Music
Chameleon Arts Ensemble’s programming, the brainchild of its director and flutist Deborah Boldin, aims to place pieces together that have interesting things in common musically and culturally.
If you find classical music to be a vibrant, living thing in which inventive pairings and convincing realizations of music of the distant and recent past can speak in fresh and vital ways to the present, Jeremy Denk is your man and this is your CD.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is a piece the BSO trots out with greater regularity of late than most orchestras (as Tanglewood aficionados are aware, it’s been the traditional summer closer each August for about a decade now) and, while such familiarity may not exactly breed complacency, it certainly runs the risk of so doing.
Swarms in the train station! Improv in the library! Video game hits and poetry! Must be Jazz Week–and there’s plenty more, including a major CD release by Argentinian bassist Fernando Huergo paying tribute to the land of the Albiceleste.
Don’t expect a standard musical. Think of Fela! as an immersive, artsy, concert experience featuring virtuoso displays of dance and musicianship.
Directed ably by Joel Zwick, a long-time collaborator of Hershey Felder’s, the excellent Maestro: Leonard Bernstein includes the performer singing, playing the piano, and conducting as well as telling stories.
Jazz songs by composer John Harbison? An ensemble devoted to the music of Björk? A quartet taking over a theatre and breaking the “fourth wall”? Jazz Week 2012 stakes out territory on the permeable boundary where jazz encounters other genres and even other art forms.
May brings a solid selection of shows. The highlights are definitely Pole, Black Dice and Grass Widow. Have fun out there!
While jazz and classical Hindustani music, tap and kathak, share a number of striking elements, the collaboration presented in India Jazz Suites is not about “fusion.”

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