In some respects, area classical music activity has begun to divide more sharply into concerts that echo the middlebrow past, and others that are working out on the borderlands of the nervy future. This season, there will be plenty of new music, as well as a healthy helping of contemporary music to enliven the programs of standard canonic repertoire. In addition, the season … [Read more...]
Sundays: Past lives, luminous memories
By Myles Ludwig There are times in every writer’s life when he can only write about himself. Philosophy becomes personal. The strictures of fiction, the narrative structure, the plot all seem improbable, and one can no longer feel comfortable creating a landscape into which armies of characters are moved around like tin soldiers on the counterpane of youth. Disguise fails. … [Read more...]
Sundays: My naughty madeleine, on the auction block
By Myles Ludwig Yesterday’s auction of ephemera from Studio 54 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions on Bunker Road was a Proustian picture of my past refracted through a disco mirror ball. I walked into the auction house and was immediately confronted with a rogue’s gallery of black-and-white happy-snaps of ghosts fixed to the wall. There was a laughing ex-girlfriend who had … [Read more...]
Focus on past stands out in film’s 10 best of 2011
Leave it to someone’s doctoral thesis to explain why this year at the movies there are two films that look back on the early days of the art form (The Artist, Hugo) and so many others also focused on the past, from biographies of Marilyn Monroe (My Week with Marilyn), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (J. Edgar) and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in pop: Classic rockers in short supply for energetic season ahead
The 2011-2012 concert season in South Florida could conceivably signal that classic rock is dead as we once knew it. Unlike the past two seasons, which collectively featured ’60s- and ’70s-launched brand names like the Allman Brothers Band, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, Roger Waters, Rush, and Earth, Wind & Fire, the next eight months look comparatively … [Read more...]
Concerts in brief: Rare Taneyev, lively Mahler
Editor’s note: Here are three brief reviews from local concerts over the past weeks. Amernet Quartet (Oct. 24, Josephine Leiser Center, Fort Lauderdale) The Russian composer Sergei Taneyev has been largely overlooked in the United States, but he had much to offer, and in the first concert of the Chameleon Musicians chamber music series, listeners had a rare chance to hear … [Read more...]
For Adami, everything is allegory
They may look like comic book art, but there is a perturbing sadness to the world that Valerio Adami creates in his large-scale paintings, 23 of which are currently on view until Jan. 9 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in a retrospective exhibit that spans four decades of the Italian artist’s work. The exhibit is merely a glimpse into Adami’s vast oeuvre, which has been shaped … [Read more...]