Theater: Opening on Tuesday evening at West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center is that great folk opera, Porgy and Bess, reclaimed from elitist opera houses and reconceived as a Broadway-scale musical by director Diane Paulus, who has owned the Best Revival Tony Award for the past three seasons (Hair, Porgy, Pippin). In this case, the DuBose Heyward script has been shaken up by … [Read more...]
A new, exciting chapter opens for Master Chorale
Something very important happened here last week for the classical music scene in South Florida: One of its performing organizations came into its own. The Master Chorale of South Florida, which rose out of the remains of the Florida Philharmonic some 10 years ago, has presented some fine programs over that time and enjoyed regular gigs backing Italian poperatic singer Andrea … [Read more...]
Vänskä, Perianes astonish at New World
By Lawrence Budmen The New World Symphony’s concert on Saturday evening at Frank Gehry’s stunning New World Center looked fairly conventional on paper. The standard repertoire pairing of a Chopin concerto and Sibelius symphony hardly seemed daring or innovative, unlike the Miami Beach-based orchestral academy’s more adventurous programming; yet the combination of the … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Nov. 1-3
Theater: For more than 25 years, Lou Tyrrell has been producing new work by emerging young playwrights, but I cannot remember him being as excited over a relatively unknown talent like he is about composer-lyricist Daniel Maté. He is so excited that he has devoted two of the slots in The Theatre at Arts Garage’s season to shows by Maté — a song cycle on contemporary … [Read more...]
2013-14 arts preview: The season in classical music
The 2013-14 classical season offers its usual overstuffed bounty for South Floridians, and this time there is a continuation of the new energy and innovation we saw last season, with a good deal of stress on new composition, orchestras widening their reach, and some of the leading performers of the newest generation making their area debuts. Here is a look, by genre, at the … [Read more...]
Opera on the Road: An astonishing rarity at Bard Summerscape
Forget Kirov, forget Bolshoi: We may one day have our own Russian opera company in New York state. Bard Summerscape, now in its 10th year delivered a magnificent performance of Sergey Taneyev’s Oresteia, premiered in 1895, which I saw on Aug. 4. The Annandale-on-Hudson festival is fast becoming a rival to Wagner’s Bayreuth as the place to be. Production values are very … [Read more...]
New music, Baroque concerto best fits for Milanese ensemble
A small string orchestra is well-suited for music of the Baroque, and indeed, there have been a number of such groups, full of young, eager players, founded in the past decade or so. Such a one is I Musici Estensi, established in Milan in 2004, and it’s known not just for its Baroque performances, but music of many other eras. Saturday night, the group was joined at the Crest … [Read more...]
New Miami chamber music group makes an important debut
It could be that the audience at the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall on Sunday afternoon was witness to the birth of a musical organization that will take South Florida into the kind of direction only the New World Symphony has gone heretofore. And it may be too early to tell. But the event, ostensibly the closing day of the 20th Mainly Mozart Festival, inaugurated a concert … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 8: ‘The Memory Show’
Most theatergoers recoiled when they heard that someone had written a musical about a woman with bipolar disorder, but Next to Normal won the Pulitzer Prize and ran almost two years on Broadway, spawning regional productions all over the country. Now the idea of such a show seems, well, almost normal. Still, are audiences ready for a musical about a woman facing the brick wall … [Read more...]
Postcard from New York No. 7: ‘Assembled Parties,’ ‘Pippin’
My time in New York is coming to a close, but fortunately I saw two first-rate shows today that have Tony Award written all over them. The likely winner for Best Play is The Assembled Parties by Richard Greenberg (previously best-known for Take Me Out), who stubbed his toe earlier this season with the short-lived new adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Assembled Parties, by … [Read more...]