July 8-26: Combining a packed schedule of performances, competitions and open master classes, a positively grueling training regimen for a small group of well-vetted aspirants and, one imagines, a few pretty high-end cocktail parties, PianoSummer at SUNY-New Paltz returns for another season of celebrating the continued vitality of the 88 keys and the centuries’ worth of brilliant music written for them.
On Thursdays in July and August, Bard opens the fabulous Spiegeltent to the curatorially adventurous Catskill Jazz factory. It is a lineup of shows not to missed. The Catskill Jazz Factory has been an especially stellar and opulent example of a jazz incubator and advocacy organization dedicated to nurturing young talent, sustaining jazz’s great careers and advancing jazz appreciation worldwide.
Saturday, July 6: To call Kingston “instrumental” in the national launch of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles band Lucius would be a bit of an embellishment of the kind we should leave to realtors, gentry-baiting developers and their pocket scribes. But one thing is for certain: The second of their two shows at BSP – in February of 2013, months after their O+ debut – happened to coincide with the exact instant of their national liftoff. I am still scarred by the afterburners.
With a court settlement in their favor, a new sponsor in Oppenheimer & Co. and some leads on replacement venues (Vernon Downs racetrack), word from the organizers seemed upbeat; according to a recent article in Billboard by Dave Brooks, however, the signals are still decidedly mixed, and time is short.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was lauded as a genius by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, had already established a strong reputation in Europe as a composer and pianist before fleeing the rise of Nazism to work in Hollywood. He is credited as the first to bring lush orchestral scores to the silver screen. John Williams credits Korngold’s score for King’s Row as his major influence for the Star Wars scores.
Saturday, June 29 and Sunday, June 30: This summer, the longest-running chamber music series in America will feature a number of the world’s great string quartet ensembles: the Escher, the Harlem, the Jasper, the Jupiter, the Pacifica, the Amernet and, on Sunday, June 30, the Shanghai Quartet.
Imagine the joy of stumbling upon a tango-obsessed saxophone quartet or an actual harpist shredding while on a hike in the woods.
The ’zine age, as well as the work of such cartoon memoirists as Linda Barry, has demonstrated that the graphic narrative form is well-suited to intimate miniatures (if Edward Gorey hadn’t already made the point), but Nonsecal is something else entirely; it is short but grand and maximalist, visually and conceptually.
June 20-July 28: The storied theater lab inherits a complex, dual responsibility: to entertain, challenge and edify us as good theater does, and to serve as Petri dish for the cultivation of new growth in a time when biodiversity has been largely choked out of the biggest stages.
County fairs are for everyone: everyone who dares believe in our commonality, our blood ties to livestock and the Earth and in the high ritualistic value of pure diversion and unhealthy fats as your great-grandparents enjoyed them.