Friday, May 10 and Sunday, May 12: While Mahler’s No. 8 is the one affectionately dubbed the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of its immense ensemble size and logistical challenges (sometimes involving entire second orchestras and choirs performing in the wings, out of audience view), No. 3 is no small and tidy affair. Bard’s performance will employ more than 160 musicians to get it right.
A strong and passionate mythology surrounds motherhood: one that alternately glorifies the institution in sentiment and song, and at the same time pins our culture’s ills onto the failure of mothers to get their jobs done well enough. Incidentally, that job is both thankless and supremely rewarding – a dichotomy that no woman expects when she signs on.
The Ulster County Poorhouse opened in New Paltz in 1828, at the site on Libertyville Road where the Ulster County Fairgrounds and county pool complex are now located. The facility closed in 1976 after having housed thousands of people in the intervening years. Some were classified as “insane” or “intemperate,” but the records show just as many who were admitted because of old age, sickness or disability. There were unwed mothers, “debauched” women, abandoned wives, babies and children, former slaves and recent immigrants injured while employed building the Catskill Aqueduct and D & H Canal.
Saturday, May 25: While the eccentric musical visionary Dave Longstreth had been making experimental pop records for years, a pair of major releases – 2009’s Bitte Orca and 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan – firmly established the then-Brooklyn-based ensemble as one of the most formidable voices in the conservatory wing of indie-pop. Everything the man does is challenging, and worth it.
Woodstock 50 impresario Michael Lang isn’t happy about what the multinational company he thought was his financial partner tried to do to his commemorative festival last week. He’s made his displeasure known by publicizing a five-page letter he sent to Toshihiro Yamamoto, president & CEO of Dentsu Inc. in Tokyo, on May 6, and charging the multinational of making off with $17 million in the process.
Gallerist and art auctioneer Jim Cox seemed just as busy at the start of this week as he was leading up to, and at, his Collectors Exchange Fine Art Auction at the Woodstock Community Center on Sunday, April 28. There was a lot of follow-up to do on live and online bids, billing matters to attend to, and the shipping of art to the many nations and states winning bids came in from.
Sunday, May 5: “[You] would think they’d been playing together for centuries,” wrote the Boston Globe of the pair’s profound and intuitive rapport.
Saturday, May 4: The singer/songwriter has earned four Grammy Awards, as well as 21 Top 40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. She is also an author whose four books include the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.”
Saturday, May 4: This free showcase of literature for children and young adults is one of the biggest book festivals in the State of New York.
There are just too damn many superheroes onscreen at pretty much any given time for us to get immersed in the drama of any one of them. That will, of course, be some viewers’ definition of thrilling cinema.