Jon Garelick
This might not be everybody’s idea of who Maria Callas was, but the film is plausible, and honest. You can watch Angelina Jolie’s Maria and think, so that’s what it was like to be her.
Most in the Berklee audience seemed satisfied with the chance to be in South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s presence, subdued perhaps, but still casting a magisterial aura.
In Godwin Louis’s music, prayer seems best expressed in dance.
If Fernando Huergo’s band of A-list Boston players sounded especially inspired, it was certainly in no small part due to what he was giving them to play.
Pianist Ran Blake’s performance was like a long dreamscape of personal reflection and meditation.
Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Lamb, with his spiritual imperative, is clearly seeking, and achieving, incantatory power.
Some at times sentimental observations of New Orleans’s “other” massive music confab, the French Quarter Festival.
Once again, here was the shock in Cécile McLorin Savant’s subversive conceptual daring.
A massive, comprehensive new box set once again shows us the diva’s indomitable place in the history of opera.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer eludes easy categorization, but Henry Threadgill’s new memoir — and his latest recording — take a step in defining his singular artistic personality.
Arts Commentary: These Goosesteps Don’t Lie — Shakira in El Salvador and the “New Security” Aesthetic