The pundits tells us life will be different after the pandemic. By switching to outdoor performances Palm Beach Opera may have stumbled on a panoply of new ideas for its future. Using the iThink Financial Amphitheatre at the South Florida Fairgrounds, with singers’s voices slightly enhanced, made for a reproductive quality not usually heard in smaller houses. Also, having … [Read more...]
Superb singers make PB Opera’s ‘Flute’ magical amid pandemic
It was different because of COVID: Palm Beach Opera held its season outdoors at the 6,000-seat iThink Financial Anphitheatre at the Fairgrounds (just one mile from the Florida Turnpike at the Southern Boulevard exit). The first of the major American opera companies to bravely adapt to an untested venue, the troupe’s general director, David Walker, thanked the people who made … [Read more...]
PB Opera ready for outdoor festival, with Met-style casts
By Robert Croan “And then the pandemic punched us in the face.” That’s how it felt to David Walker, in his first season as Palm Beach Opera’s general director – a post he took over after Daniel Biaggi resigned in 2019. “It was going so well,” says Walker, 54. “Puccini’s 'Turandot' [the opening production in January 2020] was our highest-grossing show in 12 years. … [Read more...]
Brewer cooking up live music in Lake Worth Beach
A surprising thing happened as the COVID-19 crisis ran roughshod over the local live music industry throughout 2020. You know, the year in which many performance venues — especially indoor-only ones — closed down from temporarily to permanently. The year in which most able to stay open downsized their calendars from full bands to solo artists, ranging from DJs to … [Read more...]
FGO offers short contemporary operas, special concerts for season
By Robert Croan “Even in this time of COVID and other calamities, our need for music and art is ever present,” says Susan T. Danis, Florida Grand Opera’s general director and CEO. “We are excited to be performing in intimate yet socially distanced spaces that are perfect for a unique storytelling experience." In the time of COVID-19, an opera set during the AIDS crisis … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2020-21: Classical shows shrink, but concerts still plentiful
South Florida’s classical music community is surely one of the nation’s most vibrant, with at least seven regularly appearing orchestras playing from Key West to Fort Pierce, two opera companies, three chamber music series, a nationally known concert choir, and a season that in the winter months sees many of the touring stars of the Northeast come down to shake off the … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2020-21: Aging veterans come out for abbreviated pop season
An abbreviated yet guardedly optimistic 2020-2021 South Florida pop concert season surges forward starting in November, featuring mostly veteran performers among folk, blues and other roots music styles. Star blues guitarists Tab Benoit, Buddy Guy and Kenny Wayne Shepherd are featured this month, in hopes that COVID-19 complications don’t give ticket-buying patrons a bluesy … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2020-21: Area’s opera companies move to outdoor festivals, concerts
New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced in September that it would be canceling all its shows for the 2020-21 season, but plans to reopen in September 2021 with American composer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer the Met has presented in its 140-year history. The area’s opera companies face the same … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2020-21: Female stars dot 2021 jazz landscape
Jazz takes a measured approach to the 2020-2021 South Florida concert season, eschewing the current, COVID-19-ravaged year in favor of optimism starting in early 2021. Which makes for an abbreviated schedule, yet one filled with younger, international distaff performers. Those include Japanese pianist Yoko Miwa, Canadian trumpeter and vocalist Bria Skonberg, and East … [Read more...]
FAU teacher enjoys second career as country songbird
By Janis Fontaine Rhea Francani isn’t a tough-talking Texan or a boot-scooting Okie but she loves country music like one. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., the youngest of three sisters in a close-knit Italian family that put on “full-blown concerts” in the living room of their modest home, Francani, 28, now of Boca Raton, just released the first single from her soon-to-be released … [Read more...]