Catch a Rising Star, the iconic New York City comedy club that gave rise to such household names such as Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Rosie O’Donnell and Chris Rock, has opened in two venues at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts. With its Twitter hashtag #RTL (Ready to Laugh), the center’s vintage gymnasium hopes to reach out to younger audiences, those … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire presents fine feast of contemporary American music
It’s heartening to hear the evidence of the continued good work being done in new American art music composition, much of it by composers just barely out of their studies, presented on Reincarnations, a recording released earlier this month by Seraphic Fire. The Miami-based concert choir opened its 13th season of concerts with selections from that disc, plus two other works, … [Read more...]
23rd PB Chamber Fest wraps with fine Mendelssohn
For some reason, the string quartets of Felix Mendelssohn don’t have the currency on our chamber music stages that their quality deserves. But all six of them, as well as the separate pieces for string quartet, are marvelous works, and it was with one of these pieces that the 23rd iteration of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival wrapped up last weekend. It’s also worth … [Read more...]
Natacha Koblova: Multilingual Society founder helps them speak in tongues
A year in business has not given Natacha Koblova all the answers she would like to have, although she did learn another language. The Russian-born 39-year-old polyglot (more on this later) has been in this business of teaching languages for many years. Now she faces the ups and downs of owning an infant language school/business that mixes traditional and unconventional … [Read more...]
PB Opera wraps season with well-sung, entertaining ‘Hoffmann’
Opera’s long history means that today’s audiences are treated to entertainment conventions from several different eras, and when it gets into pre-Industrial Revolution territory, viewers generally have to make something of a leap to get to full enjoyment. But Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) was composed by Jacques Offenbach for a late 19th-century urban … [Read more...]
Norton’s ‘Industrial Sublime’ a poem of water, iron, stone and sky
If New Yorkers won’t come to New York, the city will come to them, in the form oil paintings, watercolors and oil pastels with impressionist, cubist and realist tones. A rich selection of works depicting the pros and cons of the booming city makes up Industrial Sublime, which opened March 20 at the Norton Museum. The gallery rooms are filled with cityscapes by famous and … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: March 7-9
Theater: Off-Broadway pioneer Israel Horovitz sets many of his plays in his adopted hometown of Gloucester, Mass., which is where the triangular tug-of-war, Fighting Over Beverley, takes place. But the story is more about cultural differences between England and the United States, as well as later-life love and liberation, than it is about the texture of the New England fishing … [Read more...]
Whimsical jewelry captivates at Norton’s Webb exhibit
A gypsy monkey, a turtle and twin frogs are having the time of their life, and not just because they are made of gold, rubies and diamonds. Framed by elegant green walls, these bejeweled animals are among 80 jewelry pieces enjoying a great deal of attention at the Norton Museum of Art. On view since January, David Webb: Society’s Jeweler is like an expensive Christmas … [Read more...]
PB Opera turns to the timeless magic of Rossini’s ‘Barber’
Scratch the surface of a typical Rossini scholar you happen to meet and he or she will tell you that the Italian composer’s greatest contribution to the art of opera was in his serious works. It was there, the scholar will say, in works such as Elisabetta, Semiramide, Tancredi, Otello and Guillaume Tell, that Gioachino Rossini blazed a path that would be followed to great … [Read more...]
In the news: PB Opera plans world premiere in 2015; changes at Boca Museum, Norton Gardens
For the first time in its 53-year history, Palm Beach Opera next season will present a world premiere of an American opera. Enemies, A Love Story, with music by Ben Moore and a libretto by Nahma Sandrow, and based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, was seen in abridged workshop form in the company’s One Opera in One Hour series last season. Set in New York in 1948, it … [Read more...]