthew Aucoin
By: - Oct 08th, 2017Crossing premiered at ART in Cambridge, Mass. in 2015. Now it comes to BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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Musical Redemption: Huntington's Merrily We Roll Along
Stephen Sondheim Musical Initially Considered a Flop.
By: - Oct 07th, 2017One of the more obscure of Sondheim's musical, the Huntington Theatre Company's terrific production underscore's its vitality and quality. Director Maria Friedman’s stunning London production of Merrily We Roll Along received universal rave reviews – the most five star reviews in West End history as well as the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Now she has recreated it for Boston audiences. Travelling backwards in time over 20 years in the entertainment business, this musical focuses on the relationships of close friends Franklin, Charley, and Mary, and features some of Sondheim’s most memorable songs, including “Good Thing Going,” “Old Friends,” and “Not a Day Goes By." Seeing the show is like an old friend remembered.
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Barbara Takenaga at Williams College Museum of Art
The Optics of Metaphysical Cosmology
By: - Oct 07th, 2017The Williams College Museum of Art, through the end of January, is presenting “Barbara Takenaga” a stunning overview of 60 works of varying scale, that represent two decades of her oeuvre. The selection was made in collaboration with independent curator Debra Bricker Balken.
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Rome Neal as Thelonious Monk
Laurence Holder's Play Captures the Jazz Icon
By: - Oct 07th, 2017Laurence Holder’s iconic one man show Monk brings the jazz legend life to the stage. Rome Neal, actor and director, becomes Thelonious Monk, and for 90 minutes we move through the defeats and triumph’s of the man’s work, life and artistic era.
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Boulez at the Park Avenue Armory
Repons from IRCAM
By: - Oct 06th, 2017The Park Avenue Armory is presenting one of Pierre Boulez’ signature compositions, the first one to use IRCAM with all its innovation. Relatively simple material can be made to acquire sophisticated layers without losing the sound of its origins. Repons is the first product of IRCAM’s 4X computer.
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Carnegie Hall Opens with Philadelphia Orchestra
Four-Armed is Fore-Warned
By: - Oct 06th, 2017the original plan was to have Rhapsody's piano part played by Lang Lang, the international piano sensation and one of the biggest stars of this new firmament of young classical artists. Then Lang suffered an arm injury and plans were changed. The program still featured Rhapsody, but in a version fortwo pianos. The second was manned by Chick Corea, a beloved figure from the world of jazz. And serving as Lang Lang's left hand, his pupil Maxim Lando. At 14 years old, Lando is a product of Lang's International Music Foundation.
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