Music
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Barry Humphries' Weimar Cabaret
With Meow Meow and Australian Chamber Orchestra
By: - Aug 15th, 2016Barry Humphries' Weimar Cabaret focuses on the degenerate (according to the Nazis) music of Berlin's Weimar Republic of the 1920s-30s. Humphries presents and performs this music with the talented international cabaret performer, Meow Meow, and with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, led by its artistic director and violinist, Richard Tognetti. Together, these talents delivered a wonderfully done, touching and mesmerizing performance at Tanglewood's Seiji Ozawa Hall in Lenox, MA last night.
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Broadway Bounty Hunter Stars Annie Golden
Barrington Stage Debuts Hit Musical by Joe Iconis
By: - Aug 20th, 2016Annie Golden broke out with Hair in 1979. As she sings in a sure to be standard the actress is a "Woman of a Certain Age." She plays herself in a world premiere of Broadway Bounty Hunters by Joe Iconis at Barrington Stage Company. This is a fun musical that you will want to see at least twice. They just don't make them like this anymore.
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Gounod's Romeo and Juliet
Santa Fe Opera Orchestra
By: - Aug 22nd, 2016The Santa Fe Orchestra under Harry Bicket charges in the introduction to Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet with a dark gusto. On stage, the Capulets in blue sword fight with the Montagus in red. We quickly cut to the choral summation of the famous tale of ill-fated lover who pave the way to peace among naturally-born enemies.
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Don Giovanni Burns Up in Santa Fe
Superb Mozart
By: - Aug 22nd, 2016The production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni now running at the Santa Fe Opera is a perfect occasion for a celebration of the opera company’s sixtieth anniversary. Seating over 2200, it is a grand house in part because it is located on a mountain top with a view of the Jemez Mountains. Performances begin at 8pm as the sun sets and the backstage real sky is streaked orange, and red and burnt sienna.
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Capriccio at Santa Fe Opera
Insider's Debate Gives Pleasure to All
By: - Aug 23rd, 2016Are words or music more important? In opera there is no debate. Both reign. Richard Strauss, trapped in Nazi Germany because beloved members of his family were Jewish and he wanted to save them, set his last opera as a debate. Unquestionably, in 1942 he was also making a plea for civilization. Santa Fe produces a delightful take on Capriccio.
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Chorus Line in Charleston
Opens 85th Season of Footlight Players
By: - Aug 25th, 2016The production of A Chorus Line which opened the 85th season of Footlight Players in Charleston was so fresh and lively that it was hard to fathom that the musical premiered some four decades ago. The smallish stage was packed with 26 hopefuls auditioning for just eight roles.
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Opera Love in Santa Fe
Exploring a Theme
By: - Aug 25th, 2016Love is the theme connecting the five productions of the Santa Fe Opera 2016 Festival. Leading off one week of the season was Don Giovanni, where an attempted rape and then a murder jumpstart the opera. The Don is a questionable subject for the discussion of love, as the Don mows down woman after woman in his quest for the Guinness Book of Records first place position as the world’s best, or most effective, seducer. Yet love triumphs.
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Josephine Baker JB Julia Bullock
Hello Blackbird at Mostly Mozart
By: - Aug 25th, 2016Peter Sellars suggested that Julia Bullock interpret Josephine Baker. The young African American, who is more interested in creating musical moments than she is in taking on conventional opera roles, is riveting as Baker in a piece composed by Tyshawn Sorey.
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Naughton Twins Play Messiaen
Genetics Gives a New Dimension to Duo Piano at the Crypt
By: - Aug 26th, 2016Two pianos. Four hands. One heart. A spiritual beauty lurks in the origins of Messiaen's music. Certainly duo pianists Michelle and Christina Naughton seem spiritually bound to one another, although there a sparks of difference. This does not suggest conflict, but rather an opportunity to work to achieve unity, as Messiaen must have worked to embrace his God in the face of the Nazi occupation of France.
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Train, Yo-Yo Ma, Jeremy Denk and The B52's
Tanglewood Rocks.
By: - Sep 04th, 2016The 2016 Tanglewood season come to a close with a long time commitment from Conductor Andris Nelsons to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2017.
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Tenor Johan Botha Dead at 51
Memories of His Large Glorious Voice
By: - Sep 08th, 2016Johan Botha died today in Vienna at 51. He had suffered from liver cancer, but was scheduled to sing at the Wiener Staatsoper this fall. The September 10th performance of Turandot will be dedicated to him. He once said, “The biggest milestone for me is to make people happy and smile.”
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the loser by David Lang at BAM
Thomas Bernhard Novel an Opera
By: - Sep 09th, 2016David Lang was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to compose an opera. The remarkable chamber opera 'the loser' is the result. Lang has lifted the author Thomas Bernhard's words, translated by Jack Dawson, intact. He can do this because the author composes with words very much as a musician composes with notes. The subject of the piece is Glenn Gould, whose uncanny ability to separate voices is the same as Bernhard's narrative schizophrenia.
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Boston’s The Verb Hotel
Displays Bieber Collection of Rock Memorabelia
By: - Sep 10th, 2016After graduation from the BU School of Journalism David Bieber found that the only way to research and promote rock music was to collect the material. Soon his apartment was cluttered with thousands of albums and related detritus. It is the foremost archive of a formative era when Boston emerged as a major matrix for contemporary music. Now highlights of the Bieber Collection have been installed at Boston's The Verb Hotel.
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Fresh Grass Festival Is Now!
Best Bluegrass Festival In The Northeast
By: - Sep 11th, 2016Once a year, the Fresh Grass Festival takes over the grounds of the Mass MoCA art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. This year's festival features the best bluegrass musicians from all over the world. Fresh Grass takes place from Friday, September 16th through Sunday, September 18th.
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Hershey Felder's Maestro
Leonard Bernstein's Tanglewood and So Much More
By: - Sep 11th, 2016After an early triumphant conducting performance, the press crowded into the green room to speak to the young Maestro. They then turned to his father Sam and asked," Why did you block your son’s early career in music,?" To which Sam replied "How did I know he was Leonard Bernstein?"
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New York City Opera Opens in the Rose Theatre
Aleko and Pagliacci Double Bill
By: - Sep 12th, 2016Michael Capusso has breathed new life into the New York City Opera and honors its mission and traditions as well. The fall season opened with a double bill: Aleko by Serge Rachmaninoff and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.
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"The Ouroboros Trilogy" at ArtsEmerson
Three Operas on Ancient Myths by Brookline Librettist
By: - Sep 12th, 2016Cerise Lim Jacobs had a dream: to create three operas incorporating myths from the ancient world, using the Ouroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail in order to be reborn, as a recurring motif. The three works were produced together and they turned out to be engaging, even moving, with music that didn't pander to the audience while also not leaving it out. We'd love to hear it, at least "Madame White Snake" again.
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Fresh Grass Festival's Friday Line-Up
Weekend Festival At Mass MoCA
By: - Sep 16th, 2016The three day Fresh Grass Festival kicks off tonight at MASS MoCA with an outstanding line-up.
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'62 Center at Williams Announces Its Program
Launching Twelth Season
By: - Sep 16th, 2016The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance unveiled its twelfth season of diverse and challenging theatre and dance programming for the Williams College community and beyond.
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Fresh Grass Festival: Day Two Line Up
Lots Of Music At Mass MoCA
By: - Sep 17th, 2016The first day of the Fresh Grass Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, was very lively with the appearance of several major blue grass bands. Day two is a full day of music, a day that will bring together many of the great performers from the industry.
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Roger Nierenberg Teaches Listening
Kodaly, Britten, Wagner and Ravel at DeMenna Center
By: - Sep 20th, 2016The conundrum of declining symphony audiences is being addressed with all sorts of efforts. The Roger Nierenberg proposal, mixing the audience in and with the orchestra, is a bold and helpful approach.
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Opera Philadelphia's Spiritually Lush Mazzoli
Exciting New Wave in Opera
By: - Sep 26th, 2016Opera Philadelphia is leading the way in America, as it presents adventuresome new operas by contemporary composers exploring subjects of interest. Breaking the Waves is the most ambitious in its complex subject matter. The director, composer and librettist have joined forces to present a wrenching work which is very much embedded in opera tradition, but stretches the form musically and dramatically.
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Metropolitan Opera's Controversial Opening
Cast in Trenchcoats Shine in Tristan and Isolde
By: - Sep 27th, 2016Never has the disconnect between glorious singing and a production been so clear. To put Tristan and Isolde in trenchcoats isn't even a starter in a Wagner opera. Stuart Skelton, Nina Stemme, Rene Pape, Ekaterina Gubanova and Evgeny Nitikin are all superb in their roles. It is an insult to put such world class singers on this set. Do not be tempted by the HD. Listen on the radio where you can enjoy the opera's glories.
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Calixto Bieito's "Carmen" at the BLO
Controversial Production Lives Up to Expectations
By: - Sep 29th, 2016Calixto Bieito restores the sexuality long-missing to "Carmen" - but it is the guys, the half-naked soldiers in Spain's North Africa outpost, who are hot. His Carmen is a cool existentialist, half in love with easeful death. Her murder by a spurned lover on an empty stage outside the bullring could have been staged by Samuel Beckett. This is a controversial production for the expanded Boston Lyric Opera.
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On Site Opera with Argento and Berlioz
Stanford White's Harmonie Club Ballroom is the Setting
By: - Oct 02nd, 2016While huge opera houses are the dinosaurs of the 21st century, smaller venues for the presentation of the original multi-media art form are thriving. Opera is alive and well in every nook and corner of the world. Even in grand ballrooms of exclusive Manhattan Clubs like the Harmonie.
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