All music was once new. But in America, ever since Serge Koussevitzky founded the Berkshire Music Center on July 8, 1940, in Lenox, Mass., composers and their new music found a home for experimentation and performance. Randall Thompson’s Alleluia was the inaugural piece that balmy summer afternoon at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in July and August … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2015
MNM’s sublime ‘Side by Side’ adds to summer of Sondheim
It has now been seven years since a new Stephen Sondheim show (Road Show) has opened in New York and 21 years since one premiered on Broadway (Passion). So fans of the challenging, resolutely unconventional composer-lyricist have had to settle for the frequent revivals of his past musicals and the occasional retrospective revue of his work. In South Florida, theater companies … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 7-9
Art: Every year, the Norton Museum of Art summer interns get a chance to curate their own show, and this year’s is focused on another hot summer, that of 1968, when the nation’s political and social structures took a series of body blows. That was the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, plus the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in … [Read more...]
Fun staging, excellent singing mark Miami Summer Music Festival’s closing ‘Don Giovanni’
The Miami Summer Music Festival closed its second season on Sunday afternoon with a remarkable performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, epic and uncut, and featuring several standout singers in the festival’s Opera Institute program. Smartly and snarkily staged by Jeffrey Marc Buchman, who updated the opera to contemporary times in a gambling resort, this Don Giovanni lost only … [Read more...]
‘The Gift’ uncovers suburban heart of darkness
In its first half, The Gift is a fine movie for our panicked, over-surveilled, mentally unstable age, and the second half is even more powerful. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it opens on an average, happy, industrious couple visiting its new home, in this case a palatial California spread overlooking miles of lush greenery. But things get creepy real quick. In the next scene, Simon … [Read more...]
News briefs: WLRN launches classical channel; Harid gets $250K grant; Kravis to install organ
MIAMI — Radio station WLRN will launch a 24-hour classical music station on its HD-2 radio channel Aug. 10, officials said Friday. The “Classical 24” station will replace the current “Alternative News and Talk” station at WLRN’s HD-2 channel, and is being started to fill the gap left by the departure last month of Classical South Florida from the airwaves. “We understand the … [Read more...]