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Folk Concert Review: Newport Folk Festival 2012

August 9, 2012
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I’m sure organizers are not losing a lot of sleep over controversies about the definition of “folk” music since festivals are selling out.

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CD Review: Tanglewood 75th Anniversary Celebration, Live and Uncensored, Part One

August 9, 2012
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Here is Tanglewood live and uncensored, as it were, with music often thrillingly brought to life by some of the hallowed legends of the BSO’s storied past: Koussevitzky, Monteux, Munch, Leinsdorf, Ozawa, Bernstein, Previn -— the list goes on and on.

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Theater Review: Dumbing Down “A Month in the Country”

August 8, 2012
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A 19th-century Russian masterpiece presented in a translation and a production whose mishmash of style distorts the play and confuses both actors and audiences.

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Short Fuse Commentary: Josiah McElheny and CERN — Researching the Possibilities

August 8, 2012
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Art and science rebuffed each other in this show. Visitors are unlikely to leave with either a greater understanding of cosmology or of Josiah McElheny’s art.

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Movie Review: Through the Eyes of Children

August 7, 2012
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Two superb new films, “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” revolve around children and the power of love.

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Book Feature: Authors Bernhard Schlink and Joyce Hackett on the Craft of Writing and Writing About the Past

August 7, 2012
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Sponsored by the Harvard Writing Program and the Harvard Summer School, the event was introduced, perhaps humorously, to the audience as a “meeting of German–American relations.” In reality, it was a more of a showcase in differences about each country’s historical imagination.

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Book Review: Restraint Dampens “The Dream of the Celt”

August 6, 2012
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“The Dream of the Celt” succeeds at educating its readers about the worlds in which Sir Roger Casement lived his successive lives, but not about his successive personalities.

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Concert Review: New Wave Ukulele

August 6, 2012
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Greg Hawkes and his trio are proof that in the right hands, with the right material, an evening of ukulele is a marvelous showcase for the pure beauty of great songwriting and the virtuosic ability to wring exquisite chords and blissful harmonics from four strings on a stubby fretboard.

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Fuse Book Review: Too Square to “Bounce”

August 6, 2012
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Instead of painting the vibrant and colorful scene which is New Orleans, author Matt Miller supplies dry exposition about each event via a blow-by-blow chronological time line.

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Theater Review: A “Coriolanus” Cut Down to Size on the Boston Common

August 4, 2012
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Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” deals with the difficultly of recognizing superiority at a time of radical social breakdown, specifically when it is democracy that is in extremis.

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