Fuse News: Arts and Culture Tips — What Will Light Your Fire This Week

Praça do Papa, Belo Horizonte

Praça do Papa, Belo Horizonte.
Photo by Marina Campos Vinhal.

Updated with new theater and classical music recommendations.

Arts Fuse critics select some of the most promising in music, theater, and film for the coming week. A new feature!

By The Arts Fuse Staff.

Jazz

A trio of successive concerts of Brazilian jazz highlight the coming week.

“Minas and More” with drummer Bertram Lehmann and friends.
June 13, 8:15 p.m.
Berklee Performance Center, Boston, MA

Brazil’s landlocked state of Minas Gerais doesn’t get as much attention as the more celebrated musical centers of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia, but the distinctive and distinguished body of music created by the Clube da Esquina (“street corner club”)—especially that of vocalists Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges and guitarist Toninho Horta—is extraordinary, figuratively evoking the name of the state’s capital, Belo Horizonte (literally, “beautiful horizon”). Lehmann has drawn together a diverse group of musicians (including, in various combinations, vocalist Regina Benedetti, flutist/saxophonist Paul Lieberman, saxophonist Tucker Antell, pianist Maxim Lubarsky, bassist/vocalist Ebinho Cardoso, and bassist Jesse Williams) to pay tribute to this great musical legacy.

Fernando Brandão at the Berklee Performance Center

Fernando Brandão at Berklee, 2008.
Photo by Sergio Brandão.

Flutist Fernando Brandão and his sextet
June 14, 9 p.m.
Acton Jazz Cafe, Acton, MA

If you missed the recent Beehive, Ryles, and Lily Pad performances by the Fernando Brandão Sextet (or even if you didn’t), it’s worth the trip to Acton to hear this top-flight ensemble (with trumpeter Phil Grenadier, reedman Rick DiMuzio, pianist Tim Ray, bassist Fernando Huergo, and drummer Kaz Odagiri) in performance. Striking Brandão originals mingle with arrangements of songs by Caetano Veloso, Dorival Caymmi, Gilberto Gil, João Donato, Edu Lobo, and Tom Jobim.

Drummer Guillermo Nojechowicz and El Eco (vocalist Kim Nazarian, saxophonist Marco Pignataro and bassist Fernando Huergo) with special guest pianist Osmany Paredes
June 15, 9 p.m.
Ryles, Cambridge, MA

El Eco draws inspiration from Nojechowicz’s native Argentina and neighboring Brazil and Uruguay as well as Afro-Cuban traditions. The accent on the latter will be strong thanks to the presence of the formidable Paredes (from Santa Clara, Cuba).

— J. R. Carroll


Classical Music

Calder Quartet
Photo by Autumn de Wilde

Calder Quartet
Presented by Rockport Music
June 20, 8 p.m.
Shalin Liu Performance Center, Rockport, MA

The Calder is one of the most exciting quartets on the scene today. They bring two programs to the Rockport Chamber Music Festival this year, and the first is the more enticing of the two: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Homunculus, Bartók’s extraordinary String Quartet no. 5, and Ravel’s luminous Quartet in F.

— Jonathan Blumhofer

Boston GuitarFest VIII: British Invasion
June 19-23 (see schedule for dates and times of concerts and educational events)
New England Conservatory, Boston, MA

If you like guitar music, this is absolutely the place to go this week.

Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP)
June 16-22 (see schedule for dates and times of concerts)
New England Conservatory, Boston, MA

Most concerts are free and take place in NEC’s Jordan Hall.

— Susan Miron


Film

An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty

An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty

An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty
June 14-16
Brattle Theatre, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA

Terence Nance’s imaginative debut feature documents the relationship, teetering on the divide between platonic and romantic, between the director and a lovely young woman. It uses live action and various styles of animation to explore the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind during a singular moment in time. Nance will be present for the June 15th screening.

The Kid

Charlie Chaplin in The Kid

The Kid
June 16, 1 p.m.
Somerville Theatre, Davis Square, Somerville, MA

This Charlie Chaplin classic will be shown in 35mm along with selected short subjects. Jeff Rapsis, composer and scholar of silent film is now a permanent feature of the series with his live organ accompaniment. The Kid features Edna Purviance and child actor Jackie Coogan (whose long career included Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series). This masterpiece was Chaplin’s first self-produced and -directed feature film.

Peter Sarsgaard and Amanda Seyfried in Lovelace

Amanda Seyfried as Linda Lovelace and Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck Traynor

Provincetown International Film Festival
June 19 – 23
Provincetown, MA

The five-day festival presents a wide array of American and international narrative features, documentaries, and short films and makes a particular point to honor and preserve Provincetown’s rich and diverse history as an arts colony, Portuguese fishing village, and gay and lesbian mecca—while never forgetting the area’s original Native American inhabitants. Special programs include “Youth and Diversity” and Portuguese film sidebars, retrospective and archival programs, and breakfast panel discussions. Important to the festival is its “Filmmaker on the Edge Award,” this year honoring Harmony Korine, the iconoclastic director of this year’s controversial Spring Breakers, as well as films such as Gummo and Trash Humpers. John Waters is a ubiquitous presence at the festival. This year’s opening film is Lovelace starring Amanda Seyfried as Linda and Peter Sarsgaard as her hustler husband/agent Chuck Traynor. See schedule link for details.

— Tim Jackson


Local Rock

Three Day Threshold

Three Day Threshold

Three Day Threshold, Vary Lumar, Secret Lover
June 13
Radio (upstairs), Union Square, Somerville, MA

This week Radio hosts Three Day Threshold, and tickets are just $7. Self-described as “good country gone terrible bad,” the band will be playing dates with Old Crow Medicine Show and the Avett Brothers this summer. Catch them at this small local venue before they get huge; they’re due.

— Kathleen Burke


Theater

With God as his audience — Colin Hamell in “Jimmy Titanic.” Photo: Michael and Suz Karchmer

Jimmy Titanic
The New Repertory Theatre presents Tir Na’s Boston premiere staging in the Black Box Theater, Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA, June 19 through 30.

Collin Hamell plays “nearly two dozen characters” in a dramatic homage to the 100th anniversary of the end of the Titanic. This “comedic drama takes place in heaven, exploring the lost dreams of immigrants looking for a new life, fleeing oppression, poverty, or the law-or just looking for a fresh start.” Not sure about dramatist Bernard McMullan setting the play’s action in or around The Pearly Gates, but director Carmel O’Reilly is sure to bring plenty of theatrical smarts to this one-man extravaganza.

House & Garden by Alan Ayckbourn.
Presented by Trinity Repertory Company
In repertory through June 30
House at the Chace Theater and Garden in the Dowling Theater, Providence, Rhode Island

In 2000, Alan Ayckbourn took theatrical ingenuity to the point of thespian physical breakdown. House & Garden is a sadistic contraption made up of two plays that take place on different stages at the same time, a set-up that demands that cast members (who are appearing in both plays) run from space to space. I saw the New York premiere production: the scripts contain a heaping helping of the dramatist’s absurdist suburban patter, the amusing death rattles of a string of unhappy marriages and affairs gone rotten as a party progresses to its inevitable meltdown. A perfect handoff to summer theater . . .

— Bill Marx

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