Berkshire Review for the Arts

Mari Andrejco’s The Belle of Amherst (a new version after William Luce’s play) at Triple Shadow in East Otis, Massachusetts, Friday-Sunday through August 28th

Deborah Brown — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:44:57 +0000

So who was Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) really? She was the “Nobody” from Amherst, MA, the alleged half-cracked daughter of town father Edward Dickinson, who wrote nearly 1800 poems (7 published in her lifetime, but none by her initiative) and the continuing inspiration for poets, composers, writers, readers all over the world. Next to Rumi and Shakespeare, she may not only be the “Queen of Cavalry,” but assuredly the unequivocal Queen of the...

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A Singer’s Notes 36: Childe Maurice

Keith Kibler — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 02:09:45 +0000

He comes out like Oberon, with hair of gold and a light step. It's a very careful walk he has, nothing fancy, and he sits on the bench with a kind of directness and naturalness of purpose. The first notes are the "Menuet Antique." I am sitting far away at this point, and I hear the jagged off-beats of the left hand hopping out. It takes no time to be lost in this world, a world of fantastic play and even more fantastic loneliness. Is it...

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Marlboro Music 60th Anniversary Season: an update to our retrospective “Marlboro at 60″

The Editor — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:36:16 +0000

Marlboro Music—once again—is celebrating its 60th anniversary, which I have already celebrated in an extensive retrospective article last year. The revered summer music school and festival has a peculiar double anniversary, because its inaugural year was very small indeed, and rather precarious. In the second year, everything was more organized, both in scheduling and financially, and the cherished summer event took off, to become what it is...

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Bard Music Festival 2011, “Sibelius and His World” – Program Details (REVISED, with a Note on the Composer)

The Editor — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:00:07 +0000

The numerous offerings that make up the comprehensive 22nd annual Bard Music Festival, “Sibelius and His World,” take place during SummerScape’s two final weekends: August 12- 14 and August 19-21. Through the prism of Sibelius’s life and career, this year’s festival will explore the music of Scandinavia and examine the challenges faced by those who continued working within a tonal framework after the revolutions of musical modernism. ...

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Pre Raphaelite Drawings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Andrew Miller — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:21:51 +0000

Pollinated with the spirit of the Renaissance, spring-like, fresh and full of individual passion and wonder, the Pre Raphaelites went back to a state of painting when the Renaissance was in its stride if not its prime. Rather than seeing painting as a continuous development up to their own day, they when back to an approach and a world view at a point when art knew where it was going, striving toward a most sublime peak, a peak attained perhaps...

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The Barangaroo Review: Your concerns are important to us but we do not share them

Alan Miller — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:24:50 +0000

The results of the “short, sharp” review into Sydney’s Barangaroo development project have been released in the form of an 87 page report in which the word “outcome” appears 88 times. Though all sides have declared some version of victory in its wake, it is hard to see the report as anything other than a final rubber stamp for the developer Lend Lease. Whatever its misgivings, the report requires no modifications to the current plans. Any...

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A Tale of Two Conductors (and Two Pianists, Two Concertos, Two Symphonies): Graf and Eschenbach with the BSO in Mozart, Mahler, and Brahms, with Orion Weiss and Peter Serkin

Larry Wallach — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:43:17 +0000

The dual nature of the contemporary orchestral concert experience was clearly displayed last Friday and Saturday nights by the Boston Symphony concerts at Tanglewood. Each offered its own image of how an audience can interact with familiar works. Each featured a central European conductor leading core repertory: one concerto and one symphony each, all works familiar to habitual concert-goers. Each pair of pianists and conductors exhibited...

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Touch(ed) by Bess Wohl, directed by Trip Cullman, Williamstown Theatre Festival, August 3-14, 2011

Michael Miller — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:19:56 +0000

Touch(ed) is a terrifically effective and well-constructed play by a young actress and playwright who has managed to gather an impressive amount of experience in some very good places: after Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she has spent four previous seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Company. Director Trip Cullman [third WTF season] is a Yale School of Drama graduate, as is Emily Rebholz, costume designer. Andromache Chalfant...

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Bryn Terfel sings Schumann, Finzi, and Ibert at the Ravinia Festival, August 2, 2011

David Kubiak — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:48:13 +0000

I well remember the 1992 Ravinia Festival, when I bought a ticket for the American debut recital of a singer I had read about, a Welsh farmer’s son who was creating a considerable stir in Europe. Although he had made a few recordings, they were not easily accessible in this country, and I came into the concert hall not having heard a single note sung by the then 27 year old Bryn Terfel. The program was simple and serious: Schubert’s...

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Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), Vespro della Beata Vergine, under Kent Tritle, at the Berkshire Choral Festival

keith-francis — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:37:44 +0000

In his study of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, John Wenham quotes the musicologist Denis Arnold: “No doubt all professions have their hazards; and for the student of Monteverdi the principal one is surely that musicological Lorelei, the Vespers (of 1610, of course). To edit it is to receive the kiss of death as a scholar. To perform it is to court disaster. To write about it is to alienate some of one’s best friends. Even to avoid joining in the...

Here is the latest on the Berkshire Review for the Arts. Click on the headings to visit the site and read the full articles.