This evening, Adam Bakri and Leem Lubany will be attending the 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony, a dream come true for two fledgling actors from Palestine. A week earlier, they were in South Florida, on the promotion trail for Omar, the movie they star in, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. “I used to stay up to 7 a.m. until the final awards were given out,” recalls … [Read more...]
Festival Boca preview: Perlman collaborator looks to chamber music for ‘Eternal Echoes’
It’s a 1950s Saturday in Tel Aviv, in the fledgling state of Israel, and the radio’s playing cantorial music, as it always does on Saturdays. It’s music that sticks with one person in particular, a young, prodigiously talented young violinist who will soon make his mark in the world as a teenage phenomenon. But through all the decades and accolades that followed, Itzhak … [Read more...]
‘The Wind Rises’ an astonishing swan song
The Wind Rises, the self-professed final film from Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), is as visually masterful as ever. It’s filmed in his preferred, largely hand-drawn and 2D style, with deep attention paid to the flickers of light and the accuracy of shadows, to the right amount of ash and flames swirling above an earthquake-stricken city and to the … [Read more...]
Violinist Lee gives Rinker audience Szymanowski, Ives to remember
The classical music world these days is replete with fine young female violinists, and one of the most promising ones I’ve heard visited the Rinker Playhouse on Feb. 17. Kristin Lee, a South Korea-born American of just 27 years who is a protégé of Itzhak Perlman, appeared in the Kravis Center’s Young Artists series, accompanied by the splendid pianist Kwan Yi. She chose a … [Read more...]
At Studio 18, a look at the secrets we keep, and don’t
By Colleen Dougher A Plexiglas house designed to hold secrets, a self-portrait based on a 30-year-old photograph, a powerful 20-chair installation, big drawings comprised of handwritten fears, insecurities and affirmations and a found mannequin with a hidden but beautiful world inside. These are among the treasures that can be found when Which Way Out: Personal Thoughts … [Read more...]
Violinist Kutik, conductor Cooper impressive at Symphonia
The young Russian-American violinist Yevgeny Kutik was the able soloist Feb. 9 in a concert by The Symphonia Boca Raton, under the guest baton of West Virginia Symphony Orchestra director Grant Cooper. Kutik was the soloist in a work violinists know better than audiences do: the Concerto No. 22 (in A minor) of the Italian violinist and opera conductor Giovanni Battista Viotti … [Read more...]
Sundays: The normalizing power of the Xtreme
By Myles Ludwig These are the Xtreme Olympics. Xtreme in every way. The Xtremes of joy, passion and inspiration. The Xtremes of disappointment, but also of dignity. I think that spirit has been brought to the Winter Games by the young men and women who’ve made their mark in what has come to be called — and not only in the United States — as Xtreme sports. These eccentric … [Read more...]
Cleveland Orchestra brilliant in Debussy, Strauss, ‘Rite’
By Donald Waxman On the weekend of Jan. 31, the Cleveland Orchestra gave its second pair of concerts in its current winter stint as the resident orchestra of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. This was its eighth year in a residency that has become the highlight of the South Florida concert season. The orchestra’s musical director and permanent … [Read more...]
At Lynn, the sound of an orchestra transformed
Someone over at the Lynn Conservatory of Music got the memo. After three very middling concerts in which the student orchestra at Lynn University’s music school sounded haphazard, unfocused, and in its brass section, something shy of competent, the orchestra turned it all around Feb. 8 and gave a rousing performance of three well-known orchestral virtuoso pieces. Not … [Read more...]
The fever for modernity: Italian Futurists, at Boca Museum
We wish our world would slow down, unplug, take a breather, but to a group of Italian artists, this world would have been paradise with no sound more soothing than incoming text messages, microwaves and alarms. Known as Futurists, these artists emerging before and during World War I wished to delete the obsolete past and fast-forward their country into modernity. To do so, … [Read more...]