The coming season at the three regional opera companies has no milestones like last season did, with the wrap up of Sarasota Opera’s 28-year Verdi Cycle project or Florida Grand Opera’s staging of Mieczysaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, but the season has some very interesting events nonetheless, and savvy operagoers will find much to enjoy. Palm Beach Opera: The company enters … [Read more...]
Prophets of Rage ignite crowd at Perfect Vodka
The Perfect Vodka Ampitheatre was not the place for the musically faint of heart Sunday, as the Prophets of Rage brought their “Make America Rage Again” tour, and two opening acts, through South Florida. With members of Public Enemy (vocalist Chuck D, turntable artist DJ Lord), Cypress Hill (vocalist B-Real) and Rage Against the Machine (guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim … [Read more...]
2016-17 Season Preview: Jazz
Plenty of jazz artists make return trips to South Florida for the 2016-2017 season, although many haven’t performed here in recent memory. Yet what stands out most, as long as concert-goers are patient enough to wait until early 2017, are some intriguing pairings of artists. Those include Gonzalo Rubalcaba playing with influential fellow pianist Chick Corea; vocalist Kurt … [Read more...]
2016-17 Season Preview: Pop music
There are, as usual, plenty of 2016-2017 pop highlights under the all-encompassing musical blanket that the sub-genre term provides, with many featuring time-honored artists in genres from classic rock and folk to R&B and country. What’s pleasantly surprising for this season is how many of the standouts among them are female artists, and what a wide swath they cover across … [Read more...]
‘Not In My Town’: New opera makes a strong impact
In a politically unsettled time, it’s helpful to have artworks that take on the issues of the day and give us something to think about. Not In My Town, a new opera by Wilton Manors-based composer Michael W. Ross, is nothing if not politically engaged. The story of the 1998 torture-killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was part of the impetus for a … [Read more...]
Shepard hate-crime opera set for world premiere
When a selection of scenes from South Florida composer Michael W. Ross’s new opera, Not In My Town, were performed in June at Fort Lauderdale’s Sunshine Cathedral, it came only days after the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Since the subject of the opera is the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, it was an almost-instantaneous … [Read more...]
All-acoustic String Assassins see listener base grow
It’s a hot summer night outside in mid-July, but the temperature inside the air-conditioned Brewhouse Gallery in Lake Park is also uncommonly high during a performance by the genre-defying String Assassins (www.thestringassassins.com). That’s because a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd is swaying to the sounds of the quartet (acoustic guitarists Mark Shubert, Matt Gill and Dr. Jay … [Read more...]
PBCMF 4: Unusual Italian works come up short
By Kevin Wilt The Palm Beach Chamber Music Summer Festival recently ended its 25th season with an afternoon concert July 31 at the Crest Theater in Delray Beach. The program consisted of chamber works by composers associated with larger, often grander forms: Ottorino Respighi with his colorful orchestral tone poems, Gaetano Donizetti and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari with their … [Read more...]
An agreeable Sunday with the Symphony of the Americas
For nearly 30 years, James Brooks-Bruzzese’s Symphony of the Americas has presented regular concert programs in South Florida, and for almost as long, he’s provided music during the offseason with his Summerfest events. This year’s Summerfest, the 25th edition thereof, wrapped up this week in Broward County after a July of concerts here and in Panama, and this past Sunday … [Read more...]
Women outclass the men in Miami Music Festival’s ‘Crucible’
The American composer Robert Ward lived a long, productive life, and by the time he died in 2013 at age 95, he had made at least one substantial contribution to the operatic repertoire. That work was his 1961 opera, The Crucible, based on the Arthur Miller play of the same name that allegorized the McCarthy “witch hunts” of the 1950s through the medium of the actual hunts … [Read more...]