Featured
Five strong contenders: production values are high, the actors excellent, and four are beautifully grounded in their settings –- Norway, Calcutta, and two in Ireland.
In light of the many translations of Cyprian Norwid’s verse into English, Danuta Borchardt thought carefully about what she was going to focus on.
The recording was made in December 2010 in San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, and reveals an orchestra fully at home in John Adams’ distinctive idiom.
Perhaps most remarkably, BSO conductor Stéphane Denève managed to create an atmosphere in which the Symphony Hall audience, which at this time of year sometimes sounds like it’s made up of inpatients from a tuberculosis ward, was utterly captivated: even the quietest moments were accompanied by a welcomed, attentive silence.
“The Artist” works on two levels: the audience in the film and the audience watching the film are entertained by the same things. And it’s that simplicity – the era when silent movies were all they had and it was good enough – is the real protagonist.
A staged reading of an illuminating play by Motti Lerner about the devastating impact of war on men and women in Israeli society.
Some fiction can, literally, have the smell of too much research. And so, although I admire the ambition and scope of Audrey Schulman’s new novel, “Three Weeks in December,” I also feel that she made things harder for herself than she needed to.
From James P. Johnson to Thelonious Monk to Jason Moran, inspired mentors carry the past into the future.
To judge from the all-around energetic playing of the BSO, it seems conductor Jaap van Zweden has struck a good rapport with the players and I, for one, look forward to hearing more from him in coming seasons.
Art with a capital A has been put on such a pedestal that Craft with a capital C has been downgraded to a shabby or rustic sort of activity of which the practitioner should be a little ashamed. ’Tain’t so.
Recent Comments