WEST PALM BEACH — Major performers and ensembles in the classical music world have been scheduled for the coming Regional Arts season at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, in the expectation that vaccinated audiences can return to the West Palm Beach venue.
The season, announced April 6, will feature a dozen programs, and include appearances by the much-beloved American soprano Renée Fleming (Jan. 2), violinist Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (Feb. 28 and March 1), violinist Itzhak Perlman (March 6), flutist James Galway (April 3) and the French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who opens the season Dec. 6 with a recital of the complete Préludes of Claude Debussy.
Miami Beach’s own New World Symphony travels up Interstate 95 for a concert Dec. 12 led by the celebrated American conductor Marin Alsop, who welcomes pianist Aaron Diehl for a performance of the Gershwin Piano Concerto on a program that also features Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and the young British composer Anna Clyne’s Masquerade.
Other big ensembles coming to the Kravis include the Detroit Symphony (Jan. 17, with cellist Alisa Weilerstein), Cleveland Orchestra (Jan. 23), the Russian National Orchestra (Feb. 6 and 7) and the Warsaw Philharmonic (March 30, with pianist Barry Douglas).
Tickets for the general public will go on sale in June. For more information, visit kravis.org or call 561-832-7469.
Parrot Heads, rejoice: Buffett to do four Delray shows
DELRAY BEACH —The songwriter whose Margaritaville vision of life has made him an icon of laid-back Florida good times has scheduled four shows this month at Old School Square’s outdoor amphitheater.
Jimmy Buffett, a resident of Palm Beach, will bring his Coral Reefer band and his much-loved catalog to Delray on Thursday and Friday, May 13 and 14, and Monday and Tuesday, May 17 and 18. Each concert will start at 8 p.m., and audience members will be seated in four-seat “pods” that will enable social distancing because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Masks will also be required. Gates open at 6:30 p.m. each night.
Buffett, who grew up in Pascagoula, Miss., was inducted into the Mississippi Songwriters Hall of Fame last year. He released his first studio album in seven years, Life on the Flip Side, in May, and an acoustic album of some of the deeper cuts in his catalog, Songs You Don’t Know by Heart, was released in November and came out of a COVID-inspired video series curated by his daughter, filmmaker Delaney Buffett.
For more information, visit oldschoolsquare.org or call 561-243-7922.
Palm Beach Opera sets 60th anniversary season
WEST PALM BEACH —One of the world’s most popular operas will open the Palm Beach Opera’s 60th anniversary season in January, followed by two lighthearted comedies.
The West Palm Beach-based troupe will mount Georges Bizet’s Carmen as its first production, the 1875 tale of a free-spirited Roma woman who takes as her lover the soldier Don José, whose jealousy in turn leads to tragic consequences. No cast details have been announced, but the opera is scheduled for Jan. 28-30 at the Kravis Center’s Dreyfoos Hall.
Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), the story of the poor peasant Nemorino’s love for the beautiful landowner Adina, and the phony potion he thinks will help win her over, is the second production. This charming 1832 bel canto comedy includes the lovely aria “Una furtiva lagrima,” long a staple of tenor recitals everywhere. The opera is scheduled for Feb. 25-27.
The final work on the season is one of the best-known of all Viennese operettas, Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. This 1905 comedy about a wealthy widow whose money becomes a central issue for her romantic happiness and the future of the fictional Balkan nation of Pontevedro will be sung and acted in English instead of its original German. The operetta is set for March 25-27.
The opera company’s annual February fundraiser, which always features a leading operatic talent of the day, will this season feature a young star with South Florida roots.
Nadine Sierra, who was born in Fort Lauderdale and whose family moved to Delray Beach so she could attend the Dreyfoos School of the Arts, has become a major soprano on the world stage, with regular appearances at the Metropolitan Opera and top houses in Europe. She will be featured May 22 in a Met-sponsored livestream concert from France’s Royal Opera of Versailles called Three Divas, in which she will be joined by soprano Ailyn Pérez and mezzo Isabel Leonard.
Sierra, whose appearances at Palm Beach Opera include Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto, will be the special guest Feb. 7 at the fundraiser, which will take place at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach.
Tickets for the season will go on sale in September. For more information, visit pbopera.org or call 561-833-7888.