The suite drew praise from audiences and critics world-widewide and was voted best new CD of the year by listeners of National Public Radio. The Crypt Sessions return with the world premiere of Philip Glass’ Songs and Poems II written for – and performed by – the magnificent Wendy Sutter, whom the Wall St. Journal casually hailed as “one of the great leading cellists of the classical stage.” 

Wine Australia has announced the appointment of its new General Manager of Marketing Paul Turale, commencing 30 May 2022.

Barrington Stage Company (BSC), announces Summer 2022 Events with Broadway’s Best at the Boyd-Quinson Stage and the St. Germain Stage at the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center.

Take a star baseball player who is talented, thoughtful and charismatic and see what happens when he announces that he is gay. What is the effect on his longtime friend? the locker room? What happens later on when a red-neck rookie is called up from the minor leagues? Does this one announcement cause a championship team to struggle?

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) brings us Alice Childress’ 1962 play, Wedding Band.  It is set in a South Carolina backyard and the bedroom of Julia Augustine, a Black seamstress who is loud and proud with her neighbors, and a soft and loving companion to a German baker, Herman.  He is white. They are celebrating their tenth anniversary of not-being-married,. Miscegenation is banned by law.

The New York Philharmonic returned to Carnegie  Hall, its home until 1962, for a splendid concert. Both works performed reference death.  Brahms had been close to Robert Schumann, who died during the composition of the composer’s 1st piano concerto.  Bartok himself was deathly ill when he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra at a Saranac Lake health resort. 

Long before Richard Powers wrote the mega bestseller "Overstory" celebrating man’s relationship with trees, Handel wrote one of the most beautiful arias in the history of song. The cruel King Serse (Xerxes in Plutarch)  opens the opera named for him with an aria celebrating a tree’s understory, its shade. Emily D’Angelo, a glorious mezzo who has graduated from Cinderella’s Prince to a role as King this season, was masterful in her presentation of this love song to a tree.  To be sure, it’s a bit weird.  So too the tangled love relationships in this opera.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera, two of today’s leading innovators on the classical musical scene, present the New England premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s seminal opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986) on June 17, 2022, at the Strand Theatre, a short distance from the house where Malcolm Little lived in his teenage years in Roxbury. This sprawling, genre-bending biographical opera unfolds the astonishing life of one of the most misunderstood men in history.

The Dishwasher Dialogues is a tale of being down and out in Paris in the 1970s. George James Light and Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi share tales of staying alive working at Chez Haynes a soul food restaurant. It reads like a hipster's Beggars Opera. Literally this is a saga from rags to almost riches.

"for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf " is having a brilliant re-incarnation. The stage is lit only by the abstract chiaroscuro photos projected on soft screen, like the hazy landscape. A quiet light  reveals Lady In Brown (Tendayi Kuumba)  as this  rhythmic dance poem begins.  “Dark phases of womanhood , of never having been a girl..”  Her movements are as powerful and sensuous as the words,  with a spiritual nod to African roots.  

Event to feature jazz in the park, brunches, and headline performersKarrin Allyson, Houston Person, Michael Benedict and Bopitude  

Jane Hudson is showing works from a series begun in the dead of winter. These ‘orb’ images speak to various states of mind, cosmic influence and radiant energy. As the winter has led beyond the darkness of space, the source of all our inspiration, and turns to another ratio of light to dark, and the emergence of Sunlight, growth and the fruitful hope of Spring on the Earth.   

A relationship staple in the catalog of dramatic themes is that of professor and student.  Traditionally, the professor is a man who takes sexual or emotional advantage of a female student, but that formula has diversified in recent decades.

Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band - Steve Lukather, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Gregg Bissonette, Hamish Stuart and Edgar Winter - revealed the revised itinerary for their September tour, includes all 12 of the dates that they recently had to postpone.  The tour now begins September 5 at Tanglewood, in Lenox, MA and concludes in Mexico City, Mexico on October 20.

A powerful production of "The Year of Magical Thinking" is running through June 26 at GableStage in Coral Gables (suburban Miami). In "The Year of Magical Thinking," author and journalist Joan Didion recounts the year following her husband's sudden death. The basis for the play adaptation of "The Year of Magical Thinking" is the award-winning memoir by Joan Didion.

First annual Bousquet Fazz Festival is free. Thursday June 30 at the base of Bousquet Ski slopes in Pittsfield.

Repertorio Espanol presents big theater in a compact space. Productions are often not only intense but sprawling in their content. The trick of compacting large stories in a small space is one of the company’s specialties. Eva Luna, Caridad Svich’s apt dramatization of Isabel Allende's big third novel, gives ample opportunity to display these skills.

Covid delayed the opening of Artists of the Thursday Chinese Dinner Group by two years. It was worth the wait with a tasty buffet dinner on opening night at Berkshire Art Museum in downtown North Adams. The former church houses the Barbara and Eric Rudd Art Foundation, Most of the church displays a permanent installation of his work. The three levels of the tower galleries has a lively display of works by diners and artists.

Jeremy Denk is a world class pianist and writer. Recently he performed Bach violin sonatas with a magnificent young violinist, Maria Wloszczowska at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York. 

Cristina Garcia, who has adapted her 1992 National Book Award finalist novel into a world-premiere play, delves into a number of stock motifs and stock character types, but in a vivid, imaginative, and entertaining way.  The story, which takes place in Havana and Brooklyn in 1979-1980, reveals a family with four determined women of Cuban ancestry; representing three generations; living in two countries; and sharing one common condition – zero male partners impede their personal pursuits at this point in their lives.

Inna Faliks is not only a pianist of the highest order.  She programs to reveal new insights into the music she performs. She is especially striking as a commissioner of new music. She also honors living composers, some  too seldom performed.

Portia Gwen Harcus, 88, of Boston, passed away Thursday, July 14, 2022. Graveside services at Sharon Memorial Park, 40 Dedham St., Sharon, MA on Sunday, July 17, 2022 at 9:45 am.

n Philip Glass’s adaptation of a trilogy of Cocteau films to opera (the others being “Orphée” and “Les Enfants Terribles,” both previously produced by Opera Parallèle), the composer saved his most imaginative treatment for this most uncommon love story. 

The play opens with Dr. Pap addressing a classroom – the audience.  The content of the lecture is unimportant, yet those brief moments absolutely hook the viewer.  There is no waiting to get involved with the story line. 

Kirill Serebrennikov, the brilliant Russian director, brought The Nose to Munich via Zoom. He is detained by the Russian government in Moscow. The production is superb.