This week, Seraphic Fire heads to the Northeast for concerts in Washington, New York and Philadelphia, joined by the period orchestra The Sebastians, and the choir no doubt wants to give the best impression it can. If Saturday night’s concert at Miami Shores Presbyterian Church represents the quality of its calling card, audiences there will be delighted. For sheer technical … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in classical music
The classical music season for 2015-16 will be its usual overstuffed self, especially if you’re keen to travel outside Palm Beach County. Inside the county, things incline to the tried and true, but further south, they’re edgier. Nevertheless, it’s a rich and bountiful season, and the first three months of the new year will present concertgoers with a huge menu of possible … [Read more...]
Arts preview 2015-16: The season in dance
By Tara Mitton Catao With new works to be seen and an emphasis on creativity, there is a lot to look forward to in the upcoming season. The dance series presented at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts and The Duncan Theatre as well as Miami City Ballet’s 2015/16 season are looking rich as they run the gamut from enormous, new production ballets to intimate, black-box … [Read more...]
PBCMF Concert 3: French flavors and a rare clarinet quintet
There is something about French musical culture that inclines it toward woodwinds — perhaps because of the sound of French language — and when it comes to the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, French music has played a powerful role in its 24 season of concerts. Two French rarities were featured Saturday night at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens during the … [Read more...]
PBCMF Concert 2: Surprising Dubois, a touching tribute, elegant Brahms
Grab-bags of eclectic programming, a hallmark of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival since its inception 24 seasons ago, are always interesting in themselves, though in many cases the disparate works don’t necessarily hang together as an entity. But the second concert in its four-concert weekly series, presented last weekend at the Crest Theatre in downtown Delray Beach, had … [Read more...]
Sol Theatre brings spirit of Dickens to Boca with ‘Edwin Drood’
Palm Beach Arts Paper Staff What happened to Edwin Drood? Has he disappeared? Been murdered by his uncle? Traipsed off to Egypt to pursue his studies? Or even gone incognito? Such is the plot of the Sol Children Theatre production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a play written by Rupert Holmes based on Charles Dickens’s last, unfinished novel. The answer will be up to the … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Consul’ revives worthy 20th-century work expertly
Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul was a Broadway sensation in 1950, but in the decades since it’s dropped below the operatic radar. The current production by Florida Grand Opera of this Cold War work is as good an argument as can be made that the opera deserves to be restored to the mainstream, if not so much for the greatness of its score as its sheer effectiveness as theater. … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, Piffaro offer absorbing evening of’ ‘Vespers’
The merging of a Renaissance wind band with 21st-century American choral music is an idea that may sound odd on the surface, but composer Kile Smith showed it could work, and work beautifully, when he composed his Vespers in 2007. The original-instrument band that commissioned the work, Philadelphia-based Piffaro, joined Patrick Dupré Quigley and his Seraphic Fire concert … [Read more...]
The ageless Everglades, old and new, at the Norton
No landscape carries the beauty and the beast within it better than the Florida Everglades. More than 200 images capturing its changing habitants and moods compose an ongoing exhibition titled Imaging Eden: Photographers Discover the Everglades. I know what you are thinking. Shouldn’t this read Imagining Eden? No. The photography exhibit organized by the Norton Museum has … [Read more...]
FGO takes on Menotti’s ‘Consul’ to close season
Victoria Livengood first discovered the power of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera The Consul as an 18-year-old student at the University of North Carolina. Having received a full vocal scholarship after auditioning for the choir to fill an hour elective in what was supposed to be a pre-law curriculum, she came home to Thomasville one weekend to show her parents the first song she’d … [Read more...]