By Dennis D. Rooney Music for string quartet took up the first half of the third program of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 28th season, which I saw Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre. Flutist Karen Fuller joined violinists Dina Kostic and Claudia Cagnassone; violist Renée Reder; and cellist Susan Bergeron for the Nocturne and Scherzo by Arthur Foote … [Read more...]
Archives for July 2019
‘Marianne & Leonard’ a tender, complex portrait of a poet and his muse
Documentarian Nick Broomfield is the auteur of the dead musician. He’s the conspiracy-minded chronicler of the pop visionary taken too soon, whose title subjects may or may not be separated by ampersands. Though he has enjoyed a long and influential career in Direct Cinema dating back to the early ’70s, he first appeared on my radar with 1998’s Kurt & Courtney, a … [Read more...]
‘Reports on Sarah and Saleem’: The end of the affair is politics
In the movies, as sometimes in life, thinking with one’s loins instead of one’s brain is a recipe for fatalism, for broken families, for dead rabbits strung up in closets. Like a computer virus infecting our operating system, it overrides our better judgment. Sarah (Sivane Kretchner), the unhappily married, upper-middle-class Israeli café owner in Muayad Alayan’s grim … [Read more...]
Brahms piano quartet is high point of PBCMF’s Program II
By Dennis D. Rooney The second program of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 28th season, which I heard Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, contained three works: novelties by Glière and Thuille; and a Brahms masterpiece. Born in Kiev in 1875, Reinhold Moritzovich Glière came to maturity and enjoyed early success in Imperial Russia, then managed to flourish in … [Read more...]
Journalist Brooks finds service is the true road to character
New York Times columnist David Brooks won wide praise for his 2015 book The Road to Character, which celebrated the happiness found in personal achievement. He now believes he was wrong and that “the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe.” He argues in his new book that true joy comes from service to others. Brooks cites … [Read more...]
Norton’s movie poster show a summer must-see
By Myles Ludwig The movie poster is a metaphor in design, albeit with a specific purpose: A kind of Coming Attractions on paper. Coming Soon, the new show at the Norton (it opened Friday and runs through Oct. 19), is a marvelous view of design as metaphor. Some 215 movie posters from the U.S. and other countries have been curated from the 3,000-plus collection of Dwight … [Read more...]
Delightful ‘Sister Act’ wraps FAU’s Summer Rep
By Dale King Mirth and glitz mingle with murder, mobsters and fine vocals in Sister Act, the musical that’s wrapping up the two-play Summer Rep schedule at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus. Students in the master of fine arts graduate program join forces with four Actors Equity performers to present the show based on the 1992 movie featuring Whoopi Goldberg … [Read more...]
PB Chamber Fest delivers enjoyable readings of unfamiliar fare
By Dennis D. Rooney The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s 28th season opened last weekend with a program that contained two concertinos, a sonata and a nonet. None of them could be described as popular fare, although experienced listeners might have already encountered two of them. Both works titled “Concertino,” however, certainly qualified as unfamiliar. That by … [Read more...]
Astronaut’s images at Photo Centre paint our world in cosmic colors
By Myles Ludwig The vivid colors of the cosmos are on display at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, which is currently exhibiting a wondrous series of pictures captured by retired astronaut Scott Kelly during his long sojourn in the International Space Station. They are abstractions of course, shapes often as foreign as their hues. Because if people look like ants from … [Read more...]
Something for everyone as PB Chamber Music Fest opens 28th season
In this summer’s version of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, the music ranges widely from canonical string and piano quartets to rarities for unusual combinations of instruments, as well as major utterances from overlooked composers of the past. In short, it contains all the elements listeners have come to expect from this festival, whose 28th anniversary season begins … [Read more...]