The Confidence-Man, a series of Melvillean Dreams by Douglas Paisley, now on View at Arrowhead through October 15, by Michael Miller

Douglas Paisley, from The Confidence-Man. Courtesy the artist.

The Confidence-Man, paintings and drawings by Douglas Paisley
at Arrowhead through October 15.

When I began to receive promotional material from the City of Pittsfield about a summer-long celebration of Herman Melville last spring, “Call Me Melvile,” I anxiously surveyed Melville’s chronology in one of the Library of America volumes I have on my shelf, looking for some date worthy of commemoration by this busy series of events, and I found none. In 1812, Herman Melville was not yet born. In 1862, nothing happened, except for the continuing decline of his literary and fiscal fortunes as well as his mental state. The following autumn he was to leave Pittsfield for good, much to his sorrow, trading his beloved house, Arrowhead, with his brother for a brownstone in New York City.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







A Tanglewood Conducting Master Class — My Bird’s Eye View, by Nancy Salz

Soprano YoonGeong Lee performs “On voit Tout en aventure” with conductor Jonathan Berman and other Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center. Photo Hilary Scott.

Soprano YoonGeong Lee performs “On voit Tout en aventure” with conductor Jonathan Berman and other Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center. Photo Hilary Scott.

The conductor’s arms froze mid-air. The musicians stopped playing. Stefan Asbury,   leader of the Tanglewood Music Center conducting program, had stopped the class.

“They’re not together,” Asbury told Jonathan Berman, the student conductor. Berman gave a small nod. It wasn’t the response Asbury wanted.

“Do you want them to be together?” Asbury pressed, invoking a bit of tough love. This time a bigger nod from Berman.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival by Daniel B. Gallagher

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One of the greatest challenges facing any Shakespearian actor is putting on and peeling off various layers of pretense throughout a play. This is what makes Much Ado About Nothing so interesting. Whoever plays the part of Beatrice must pretend she is a woman pretending she is not in love with Benedick, who, in turn, is played by an actor pretending to pretend he doesn’t love her. The actor playing Don Pedro must pretend to pretend to be happy, shirking sadness by means of his clever plot to bring “Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection the one with the other” (II, i). Whoever plays Hero may well choose to portray her as a young woman pretending to be in love with Claudio, who, in turn, pretends to want her hand in marriage until rejecting her at the altar. The stage is full of characters portraying false feelings while trying to ascertain the true feelings of those around them.

Read the full review in The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Patrick Keiller: The Robinson Institute at Tate Britain by Gabriel Kellett

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Occasionally I’ve thought that in my role as The Berkshire Review‘s ‘London correspondent’ I ought to focus sometimes on things that are more culturally British; unfortunately, I just don’t think much of British culture generally, and with the Olympics now here, decimating arts funding and forcing friends and colleagues of mine out of their homes due to massive rent increases, I feel arguably less inclined than ever to take up the baton for this country.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Glyndebourne’s Swinging Marriage of Figaro by Huntley Dent

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Let’s do the twist! The Count sports a Sgt. Pepper mustache and velvet brocade bell bottoms. The Countess is dressed in a caftan that looks like William Morris wallpaper. Cherubino wears a skin-hugging flowery shirt. Yes, Glyndebourne has dared to set The Marriage of Fiagro as a romp through London in the swinging Sixties, and after holding your breath for the first ten minutes, it begins to work because it’s funny — a ridiculous sartorial period marries into the world of Marie Antoinette. Like a drunk uncle at the wedding, the swingers loosen everybody up. Once Countess Almaviva stops feeling sorry for herself and begins to frug — or is it the swim? — infectious absurdity wins the day.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

April De Angelis’ Jumpy at the Duke of York’s Theatre by Huntley Dent

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Tamsin Greig and Bel Powley in the original Royal Court production (2011). Photo by Robert Workman.


Jumpy
By April De Angelis
Directed by Nina Raine
Duke of York’s Theatre

Lizzie Clachan – designer
Paul Arditit – sound designer
Peter Mumford – lighting designer

Tamsin Greig (Hilary), Seline Hizli (Lyndsey), Richard Lintern (Roland), Ben Lloyd-Hughes (Cam), Doon Mackichan (Frances), James Musgrave (Josh), Bel Powley (Tilly), Amanda Root (Bea), Ewan Stewart (Mark)

Preggers. A bloke in a certain frame of mind, namely male, might wonder why he is sitting at Jumpy. April De Angelis’ new play, beginning its West End run after a success at the Royal Court, is very witty but also very hen-partyish. When the women in the audience laugh knowingly at a line like, “Is she metal-pausal?” some men might wince. Their eyes are likely to avert when a whoop goes up at the sight of a hunky young man entering stage left, starkers, except for modestly covering himself down there. This isn’t gender neutral comedy, and the territory it covers — the generation gap between a middle-aged mother and her mouthy sixteen-year-old daughter — has a case of galloping cliche.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!

A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 56: The Price

Rocco Sisto as Caliban and Olympia Dukakis as Prospera in The Tempest at Shakespeare and Company. Photo Kevin Sprague.

Never have I seen the price of forgiveness so costly on stage as in Olympia Dukakis’s singular, and singularly moving Prospera with Shakespeare and Company. Try to find Rembrandt’s “Prodigal Son” and look carefully at the hands of the patriarch, large hands fully outspread, each finger more generous than the other, pressing on the back of the wayward son with a touch the painting tells us the weight of. This is radical forgiveness, almost a blank forgiveness. It is nearly immoral in its extremity of love, as the Prodigal’s brother tells us. This is the near opposite of what I saw in Ms. Dukakis’s performance. Hers was an assumption of the role which was drenched, sometimes even drowning, in resentment. She played these emotions fundamentally, but I saw them more clearly in her efforts to be gentle. I’m thinking now of the scene between Prospera and Miranda near the beginning of the play which was like no other performance I have seen. It was slow, way slow, but Ms. Dukakis is the mistress of time. It made perfect sense that she had to continually ask Miranda to pay attention because the entire scene was silences, knit together with words. Riveting.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







Winds in the Wilderness Concerts, Church of St. John in the Wilderness, Copake Falls, NY: Bach, Piazzolla, Ulysses Kay, Haydn, Anronio Lauro for Flute, Oboe, Viola da Gamba, and Guitar

Michael Miller
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Prom 54: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Frederick Delius and Shostakovich by Huntley Dent

Petrenko

Resistance movements. It didn’t take long for everyone to realize that they had a musical star in Vasily Petrenko, the boyish thirtysomething conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He debuted with them in 2004 at the age of 28 with brilliant promise. No one spoke of promise after a concert or two; they were already floored. One of a star’s perks is a roaring welcome at the Proms. You’d have thought at the end of their concert two nights ago that the orchestra had just played Crown Imperial rather than the angst-ridden Shostakovich Tenth.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 55: The TMC Forever!

Stephan Asbury leads TMC Fellows in Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Photo Hilary Scott.

I just saw a spectacular production of Higglety, Pigglety, Pop with the Tanglewood Fellows and the excellent Stefan Asbury conducting. Higglety is one of Maurice Sendak’s longest texts, still it is by no means loquacious. There is clarity and there is sharpness in his writing, and this book from 1967 is no exception. Oliver Knussen’s opulent score on the other hand, is a virtual paean to excess. The impression I got listening to it is that of a two-year-old child with elemental, alarming ideas by the dozen, but only twenty words that are speakable. Even worse, if you are the hero of Higglety, Pigglety, Pop, you are a dog with very few words.  The powerful juxtaposition of lean, straight writing and gorgeous, lavishly orchestrated, abundant music shows a rare sympathy with the child who thinks more wonderfully than he can speak. At first one questions how such grand excess can possibly sort with the few words that Jessie the Dog says in the text. But Mr. Knussen’s music uses the text only as a kind of fundamental ingredient and then builds worlds upon it, vocally and instrumentally. The end of the opera is multivalent, a kind of Mozart overture and finale with nursery rhyme words, even syllables sung in a kind of coordinated chaos. I would love to hear an Alice in Wonderland from Oliver Knussen.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!