Weekend arts picks: April 16-21

Art: In time for Earth Day, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens is opening an exhibit of works compiled from “recycled, reused and found objects.”

Executive Director Cynthia Palmieri selected artists who would be willing to consider the site’s unique location and its natural materials as well as the limitation that a historic home would have in installing larger works. The featured artists are Colette Anusewicz, Pamela Larkin Caruso, Lucy M. F. Keshavarz, Isolde Koester, Sherri Sabo, Elayna Toby Singer and Leora Klaymer Stewart.

Stewart, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant, created Network of Stoppages from cotton and linen threads, burned papyrus paper, copper- and gold-knitted wire and glass beads. The piece is 12 inches by 20 inches. “I combine different natural and manmade materials,” Stewart said, “repurposing them into landscape structures that evoke natural growth and change.”

Ecology Art at the Gardens runs through May 30 and opens with an artists’ reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday. The Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens is located at 253 Barcelona Road, just south of Okeechobee Blvd. Hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Entrance fees are $5. For information, call (561) 832-5328, or visit www.ansg.org.

Palm Beach State College’s 24th Annual Student Art Exhibition opened Tuesday at the Eissey Campus Art Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens. Students interested in ceramics, design fundamentals, 3D design, drawing, painting, photography and sculpture are exhibiting nearly 300 works of art for the show, which runs through May 7.

First-place awards went to Sena Brickwedel (ceramics), Chloe Gillispie (drawing), Stephen Williams (life drawing), Nichole Dikon, Gerth Warner and Ethan Samual (3-D design), Nicholas Cordes (two awards: color design and painting), Andy Logan (design fundamentals), Robert Herman (digital imagery), Jessica Miclentz (experimental photography), and Christopher Jones (photography).

Best in Show was awarded to Georgia Novotny for 1930 Vignette, a trio of a pillbox hat, gloves and a hand clutch realistically fashioned form ceramic stoneware with a shiny, patent-leather-like glaze. Cordes won awards for two of his paintings, both created in shades of red; one a very dramatic, uplighted self-portrait with his bloody hands gripping barbed wire and another a marvelously mottled series of abstract organic shapes on a receding landscape.

The art gallery at the college’s Eissey campus is located in the BB building, 3160 PGA Blvd., Palm Beach Gardens. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday. For more information, call Karla Walter at (561) 207-5015, or visit www.pbcc.edu – K. Deits

Theater: Having trouble keeping your mind on what you are watching onstage? Perhaps the solution is Distracted, Lisa Loomer’s dysfunctional comedy about attention deficit disorder, which is either a medical condition that is reaching epidemic proportions or a new label for an age-old problem of young, unfocussed minds. Whichever it is, audiences are likely to be drawn into the plight of a perplexed mother (Laura Turnbull) challenged by the behavioral and emotional woes of her 9-year-old son (Brian Inerfeld). Clive Cholerton directs the Caldwell Theatre production, which is anything but a disease-of-the-week play. Opening this weekend and playing through May 16. Call (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432 for tickets. — H. Erstein

Film: The commercial Hollywood fare this weekend is awfully conventional and conventionally disappointing, but Mos’Art Theatre in Lake Park and Emerging Cinemas in Lake Worth fill the void with a satisfying Danish film, Terribly Happy, a comic suspense tale about a cop from Copenhagen (Jakob Cedergren) who is transferred to a dinky town in the sticks where he finds fitting in difficult. Although written and directed by Henrik Ruben Genz, it has the feel of David Lynch crossed with the Coen Brothers. It drifts into territory of the old westerns at times, but is far quirkier than anything John Wayne would have been associated with. Take that as a compliment. Through Friday. — H. Erstein

Music: One of the most poignant documents in music history is a page by Mozart showing the Lacrymosa section of his Requiem (in D minor, K. 626). The music breaks off part of the way through after just getting underway, because it was at that point (probably late November of 1791) that Mozart took to his bed with the kidney failure that was soon to kill him. The Requiem, therefore, is an unfinished work, and was completed by Mozart’s friend Ignaz Sussmayer, but scholars have long debated how good that completion is.

Beginning tonight, the Master Chorale of South Florida wraps up its season with a performance of the Requiem as completed by the American Mozart scholar and pianist Robert Levin on a program with the early (K. 141) Te Deum, written when Mozart was 13. The Boca Raton Symphonia accompanies under the direction of Joshua Habermann.

Soloists are soprano Susan Williams, mezzo Misty Bermudez, tenor Tony Boutté, and bass Teppei Kono. The program will be heard three times: Tonight at 8 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Miami, at 8 p.m. Saturday at Boca Raton Community High School in Boca Raton, and at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Fort Lauderdale. Tickets for the Miami and Boca performances can be had for $30 by calling 954-418-6232 (they are $35 at the door) or visiting www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org. Tickets for the Broward performance are available by calling 954-462-0222 or visiting www.browardcenter.org.

This weekend marks the debut of a new South Florida string quartet, featuring a violinist who until recently was a member of the Delray String Quartet. The Fort Lauderdale String Quartet, which is made up of violinists Laszlo Pap and his wife, Claudia Cagnassone, violist Scott O’Donnell and cellist Christopher Glansdorp, will open its first concert with Beethoven: the Quartet No. 4 in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4, which the Delray played earlier this year when Pap was still with the group. The second half of the Fort Lauderdale foursome’s program will consist of excerpts from four other works: the finale of the Quartet No. 64 (in D, Op. 76, No. 5) of Haydn, the slow movement of the Quartet No. 22 (in B-flat, K. 589) of Mozart, the scherzo movement (Assez vif) of the lone quartet of Maurice Ravel, and the first two movements of the Divertimento No. 1 of the Hungarian composer Leo Weiner (1885-1960). The concert, which will be followed by another May 16, will take place at 5 p.m. Sunday in the PierTop room of the Hyatt Regency Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $25 for chairs, $35 for tables of four or six. For more information, call 954-545-0088.

Sunday also marks the final performance this season by the Delray Quartet, which will wrap its sixth season with two works: the String Quartet No. 1 (in D, Op. 11) of Tchaikovsky, and the String Quartet No. 2 (in A) of Juan Arriaga, perhaps the most promising composer to have been lost to the world by an early death. Arriaga, a Spaniard from the Basque country known as “the Spanish Mozart,” was 10 days shy of his 20th birthday when he died in Paris, probably of tuberculosis, in January 1826. In his very short career he managed to write three fine string quartets, an excellent symphony and an opera, among other pieces.

The quartet performed this program last weekend in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, and concludes at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach. Tickets for that show are $35. Call 213-4138 for more information, to make reservations, or buy tickets.

Finally, the Miami-based Amernet Quartet comes to the St. Paul’s series in Delray Beach with some music they performed last week in the season closer of the Chameleon Musicians series. That includes a fascinating arrangement of six preludes from the Op. 34 collection for piano by Dmitri Shostakovich, compiled by Yuri Vitenson, father of Amernet first violinist Misha Vitenson, and the final quartet of Antonin Dvořák, (No. 14 in A-flat, Op. 105). Also on the program are an early Haydn quartet (No. 14 in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2) and the Oracion del Torero of Joaquin Turina, a popular piece with quartets everywhere. Tickets for the 4 p.m. concert Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray Beach are $15-$18, $5 for students. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.