David Amado, director of the Delaware Symphony and the first of four conductors to be considered by the Atlantic Classical Orchestra as a successor to Stewart Robertson, led a concert Jan. 13 with the ACO whose quality was unsurpassable. The concert at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens opened with the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon, an opera … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 9-10
Film: You may remember Swedish director Jan Troell, who made two linked Oscar-nominated films, The Emigrants and The New Land, in the early ’70s. Now 83, he has crafted a stunning, downbeat, history-based film, The Last Sentence, but since the story it relates is Swedish history, it is likely to be unfamiliar to most American viewers. It focuses on a crusading newspaper … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 7-9
Theater: Little Shop of Horrors, Roger Corman’s 1960 low-budget sci-fi flick about a man-eating plant and a nebbish florist’s love for an abused Skid Row tootsie, must have seemed odd source material for Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (the songwriting team behind such Disney animated features as The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast), but they turned it into a … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 19-21
Art: As the summer winds down (though not heat-wise) and students return to the classroom, the Norton Museum offers a little exhibit put together by its five summer interns. Drawing from the museum’s own collections, the interns – who include college and high schools students – chose 16 European prints from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including works by Mary Cassatt and … [Read more...]
Review roundup: Confident ‘Creation,’ strong ‘Turandot,’ elegant Mozart
Here are capsule reviews of three recent classical music events: Master Chorale of South Florida (Nov. 20, Wold Center for the Performing Arts, Boca Raton) The Creation is one of Franz Joseph Haydn’s finest works, and even in the abridged version the Master Chorale of South Florida presented Saturday night, the beauty and vigor of this oratorio were well in evidence. … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Lucia’ has good lead, iffy concept
Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has reimagined this opera in a way that falls short of success, but fortunately it does have a soprano in the lead role whose singing is strong enough to carry the heavy lifting of the Mad Scene and much else besides. Eglise Gutiérrez, a Cuban-born soprano now resident in Philadelphia, has … [Read more...]
ArtsPreview 2009-10: The season in classical music
Some things will be absent or reduced in the upcoming classical music and opera season, but overall, the coming supply of concerts will be relatively robust, and well worth investigation. Here’s an overview of the season by genre – orchestral, solo, chamber and choral – with the proviso that this is a selective list and not a comprehensive one. Orchestras: Fans of … [Read more...]