Even with the loss of one orchestra’s Palm Beach County concerts (the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, which will stick to Stuart and Vero Beach this time around), the upcoming classical season is hard to complain about, with its roster of major ensembles and performers, several world premieres, and a deep lineup of compelling music across the genre spectrum. Here’s how that … [Read more...]
2023-24 Season in Opera: Area’s companies play it (mostly) safe
It’s fair to say the world of opera is in flux, with the nation’s preeminent company, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, sharply modernizing its repertoire, and locally, with the three opera houses pulling back from innovation somewhat and sticking with box-office certainties. Palm Beach Opera The West Palm Beach-based company opens its 62nd season with the most reliable … [Read more...]
Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, on hiatus, seeks funds to return in 2024
For the first time in 31 years, a July in Palm Beach County passed without the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival. Thrown off its tracks by adjustments for the COVID-19 pandemic and a drying up of donor funds, festival organizers called off the summer concert series they’ve been hosting since 1992. But it’s too soon to write an epitaph for the festival, which gave four … [Read more...]
PB Opera takes on cultural clash in ‘Madama Butterfly’
The opening of Japan to Western trade in the 1850s engendered a flurry of exotic-themed art in Europe and the United States. Painters and interior designers, dramatists and musicians created numerous works that evoked the mysteries of the land of the Chrysanthemum Throne. Many of these works examined the clash of East and West, including a French novel, an American short … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in classical music
There has been a profound change in the world of classical music over the past two or three years when it comes to programming. Although South Florida will still welcome touring orchestras bearing gifts of symphonic favorites, the post-George Floyd world has had a bracing effect on the kinds of music presented to today’s concertgoers. Programs now feature more Black and … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2022-23: The season in opera
South Florida’s two regional opera companies are adding some new things to a lineup heavy in audience favorites, while across the state in Sarasota, the repertory company is returning to an early Verdi masterwork and offering a French rarity. The country’s largest opera troupes are making moves this season into a much more modern direction, with new works, especially … [Read more...]
Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival returns in one-week format
Over the 30 years that the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival has been presenting summer concerts, its musicians have presented more than 500 pieces, the majority of which have been pieces from worthy but infrequently visited corners of the repertoire. It’s a remarkable legacy, and its mix of adventurousness and first-rate playing can be explored on the six recordings its … [Read more...]
Norton deepens collection with absorbing Dürer, Rembrandt and Picasso exhibit
There are some times when a celebrated turn of phrase from literature perfectly sums up an experience, and for a current exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art, the magic words come from Christopher Marlowe, writing in 1589: Infinite riches in a little room. The West Palm Beach museum has been promised prints by three supreme masters of the genre — Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt … [Read more...]
Record review: Bright, vigorous Telemann from violinist Cotik
Tomás Cotik is a violinist, a professor at Portland State University, and perhaps most important, a scholar whose projects for the Centaur Records label have included complete surveys of the Mozart violin sonatas and Schubert violin-and piano works, as well as the Bach sonatas and partitas. Each of these recordings was accompanied by deeply learned program notes by Cotik, who … [Read more...]
Frost string trio opens Flagler Museum music series
It’s been quiet, musically speaking, at the Flagler Museum over the past year as COVID-19 silenced the annual chamber music programs at Whitehall. Since 1999, the mansion-museum in Palm Beach has welcomed some of the leading chamber music groups on the world scene, especially young string quartets such as the Dover, Calidore, and New Orford, all of whom have played the … [Read more...]