It’s hard to know whether a change as simple as a rehearsal strategy can make all the difference in the world for a performing organization, but in the case of the Lynn Philharmonia, this much can be said: Its opening program this past weekend was easily the finest opening concert of the season the conservatory orchestra has ever given, and in its freshness, maturity and … [Read more...]
PB Opera wraps season with well-sung, entertaining ‘Hoffmann’
Opera’s long history means that today’s audiences are treated to entertainment conventions from several different eras, and when it gets into pre-Industrial Revolution territory, viewers generally have to make something of a leap to get to full enjoyment. But Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) was composed by Jacques Offenbach for a late 19th-century urban … [Read more...]
Norton’s ‘Industrial Sublime’ a poem of water, iron, stone and sky
If New Yorkers won’t come to New York, the city will come to them, in the form oil paintings, watercolors and oil pastels with impressionist, cubist and realist tones. A rich selection of works depicting the pros and cons of the booming city makes up Industrial Sublime, which opened March 20 at the Norton Museum. The gallery rooms are filled with cityscapes by famous and … [Read more...]
At Lynn, the sound of an orchestra transformed
Someone over at the Lynn Conservatory of Music got the memo. After three very middling concerts in which the student orchestra at Lynn University’s music school sounded haphazard, unfocused, and in its brass section, something shy of competent, the orchestra turned it all around Feb. 8 and gave a rousing performance of three well-known orchestral virtuoso pieces. Not … [Read more...]
Boca Museum’s ‘Pop Culture’ gives us images of what we really are
Like a giant slap in the face, the new Pop Art exhibition at the Boca Museum of Art wakes us up from a long hibernation filled with compulsive consumerism habits, celebrity infatuation and overindulgence. The effect, however, is momentary. It may not be enough to change our ways, but faced with a giant hot dog made of mosaics, a thought does come to mind: How did we get to … [Read more...]
Harid marks 25 years with three celebratory programs
Reared in the orphanages of rural southwest Brazil, Gleidson Vasconcelos found his future one day as he looked into a window he was passing, and saw a girl dancing to the sound of a music box. “’She must be having a really great time doing what she is doing. She is so beautiful and free,’” Vasconcelos remembers thinking. Seen at the window by a dance teacher, the 10-year-old … [Read more...]
Chameleon ends season with worthy revival of forgotten composer
It’s surely the case that most of the readers of this review have never heard of the Swedish woman composer Elfrida Andrée (1841-1929), whose career ran into the standard gender roadblocks of the Victorian era into which she was born. But Andrée’s music is well worth hearing, and last Sunday (May 12), the Chameleon Musicians chamber music series in Fort Lauderdale closed its … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire ends 11th season in standout style
Seraphic Fire wrapped its 11th season this past week with a new record release, a $12,500 NEA grant in hand to record the next one, and a concert of widely varied works that illustrated the range of its interests as well as the flexibility of its singers. Dubbed Cathedral Classics, the potpourri concert featured 18 short works, many of them suggested by an email campaign in … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, Renaissance jam band bring Ponce de Leon’s era alive
It takes a leap of empathy and a sizable amount of scholarship to take an audience back five centuries to a time too remote from our own to be entirely understandable, yet recognizably humanist in a way that we still emulate. That Seraphic Fire was able to do this with its program of late medieval and early Renaissance music from Spain – in honor of Juan Ponce de León’s … [Read more...]
At the symphony I: Lovely Mozart at Boca Symphonia
Philippe Entremont closed out his tenure as director of the Boca Raton Symphonia on March 24 with a concert that included a flute concerto by Mozart and works by Respighi and Shchedrin. The French pianist and conductor will return for one concert next season, but conducting duties will be divided among three other maestros: Gerard Schwarz, Alexander Platt and James Judd. … [Read more...]