Penelope is coming down to dinner slowly on the night Odysseus comes home. The high-walled courtyard with its cypress pillars is full of noise. She has stayed as long as she could in the shelter of the loom, in her workroom, and the sea below the house is dark in […]
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Holiday music warms the Berkshires in midwinter — BTW column
Winds in the reeds lift a clear tone in longing for home — a heartbeat Last year, on a snowy day, we heard a solo harp. Students sang a medieval carol and a modern one by Richard Wilbur, our former poet Laureate and former Berkshire voice in the hills, and […]
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Leonard Bernstein found his feet at Tanglewood
The world is remembering Leonard Bernstein this summer. Aug. 25, 2018, would have been his 100th birthday, and on Saturday night the world will come to the Berkshires to remember him. Because in many ways he began here. He came as a student to the first class of what was […]
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Łempicka new musical brings Parisian art to Williamstown Theatre Festival
In a studio at night, two women are holding each other. The room smells of paint and turpentine and smoke and sweat. An artist trying to build a career and raise a daughter comes to a bar after her first big opening and meets a woman who has always lived on […]
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Fiddlers jam in a day of music at Hancock Shaker Village
Imagine holding hands and spinning until the room blurs. Imagine that movement in someone’s arms, to the beat of music. Imagine the musicians sliding from one tune to the next, the melody racing over the chords. Across the country, across 200 years and more, folk dance music has stayed alive. Mill workers […]
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William Kentridge honors Africa in World War I
You have already taken all I have. Now you are taking my son. The words appear on a vast wall. At center stage a man faces a round microphone, as though he is speaking on the radio in 1918. He is reliving the history of Africa in World War I — a […]
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Cantilena Choir comes face to face with Joan of Arc on silent film
She is a teenager, and she is in a court room. She is tall and broad shouldered, her dark hair is cut short, and she is wearing a man’s buttoned shirt — one reason she is here, fighting for her life. She is a poorly educated farm girl from a small […]
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Brooklyn ragas meet modern jazz at Mass MoCA
At sunset after a long day of work, Sameer Gupta remembers listening to a rippling music. “You feel it connecting,” he said in a phone interview from the West Coast, on tour for new album, A Circle Has No Beginnings. “The sun is setting, the day is winding down and […]
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Music flies free at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival — BTW column
Adam Ezra calls two friends in the audience up to the stage. They are musicians from Boston, like him. Got your ax? he says, and the woman beside him tunes her fiddle. He strums the opening bars, and the musicians around him casually pick up the beat. They hand off […]
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Weekend ahead June 30 to July 2
‘And there was distant music, simple and somehow sublime’ … and getting closer. This weekend, Ragtime takes Barrington Stage Company back to the turn of the 20th century, as a stifled housewife, an immigrant father and a musician from Harlem fight for their own real American dreams. It’s July in […]
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