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The Latest on the Berkshire Review for the Arts

• December 21, 2010
  Last week's program at the San Francisco Symphony carried a sense of celebration with it. John Adams was in attendance, giving luster to the orchestra's new performance and recording of his "Harmonielehre" under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. (Edo De Waart taped the piece in his final year as Music Director, when Adams was compos […]
  Steven Kruger
• December 18, 2010
  A year ago, when Frank Gehry was commissioned to design the new business school for the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) he was asked if he liked the proposed site. His response — “I like the problem” — was both diplomatic and revealing, for UTS, the youngest of Sydney’s four major universities, exists in a part of town with a lot of likable problems. […]
  Alan Miller
• December 14, 2010
  Music in Midtown ends its fall season with a special presentation by Paula Robison -- in a role outside her renown as solo flutist extraordinaire -- of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21. Robison will perform the Sprechstimme or “speech-voice” in the expressionist masterpiece, accompanied by Sooyun Kim, flute/piccolo; Carol McGonnell, clarinet/ […]
  Michael Miller

• H.G. Wells's novel The Time Machine has been adapted into film as well as several comic book permutations, including the Classics Illustrated version, whose cover was a siren's call to the bean bag chairs in the back of my third grade class, and is the image used by Radiotheatre for its stage adaptation now running at The Red Room. While other vers […]
• The three men who wrote, arranged, and perform Three Pianos are indubitably indie theater all-stars. True to their own diverse theatrical histories/visions, Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy deftly manage to entertain, enlighten, jolt, shake up, and delight their audience. […]
• Updated list of coming attractions heading to New York City theatres […]

Italian Notebook

• S e a s o n ‘ s   G r e e t i n g s While the Chinese, Arabs, and Spanish all had paper before the Italians, they were the first to watermark paper. Watermarks are areas of the paper where an identifying mark is left by bent wire in the screen mold. […]
• Manuela Belli has her paper conservation studio in Rome, behind the Palazzo di Giustizia, and not far from Castel Sant’Angelo. Belli studied at Rome’s Tor Vergata University (graduating 2008), with three years at a conservation program in Spoleto (graduating in 2003). The Spoleto program was founded jointly by the European Union, the Italian Cultural Ministr […]
• I’ve been writing about olive oil, and especially the business of olive oil, for an online publication called the Olive Oil Times, and I thought I’d try a post here about olives and drawings. The image just below is of a vase in the British Museum. The olive oil amphora is from around 520 BC […]

• The Thursday noontime recitals at First Church Boston continued in December. Nickolai Sheikov on Dec. 2 offered two warhorses, J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 and the Italian Concerto, BWV 971. Sheikov demonstrated great technique in the Chromatic Fantasy but had a memory lapse, from which he recovered nicely; it sounded improvised. Elaine […]
• Blue Heron Renaissance Choir, directed by Scott Metcalfe, presented a superbly conceived and executed complex program, “Christmas at the Courts of the 15th-Century France, Burgundy, & Cyprus,” to a packed First Church in Cambridge Congregational on December 18. The group chose to emend the text of “venomous barbs aimed at Jews,” a debatable decision. Met […]
• The last sounds of music making to be heard in the Tapestry Room at the Gardner Museum were those of A Far Cry, on Sunday, December 19. When it performs as it did in Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by Arvo Pärt it cannot be topped for super fine network of sound and expression. J. S. Bach’s: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 whistled by on the edge, a mixed aff […]