By Dale King Louis Tyrrell is going back to school -- literally. The founding artistic director of the former Florida Stage in Manalapan who went on to create the Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach following the previous venue’s 2011 bankruptcy, is launching a new educational initiative. Six months after resigning from his Theatre at Arts Garage post last March, Tyrrell … [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...]
Miami Summer Music Festival bounces back from no-show with high spirits, strong Mahler
The opening concert of the second-ever season of the Miami Summer Music Festival opened in good news-bad news fashion, with the worst intelligence coming at the very start: No Deborah Voigt. The celebrated soprano, who was to open the season Saturday night at Barry University’s Shepard Broad Performing Arts Center, begged off, citing stomach flu and promising to appear for … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 11-12
Music: Here’s a good sign that summers are more active than ever in South Florida. On Saturday night, no less a musical eminence than Deborah Voigt will kick off the second annual Miami Summer Music Festival, singing with the MSMF Orchestra led by festival founder Michael Rossi at Barry University’s Shepard Broad Performing Arts Center. Voigt will sing music by Richard Strauss … [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...]
Mainly Mozart Festival launches 22nd season splendidly
It is a maxim of South Florida life that when it begins to rain, all residents are commanded to forget everything they ever knew about driving in it. And so Saturday afternoon as I made my way south to Gusman Hall at the University of Miami, a rainstorm in Broward County caused me to spend an hour making my way down a bumper-to-bumper interstate as hapless auto pilots around … [Read more...]
Flagler features art of an enigma-less master
In true dramatic fashion, he went from being the trendy artist everyone desperately copied to being something like the universal symbol for what to avoid. What else is new? The fame, popularity and recognition enjoyed by French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau in the 19th century no doubt landed him in the history books. When else have America and Europe been on … [Read more...]