With its simple harmony and elegant lines, much classic Asian art has been easy to digest but not to remember. This is its -- or rather, our -- struggle. And so it is with the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens’ current exhibit, Kyoto: A Place in Art. As soon as we leave the exhibit, we’re in fear of forgetting what we’ve seen. It doesn’t help that Kyoto: A Place in Art is … [Read more...]
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes silly, FGO’s ‘Carmen’ still bold, colorful
The Florida Grand Opera closed its 69th season Saturday night in Fort Lauderdale with a production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen that was sometimes brilliant, sometimes risible, but that also offered reliably good singing and enough dramatic punch to give it real entertainment value. In their bid to reinterpret this greatest of French operas, the Franco-Canadian team of André … [Read more...]
Delray Quartet closes 6th season in exemplary style
The Delray String Quartet that finished its sixth season this past weekend at the Colony Hotel in its namesake’s historic downtown is a foursome that has been playing together more frequently than its earlier iterations, thanks to its expanded three-county performance schedule. And the extra time together showed Sunday, with excellent performances of quartets by Arriaga and … [Read more...]
PBO’s ‘Carmen’ alive to characters’ humanity, theatrical savvy
It’s tough to bring something new to a work as well-known as Carmen, but the current Palm Beach Opera production of Georges Bizet’s classic, if not groundbreaking, fills out the opera’s promise with just plain good theater. On Friday night, a stellar lead and a strong supporting cast, plus smart, interesting directing choices made this production, the last in the company’s … [Read more...]
PB Opera cast, conductor see continued vitality in ‘Carmen’
The young Frenchman Jean-Luc Tingaud is the associate conductor at the venerable Opéra-Comique in Paris, the same theater (though not the same building) where the opera Carmen premiered in March of 1875. Three months later, Carmen’s composer, Georges Bizet, died of runaway strep throat at the tragically young age of 36. Tingaud says the theater still has the original … [Read more...]
Sarasota Opera’s ‘Giovanna’ revealed Verdi gem
The Sarasota Opera likes to say that no other company in the world will have completed a Verdi cycle – a complete survey of all the composer’s stage works -- when it comes to an end in 2013 on the 200th anniversary of Verdi’s birth. The company’s just-ended production of Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc) was the 29th opera in the cycle, and its boast of exclusivity is a strong … [Read more...]
Norton’s contemporary art deserves its own space
The Norton Museum has an expanding collection of contemporary art, and, like many museums that evolve and grow from their initial purpose, it does not have a permanent exhibit space for it. Although significant, it would be difficult to justify replacing any of Ralph and Elizabeth Norton’s original collection, or changing the focus of current gallery space, and the museum … [Read more...]
PB Opera’s bold, radical ‘Giovanni’ stumbles without statue
s Chekhov’s rule in theater was this: If you’ve got a gun on stage, you’re going to have to fire it at some point. By the same token, if you promise people a monster, you’re going to have to show it. But the Palm Beach Opera’s new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which opened Friday night at the Kravis Center, dispenses with the climactic theatrical device of the opera … [Read more...]
Flagler Museum’s tropics show intimate, inviting
A "Wow!" is heard in the first room of the Flagler Museum's second-floor gallery. It's uttered in response to Martin Johnson Heade's massive The Great Florida Sunset, one of the highlights of the Flagler's winter show, New World Eden: Artist-Explorers in the American Tropics, running now through April 18. It won't be the last. In the mid-19th century, the German explorer … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Lucia’ has good lead, iffy concept
Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has reimagined this opera in a way that falls short of success, but fortunately it does have a soprano in the lead role whose singing is strong enough to carry the heavy lifting of the Mad Scene and much else besides. Eglise Gutiérrez, a Cuban-born soprano now resident in Philadelphia, has … [Read more...]