Music: The Argentine violinist Tomás Cotik, who has made a strong career for himself with well-received discs of music by Schubert and Piazzolla, will be departing South Florida at the end of this month to take a job teaching at Portland State University in Oregon. His exit from the local scene is a real loss, but before he goes, he’ll be giving two concerts of music from his … [Read more...]
Archives for August 2016
PBCMF 4: Unusual Italian works come up short
By Kevin Wilt The Palm Beach Chamber Music Summer Festival recently ended its 25th season with an afternoon concert July 31 at the Crest Theater in Delray Beach. The program consisted of chamber works by composers associated with larger, often grander forms: Ottorino Respighi with his colorful orchestral tone poems, Gaetano Donizetti and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari with their … [Read more...]
An agreeable Sunday with the Symphony of the Americas
For nearly 30 years, James Brooks-Bruzzese’s Symphony of the Americas has presented regular concert programs in South Florida, and for almost as long, he’s provided music during the offseason with his Summerfest events. This year’s Summerfest, the 25th edition thereof, wrapped up this week in Broward County after a July of concerts here and in Panama, and this past Sunday … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 12-14
Dance: Tonight at the Kravis Center, two local dance leaders, Maria Konrad and Jerry Opdenaker, will be joined by the Koresh Dance Company of Philadelphia for an evening of new work called Inside Out. Two Florida premieres by Roni Koresh, and world premieres from Konrad (who runs Reach Dance Co.) and Opdenaker (who runs O Dance), teaming here with Sarah Walston of Florida Dance … [Read more...]
When she was bad: Frears’ sweet, pointed ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’
If the cinema has Ed Wood and his legions of B-movie acolytes, the operatic canon has Florence Foster Jenkins — a cultural figure beloved because of her lack of talent, not despite it. The New York City arts doyenne turned amateur soprano is arguably the strangest footnote in music history. In the early ’40s, Jenkins warbled off-key coloratura at select private performances … [Read more...]
Toni Tennille: On life with, and without, the Captain
By Dale King Vocalist, actress and now author Toni Tennille knows a lot about love, such things as muskrat love and love that will keep us together, about touching your lover the way you want them to touch you and about doing loving things to paramours one more time. Alabama-born Cathryn Antoinette Tennille and husband, Daryl Dragon, the captain’s hat-wearing, usually … [Read more...]
The View From Home 80: Sokurov at the Louvre, Pialat’s Van Gogh, Resnais, Makavajev, Verhoeven and forbidden love
Francofonia: Defying categorization, Alexander Sokurov’s hypnotically watchable Francofonia (Music Box, $24.19 Blu-ray, $20.69 DVD) is an essay and a collage, a historical fiction that is also documentary about its own creation, a place where past and present can collide during a single circular pan. Its subject is the Louvre, particularly the museum’s uncertain future during … [Read more...]
A lovely ‘Giselle’ at Boca Ballet
This has been a good year for 25th anniversaries of local arts groups, with the Kravis Center, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, and Boca Ballet Theatre marking that milestone. The ballet company, which is run by Dan Guin and his wife Jane Tyree, can draw on many a connection in the dance world for their educational mission and for a little bit of celebrity dazzle for … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 5-7
Theater: Yes, summer is a slow time for theater in South Florida, but apparently someone forgot to tell Margate’s Stage Door Theatre, which has just extended its long-running Motown revue, The Soul of Motor City, through Aug. 28. Aimed at the Boomer generation, which will recall these three dozen-plus rhythm & blues song hits from the 1960s through 1980s, the evening is … [Read more...]
Women outclass the men in Miami Music Festival’s ‘Crucible’
The American composer Robert Ward lived a long, productive life, and by the time he died in 2013 at age 95, he had made at least one substantial contribution to the operatic repertoire. That work was his 1961 opera, The Crucible, based on the Arthur Miller play of the same name that allegorized the McCarthy “witch hunts” of the 1950s through the medium of the actual hunts … [Read more...]