Singing the 'Messiah' Other Holiday Delights, and Tanglewood

The Christmas music season is underway, and one of the early entries in the holiday calendar is the annual Williamstown Holiday Walk, and a concert at the Clark Institute featuring the storytelling, music and dance of Tomáseen Foley’s “A Celtic Christmas†on Friday, Dec. 4, at 8 pm. Tickets are $28 ($25 for members and children). Call 413-458-0524 or go to www.clarkart.edu.

   If you are in a participatory mood, consider joining Crescendo for a “Messiah†sing-in with conductors Jack Brown, Christine Gevert and Ben Harms  at the First Congregational Church, Great Barrington, MA, this Saturday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m. Bring your own score or buy/rent one at the event. For reservations, 800-838-3006, $35.

   The Church of St. John in the Wilderness on Route 344 in Copake, NY, will present a chamber music concert with Sharon Powers, flute; Ellen Katz Willner, oboe; and Beth Craig, cello, on Sunday, Dec. 6, at 2 p.m. The program includes works by Haydn, W. F. Bach, Telemann, Schickele and Corigliano. Suggested donation, $10, children free. 518-329-3674. Two more concerts are scheduled to  take place, there, in coming months.

   Farther afield, the Boston Symphony has just announced this summer’s Tanglewood season, and anniversaries abound. The summer will officially open on July 2 with Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection†conducted by music director James Levine, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and soloists Layla Claire and Stephanie Blythe.

   But events begin a week earlier, including a live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion†with Garrison Keillor, a dance program by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and a tribute to Arthur Fiedler and John Williams that will kick off the 125th anniversary of the Boston Pops, now conducted by Keith Lockhart.

   The complete schedule is available at www.tanglewood.org.

   Tickets go on sale Valentine’s Day.

   Meanwhile, those hungry for the sound of the BSO can visit the www.bso.org to check the season.   

Latest News

Finding ‘The Right Stuff’ for a documentary

Tom Wolfe

Film still from “Radical Wolfe” courtesy of Kino Lorber

If you’ve ever wondered how retrospective documentaries are made, with their dazzling compilation of still images and rare footage spliced between contemporary interviews, The Moviehouse in Millerton, New York, offered a behind-the-scenes peek into how “the sausage is made” with a screening of director Richard Dewey’s biographical film “Radical Wolfe” on Saturday, March 2.

Coinciding with the late Tom Wolfe’s birthday, “Radical Wolfe,” now available to view on Netflix, is the first feature-length documentary to explore the life and career of the enigmatic Southern satirist, city-dwelling sartorial icon and pioneer of New Journalism — a subjective, lyrical style of long-form nonfiction that made Wolfe a celebrity in the pages of Esquire and vaulted him to the top of the best-seller lists with his drug-culture chronicle “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and his first novel, “The Bonfire of The Vanities.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Art on view this March

“Untitled” by Maureen Dougherty

New Risen

While there are area galleries that have closed for the season, waiting to emerge with programming when the spring truly springs up, there are still plenty of art exhibitions worth seeking out this March.

At Geary Contemporary in Millerton, founded by Jack Geary and Dolly Bross Geary, Will Hutnick’s “Satellite” is a collection of medium- and large-scale acrylic on canvas abstracts that introduce mixtures of wax pastel, sand and colored pencil to create topographical-like changes in texture. Silhouettes of leaves float across seismic vibration lines in the sand while a craterous moon emerges on the horizon, all like a desert planet seen through a glitching kaleidoscope. Hutnick, a resident of Sharon and director of artistic programming at The Wassaic Project in Amenia, New York, will discuss his work at Geary with New York Times art writer Laura van Straaten Saturday, March 9, at 5 p.m.

Keep ReadingShow less
Caught on Camera: Our wildlife neighbors

Clockwise from upper left: Wildlife more rarely caught by trail cameras at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies: great blue heron, river otters, a bull moose, presenter and wildlife biologist Michael Fargione, a moose cow, and a barred owl.

Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

‘You don’t need to go to Africa or Yellowstone to see the real-life world of nature. There are life and death struggles in your wood lot and backyard,” said Michael Fargione, wildlife biologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, during his lecture “Caught on Camera: Our Wildlife Neighbors.”

He showed a video of two bucks recorded them displaying their antlers, then challenging each other with a clash of antlers, which ended with one buck running off. The victor stood and pawed the ground in victory.

Keep ReadingShow less