By Dennis D. Rooney The Hermitage Piano Trio takes its name from the great Russian museum of art and culture in St. Petersburg founded in 1764 by Empress Catherine the Great. The players are Ilya Kazantsev, piano; Misha Keylin, violin; and Sergey Antonov, cello. Their concert Jan. 23 in the Flagler’s current Music Series opened with a relative novelty, Dmitri … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2018
FGO’s ‘Salome’ benefits from strong lead, secondary performances
Today’s menu of visual entertainment encompasses literally everything thanks to digital technology, but even a complicated work of grand opera from more than a century ago still has the power to shock. Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera Salome, based on an Oscar Wilde play that was the last word in decadence at the time, also remains a formidable challenge for any house that wants … [Read more...]
Multi-racial ‘On Golden Pond’ aims to be about story, not skin color
At Palm Beach Dramaworks, the cast of Ernest Thompson’s popular 1979 play, On Golden Pond, is multi-racial by design, but director Paul Scancato (Collected Stories) does not want you to focus on that aspect of the production. “For me, it’s ultimately about telling the story of the Thayers,” he says. “The audience might initially think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be … [Read more...]
Stellar leads, soaring score make Slow Burn’s ‘Bridges of Madison County’ worth a visit
It is remarkable how music and its emotional uplift can elevate a story. A case in point is Robert James Waller’s potboiler best-selling romance novel, The Bridges of Madison County, which became an only slightly less gooey film starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. Yet in the hands of composer-lyricist Robert Jason Brown, this steamy tale of an affair between an Iowa … [Read more...]
Violinist Huang impressive in Kravis recital
By Dennis D. Rooney 23-year old Sirena Huang won the grand prize at last year’s inaugural Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition held at Lynn University in Boca Raton. On Jan. 22, she gave a local recital, part of the Kravis Center’s Young Artists Series. That complex’s Rinker Playhouse was an ideal venue. With Robert Koenig at the piano, Huang played a … [Read more...]
‘Communion,’ at Primal Forces, deftly explores issues of character
Although the word "communion" brings to mind the Catholic ritual of accepting the body and blood of Christ, Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor seems more interested in its alternate definition, “the sharing or exchanging of mental or spiritual thoughts or feelings.” For there is plenty of such sharing – as well as withholding – in MacIvor’s Communion, receiving its regional … [Read more...]
Three strong women aim for ‘Communion’ at Primal Forces
Keith Garsson and his Primal Forces theater company are on the move again. After a season and a half at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage, which then dropped its theater program, he returned to Andrews Living Arts in downtown Fort Lauderdale. But after one show there, it too suspended production. So Garsson packed up again and moved across town to Empire Stage, where he opens the … [Read more...]
Kruger stands out in otherwise clunky, morose ‘In the Fade’
If you didn’t feel sufficiently suicidal after seeing last week’s South Florida opening of Michael Haneke’s Happy End, writer-director Faith Akin’s medicinal tragedy In the Fade has more than enough blunt despair to finish the job. The difference is that unlike Haneke’s formally precise, even darkly comic burrow into the splintered human condition, Akin’s humorless litany of … [Read more...]
Strong female characters get numerous Oscar nods
A mute cleaning lady at a Cold War aerospace facility who falls in love with a sea creature. An outraged mother who uses outdoor advertising to shame the police into finding her daughter’s killer. A young woman coming of college age, butting heads with her overprotective mom. The nation’s first female publisher of a major daily newspaper deciding whether to risk it all for … [Read more...]
Lang’s ‘Little Match Girl Passion’ makes moving impact in Seraphic Fire performance
By Robert Croan In prefatory remarks to Seraphic Fire’s January concerts, director Patrick Dupré Quigley told audiences that the featured work, David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, is such a strong piece that no other contemporary choral work could stand up to it on the same program. Instead, Quigley balanced the 40-minute oratorio with three Renaissance motets. … [Read more...]