John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby gets its long-overdue Boston premiere, as does Jan Dismas Zelenka’s 1739 Missa Votiva. Handel’s Jephtha returns to the Handel and Haydn Society after a century and a half, and the Walden Chamber Players explore music from Cuba.
What is Harvard Square today but a shopping spree waiting to happen, a student lounge, a food court? What could a novel gain by being set in that venue?
May is in full bloom. Starting just this week there is the LGBT Festival, screenings of three silent classics with live accompaniment, the beginning of the Harvard New American Black Cinema Series, and two Boston Jewish Film Festival encores.
A two week stay in Paris, April 11 through 26, delivered the sights and sounds crooned about in the well-known songs.
Simultaneously storyteller and player, ancient character and modern respondent, Denis O’Hare’s performance of “An Iliad” elicits the kind of respect automatically granted this genre of demanding monologual performance.
The best rock biopics, like “24 Hour Party People,” “I’m Not There,” and “The Doors,” aren’t afraid to get a little weird, even if it means throwing verifiable facts to the wind.
Susanne M. Sklar’s study is the best exploration of William Blake’s miraculously bewildering masterpiece that I know of — thoughtful, scholarly, imaginative, and supremely sympathetic to the poet’s ornery complexity as well as his capacity to inspire wonder.
The best parts of this book of interviews come when Charles Mingus or his collaborators talk about the music.
The Boston Lyric Opera’s production of “The Flying Dutchman” may not the subtlest you will see — the Freudian elements are slathered on pretty thick — but the nervy dramatic concept adds to our understanding of the opera without compromising its core elements.
The time is short, but the opportunity rich via these two exhibitions, to bask in the military culture of old Japan, with all of its deadly splendor.
In the wake of the horrors of last week, Jazz Week 2013 comes as almost an act of defiance, an insistence that life will go on in all sectors of the Boston community.
Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.
In my experience, few leave an Evgeny Kissin concert disappointed.
In a modest tweak of Dorothy Fields’ lyrics to the famous Jerome Kern song, this weekend will be Boston’s chance, via the Design Museum Boston, to sit yourself down, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
I was curious to see how the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent events would filter into the fest. It began with my Facebook newsfeed displaying “Going to Worcester to blow off steam”-type messages.
According to our docile mainstream media, Boston enjoys a perpetual Renaissance — the merchandise in the cultural window is always worth buying. And that predictability makes for very boring journalism.
If I suffered half as much from the thought that most art has been lost as I suffer every day from the recollection of departed family and friends, I would be in a mental hospital. In this sense, I found myself resisting the message of “The Melancholy Art,” to the point that I felt that the book was laying a guilt trip on me.