Music
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Evita in South Florida
At The Wick Theatre In Boca Raton
By: - Feb 01st, 2020The Wick Theatre presents a powerhouse production of Evita. Triple-threat performers and Behind-the Scenes crew shine. The production runs through Feb. 23 in Boca Raton.
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Object Collection Opera at La Mama
Kara Feely and Travis Just Give Us Space Control
By: - Jan 27th, 2020The Downstairs stage at La Mama is darkened. People bustle around, cleaning equipment, moving it about, casting lights and cameras on it. We the audience are not quite sure whether or not the performance has begun. In fact, the minute we walk into the theater, we are in the drama. It is the intention of Object Collection, the producers and creators, to keep the audience at high alert. Daniel takes a seat on the cosmic throne, a cross between dental chair and space rocket. The quotidian and the other worldly will be liberally mixed in music and action for the next hour.
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Julian Wachner's Rev 23 at Prototype
Biblical Opera is Fun
By: - Jan 21st, 2020We are immediately struck by the lime color of the Rev 23 set: the walls, lights, desks in a school room in hell where God’s lessons are being taught, or unlearned. Clever James Darrah captures both the weight of Rev 23 and its surprising hopefulness in his production. Responding to an exuberant score by Julian Wachner, the Furies dance together across the classroom, lofting comments, instructions and denigrating the ideas of Lucifer. This is his world.
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Cion at Prototype Festival
Gregory Maqoma Erupts in a Graveyard
By: - Jan 20th, 2020Graves are marked with sticks crossed. They seem to bend in the movement of the professional mourner and his followers. Light is spotted from the ceiling, sometimes two spots and at others six. The lights rhythmic entrances and exits fit perfectly with incessant beats of the feet. The brilliant South African choreographer Gregory Vuyani Maqoma has adapted Zakes Mda’s novel Cion.
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Ellen West by Ricky Ian Gordon
Jennifer Zetlan is a Force of Nature
By: - Jan 17th, 2020Jennifer Zetlan gets a full opportunity to display her extreme force of nature in voice and acting in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West. The work premiered at Opera Saratoga last summer. Cast changes have been made. The distinguished Nathan Gunn takes on multiple roles. He is featured as the doctor, based on Ludwig Binswanger who wrote the classic case study of his patient whose pseudonym was Ellen West.
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Barrington Stage Company 2020
Music, Music, Music
By: - Jan 16th, 2020Barrington Stage Company will present two World Premiere musicals and new productions of a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical classic, a Tony Award-winning musical revue, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. BSC will also perform outdoors for the first time with free performances of one of the company’s World Premiere musicals and featuring the company’s popular Youth Theatre.
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Hot Magadalene at HERE
Danielle Birrittella Sings Richly of Love and Lust
By: - Jan 15th, 2020Danielle Birrittella, the co-creator of Magadalene, has a rich, inventive lyrical delivery of the poet Marie Howe's words. She dares to explore the divide between feminine and erotic in Magdalene, a work having its world premiere at HERE in New York.
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Jeremy Schonfeld's Iron & Coal
Rock Opera at Prototype
By: - Jan 14th, 2020Iron & Coal is a live rock show presented as part of the Prototype Festival at the Gerald Lynch Theater in New York. The title refers to an iron will to survive, but also to the charred emotions that remain after a concentration camp incarceration. The songwriter Jeremy Schonfeld tells the story of his father’s arrival in America at 11. He searched for his place in our sun, and especially to answer the question: for what purpose did I survive when so many others did not.
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Garrett Fisher's Blood Moon in World Premiere
Prototype Presents a Moving Contemporary Noh drama
By: - Jan 13th, 2020Blood Moon is a chamber opera created with consummate sensitivity and skill by a team of artists, including the composer, a passionate appreciator of Noh theater, and the prize-winning playwright, Ellen McLaughlin. One of McLaughlin’s specialties is the adaptation of classic dramas for our time. The composer also likes to jump off from the past, and react to a work created many moons ago in the present now.
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TON presents Honegger with Felix Valloton
Sight and Sound at Metropolitan Museum
By: - Dec 25th, 2019Leon Botstein, the polymath conductor, has taken on a delightful series, Sight & Sound, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With The Now Orchestra (TON) he offers a musical program which is related to a current exhibit at the Museum.
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The Jack Quartet in Residence at New School
Exploring the Different Sounds of the Bow
By: - Dec 21st, 2019Jack Quartet is in residence at the Mannes School of Music, the New School. They opened their program with Clara Iannotta’s “Dead Wasps in the Jam-Jar." The title is rich with suggestion. Wasps are not bees, but the buzzing was reminiscent of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral interlude from "The Tale of Tsar Sultan."
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Second Mainstage Musical for Barrington Stage Company
Ain’t Misbehavin’ Joins South Pacific
By: - Dec 17th, 2019Can there be too much of a good thing? Barrington Stage Company is known for staging classical musicals. But now Ain't Misbehavin has been added to South Pacific. This seems more about the bottomline than balanced programming. The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg is the third high season production on the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage. Anna in the Tropics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Nilo Cruz, will highlight the St. Germain Stage.
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Lucy Shelton at National Sawdust
Legendary Singer of Contemporary Song Lofts Stravinsky and Rochberg
By: - Dec 16th, 2019Lucy Shelton, the legendary soprano, did not let us forget. If we don't live in the action and passions of our musical times, we risk not having lived at all. Igor Stravinsky vocalise, with no words and only sung notes, introduced the evening.
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Seance with Benjamin Britten
The Crypt Conjures Brittain
By: - Dec 14th, 2019The Crypt Session as imagined and realized by Death of Classical point the way to music’s lifefulness going forward. New, young audiences wait for months to get a ticket to one of these events. Tickets sell out moments after events like this Salon Séance are announced. Andrew Ousley, whose creation Crypt Sessions and The Catacombs assures us that more events in new locations are coming. A cave is promised in the future.
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Heartbeat Opera's Der Freischutz
Louisa Proske Creates a Present Moment
By: - Dec 11th, 2019Der Freischutz is everything an 1821 opera should be in a present day performance. The brilliant conception by Louisa Proske, credited with the adaptation and direction, surrounds us from the moment with enter the theater. The circle in the square encompasses the audience. Next to the home of Agathe at one point in the circle is a looming rock which is part of the Wolf Canyon. The orchestra is inside the circle under one section of audience. In the largest seating area, a platform extends. The singing actors use all these spaces. They come very close to us at time, ignoring our presence, but allowing us to see into their souls. Immersion hardly describes what the production offers.
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Amahl and the Night Visitors
Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas Spirit for Today
By: - Dec 10th, 2019On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning.
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Newsies the Musical
At Hillbarn Theatre
By: - Dec 09th, 2019What makes Newsies really jump is the dancing with the accompanying choruses like “Carrying the banner” about the independent but challenging life of selling papers on the streets, and “Seize the day” about striking to get their due.
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Joe Rosen Presents Clarinet Quintets
New Insights Into the Form
By: - Dec 07th, 2019An active patron of New York music associations, Joe Rosen is a first-rate amateur clarinetist who opens his home to salons. Here young musicians accompany him in chamber music pieces. Recently he changed his method of operation. Instead of transposing one string instrument's part for clarinet, he is performing quintets specifically written for the instrument. The clarinet's mellow, earthy timbre is revealed.
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Seance with Benjamin Britten at Crypt
String Quartets One and Two Spectral
By: - Dec 05th, 2019The Crypt Session as imagined and realized by Death of Classical point the way to music’s lifefulness going forward. New, young audiences wait for months to get a ticket to one of these events. Tickets sell out moments after events like this Salon Séance are announced. Andrew Ousley, whose creation Crypt Sessions and The Catacombs assures us that more events in new locations are coming. A cave is promised in the future.
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Hansel and Gretel
At Opera San José
By: - Nov 30th, 2019Opera San José’s production is specifically designed to be family friendly. The opera is sung in English and the supertitles are given in pretty basic vocabulary. Yet, only 15% of the audience is children, so adults, do feel welcomed. It is a quality production, beautifully staged and sung, that will satisfy audiences of all ages and levels of opera understanding.
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Lucy Dhegrae at National Sawdust
Giving Voice to Rape
By: - Nov 24th, 2019Lucy Dhegrae, a superb mezzo soprano, lost her singing voice after an assault. In finding her singing voice again, she follows the sounds of a human from the first grunts and breaths to the glorious free sounds of song. Dhegrae is National Sawdust's Artist-in-Residence.
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Teodor Currentzis Brings Verdi to The Shed
Dramatic Performance Accompanied by Jonas Mekas Images
By: - Nov 22nd, 2019The Verdi Requiem conducted by Teodor Currentzis with the musicAeterna Orchestra and Chorus is performed at The Shed through November 24. The McCourt is a grand space and can seat 1,250 and hold 2000 standing. Designed to be flexibly conformed, this performance has bleacher seats extending from the floor before the stage up to the rafters, or heavens if you will. This program's music is both other-worldly and very much in the now.
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Popular Artists at Tanglewood
From Ringo to Arlo and Judy Collins
By: - Nov 21st, 2019It's time to mark your calendar. Tanglewood has annpunced the Popular Artists for the 2020 season. More to be announced later. By Popular Artist the BSO differentiates them from what we assume to be the unpopular ones. Its notable that so far the uber popular James Taylor is not a part of the lineup. But is likely to slip in late, As of now his usual slot for the July Fourth holiday weekend ia wide open. What's announced so far is the Popular prequel.
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Conrad Tao Debuts at Carnegie Hall
Barefoot and Brazen Tao Makes a Case for the Piano
By: - Nov 21st, 2019The young musical polymath Conrad Tao made his debut at Carnegie Hall. In an ambitious program, designed in part to display the elements of virtuoso performance on the piano, Tao played representative composers from J. S. Bach to David Lang and Julia Wolfe.
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Artist Jane Hudson at Tourists
Birthday Celebration on Becoming Jane
By: - Nov 21st, 2019The upscale Tourists a hip, designer savvy resort in North Adams, has launched a program of evenings with artists. Last night there was a cozy, well attended fireside chat with artist and musician Jane Hudson. She and her husband Jeff operated Hudsons Antiques formerly at MASS MoCA. They also perform music as Jeff and Jane. Both are widely exhibited artists. She discussed phases of her career which I have followed as friend and commentator since the late 1960s. It was also her birthday.
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