Seraphic Fire wrapped its 11th season this past week with a new record release, a $12,500 NEA grant in hand to record the next one, and a concert of widely varied works that illustrated the range of its interests as well as the flexibility of its singers. Dubbed Cathedral Classics, the potpourri concert featured 18 short works, many of them suggested by an email campaign in … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, Renaissance jam band bring Ponce de Leon’s era alive
It takes a leap of empathy and a sizable amount of scholarship to take an audience back five centuries to a time too remote from our own to be entirely understandable, yet recognizably humanist in a way that we still emulate. That Seraphic Fire was able to do this with its program of late medieval and early Renaissance music from Spain – in honor of Juan Ponce de León’s … [Read more...]
At the symphony I: Lovely Mozart at Boca Symphonia
Philippe Entremont closed out his tenure as director of the Boca Raton Symphonia on March 24 with a concert that included a flute concerto by Mozart and works by Respighi and Shchedrin. The French pianist and conductor will return for one concert next season, but conducting duties will be divided among three other maestros: Gerard Schwarz, Alexander Platt and James Judd. … [Read more...]
Armory Art Center set to celebrate 25th anniversary
It’s not generally known that the Armory Art Center is what it is today — and celebrating its silver anniversary Saturday — thanks to the foresight and vision of the Flamingo Park neighborhood preservation committee, community organizers, and students and teachers from the former Norton Museum Gallery and School of Art. Back before the Kravis Center and the convention center … [Read more...]
PB Opera gives us a ‘Salome’ with a conscience
Richard Strauss’ Salome has earned its reputation for decadence not just because of its Oscar Wilde source, the time of its composition in the overripe-civilization years of the early 20th century, or its score, with its strange, unexpected sounds at every turn. It has also earned it because of the story itself, which ends in a parody of Wagnerian bliss, with a cruel but … [Read more...]
Arts calendar: March 1-April 4, 2013
(Note: Events are listed through April 4 and were current as of Feb. 18. Please check with the presenting agency for any changes. Ticket prices are single sales. Most of the presenting organizations offer subscription plans. Entries may be changed as the month proceeds for cancellations, corrections of errors, or addition of other events.) Art Exhibits Ann Norton Sculpture … [Read more...]
Armory combines art and the runway for fundraiser
A standing-room-only crowd navigated its way around the Armory Art Center last week for the Armory’s first-ever wearable art show and fundraiser ―Fashion ARTillery ― as part of the Armory’s 25-year anniversary celebration. Amid works by Dayron González, Omar Rodriguez Lavandero and New York and Palm Beach-based artist Serge Strosberg, the crowds came out Feb. 7 for a fashion … [Read more...]
PB Pops paying tribute to the king of all film composers
Few American composers of any description have enjoyed the fame of John Williams, and even fewer have had their music become so familiar to a worldwide audience. It’s likely that almost anyone you run into could sing the opening theme of Star Wars (1977), for example, or imitate the deep, chopping bass figure that accompanies the great white shark of Jaws (1975). His music is … [Read more...]
Leibovitz at the Norton: Scenes from the eye of a ‘reluctant director’
By Tom Tracy Leonardo DiCaprio is wearing a living swan around his neck, while Allen Ginsberg is caught tying his shoe in a grungy bathroom. And the Rev. Al Sharpton sits in a beauty salon with his hair up in curlers under a dryer. Yet the laid-back Annie Leibovitz, one of American popular culture’s leading portrait photographers for four decades, said she has never pushed … [Read more...]
PBO’s ‘Traviata’ has impressive Violetta, Germont
Today’s opera singers are expected to be persuasive actors, and that can be a challenge given the very short dramatic trajectories their characters must ride in the pages of most libretti. In the case of Violetta Valéry, the doomed heroine of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, sopranos have enough splendid music that if their acting is less than persuasive, they can still make a … [Read more...]