Herb Alpert and Lani Hall. By Dale King Herb Alpert’s still got it. At age 80 — 81 as of March 31 — Herb Alpert, the legendary master of trumpet, has been a performer, composer, arranger, songwriter, singer, record producer, record executive, record company co-founder, painter and sculptor. But the audience that took up nearly every seat at the Mizner Park Amphitheater in … [Read more...]
PB Symphony takes its place with the majors in Benjamin Hall
Like a top-league soccer coach, Ramón Tebar has gotten his team to World Cup level. The Palm Beach Symphony, playing Jan. 27 at the new auditorium of Benjamin High School in Palm Beach Gardens, sounded like a major orchestra from Europe or the Americas. In my time covering this ensemble, Tebar has taken it from a refined chamber music ensemble of 35 players to a well-crafted … [Read more...]
Community dance: A brace of Nutcrackers
As aficionados are happy to point out, The Nutcracker is a most unusual classical ballet in that it doesn’t really have a central character. What it does have is a first half in which mime is crucial to telling the story, and a collection of widely varied dances for the second. It’s a strange story, too, drawn from a tale by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, and no … [Read more...]
The View From Home 34: New DVD releases, Jan. 10-31
As Brian De Palma and Stanley Donen understand all too well, there can come a time in every reverential filmmaker’s oeuvre when loving homage devolves into shameless mimicry. For these aforementioned filmmakers, features such as Dressed to Kill and Charade followed various Hitchcock blueprints so faithfully that the directors’ own voices risked being swallowed in a quicksand … [Read more...]