Members of the Palm Beach Chamber Festival. If you’re seeking from relief from the summer heat in a cool Sunday afternoon concert of music from woodwinds and strings, check out the front row of the balcony at the Crest Theatre in Delray Beach this July. That’s where you’ll find Anton Bernath, who’s been coming to the concerts of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival since it … [Read more...]
Radiant Brahms stands out at Mainly Mozart
Moran Katz. CORAL GABLES —The Carnegie Hall chamber music collective known as Decoda has developed a continuing relationship with the Mainly Mozart Festival, and on Sunday, two of the group’s members joined festival director Marina Radiushina for a strong program of works featuring the clarinet and cello. On hand for the last concert before the festival’s finale Friday night … [Read more...]
‘Popstar’ gives pop music deflation it deserves
Andy Samberg in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. To paraphrase The Clash, phony Biebermania has bitten the dust. In the cheeky mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Andy Samberg’s Conner Friel, AKA Conner-4-Real, imagines an older, unwiser Bieber — one liberated from adolescent demographics if not behavior, extravagantly tatted and gold-chained, monumentally … [Read more...]
Chafin Music: The little music store that could celebrates 60 years
The staff at Chafin Musicenter; Sue and Jeff Chafin are second and third from left. (Photo by Bill Meredith) Much of the first half of the 60-year life span of Chafin Musicenter (www.chafinmusic.com) in Lake Worth was spent on the 900 block of Lake Avenue, just west of U.S. 1. But when owner Paul Chafin found a larger site — a defunct feed store on North Dixie Highway — in … [Read more...]
Frontwave new music festival opens; Oliveira inaugurates competition
WEST PALM BEACH —Palm Beach Atlantic University’s biennial concert series of new music, the Frontwave Festival, begins tonight at the college in West Palm Beach and runs through Saturday. The special guest for the festival is composer John Fitz Rogers, who teaches composition at the University of South Carolina. He holds degrees from Oberlin, Cornell and the Yale School of … [Read more...]
Varied modernist program engages at Seraphic Fire
By Robert Croan A Single Rose: Modernism in the Americas was the arbitrary title of Serapic Fire’s March concerts, offered in several South Florida venues March 9-16 (seen in Fort Lauderdale’s All Saints Episcopal Church, March 12), but neither roses nor musical modernism were at the core of the program. The rose metaphor comes from a poem by Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke … [Read more...]
Pop and Jazz Happenings, February 2016: Pianist Keller finds rewards in jazz, teaching
Brad Keller. (Photo by Bill Meredith) There may not be a better Palm Beach County-based jazz instrumentalist than pianist Delray Beach resident Brad Keller, but he certainly played the field musically beforehand. “I started as a vocal major in college,” he says. “I was going to be an opera singer until we all found out I wasn’t good enough. So I studied piano at Broward … [Read more...]
Chamber Music Society adds three-concert series at Eissey
For three seasons now, the Mar-a-Lago Club has been home to more than a presidential candidate’s ambitions. The Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, which debuted in November 2013 in a 193-seat room at Donald Trump’s island mansion, has welcomed an impressive series of musicians to its series, many of them rising stars of the classical music world such as guitarist Miloš … [Read more...]
Comfort ye: A calendar of holiday music and dance for December
One minute it’s Thanksgiving, and the next, you’re stocking up on champagne to welcome the new year. The holidays go by in an instant, but we all try to steal a little time for the ceremony of the season, for its sounds, sights, aromas and traditions. Finding that time is difficult, especially with the growth in the past few years of South Florida’s arts season, which has … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 19-21
Theater: Twenty years ago, Miami’s City Theatre began an annual festival of one-act plays, roughly 10 minutes in length. Over time, Summer Shorts has grown into one of the region’s most anticipated stage institutions. This year’s edition seems purposely downsized – only nine plays, performed by a versatile cast of six – but for once there is not a clunker in the bunch, either … [Read more...]