Featured
By Helen Epstein Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich Symphony Hall Boston, MA Vasily Petrenko, conductor Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to…
By Caldwell Titcomb Three works by major composers made up the free concert presented by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble on October 10 at the Midway Studios in South Boston. On the podium was Eric Hewitt, who holds a bachelor’s in saxophone performance and a master’s in conducting – both from the New England Conservatory…
By Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
The governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.” Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95. Reviewed by Mark Nolan…
The Massachusetts State Sandwich? Fluffernutter as Icon? By Sally Steinberg No serious eater, no gourmet, no culture vulture, no thinking person, no person of discriminating taste, no one interested in nutrition could…… But wait! The Fluffernutter might just be one of the secret food grails, its own Umami, all by itself, an elusive, indescribable, uncategorizable,…
By Caldwell Titcomb Musica Viva, under its founding director Richard Pittman, kicked off its 41st season on September 25 with an all-American concert in the Tsai Performance Center. The organization is exclusively devoted to contemporary music – on this occasion extending from 1982 to the present.
Robert Siegel has an undeniable talent for capturing the desperation and despair of his downtrodden character, but the director never tells us why he is plumbing the lower depths of America’s mania for sports. Big Fan, directed by Robert Siegel, showing at Kendall Square Cinema. Reviewed by Justin Marble Like Robert Siegel’s first script, “The…
Actors From the London Stage (AFTLS) proves that when it comes to the Bard the minimal may be maximal. Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb Shakespeare’s challenging “King Lear” is the vehicle for this year’s fall tour of the troupe called Actors From the London Stage (AFTLS). This project was begun in 1975, and has been flourishing…
Recent Comments