If There's a Sackbut, Calliope Is Coming

   Renaissance music has always been dear to my heart. Maybe it was listening every night to a program on the much-missed NYC classical radio station WNCN, where strange names like Machaut and Josquin and Ockeghem mingled with the more familiar 3 Bs. In some of this music the instruments are as fascinating to look at as to listen to, and a great opportunity to do that is coming up Nov. 20 at 8 p.m. at Club Helsinki Hudson, in the Claverack Landing series presented by the Columbia Festival Orchestra.

   The performers are the renowned Calliope Renaissance Band, an eclectic quartet that toured extensively on the classical circuit for more than 25 years, winning the Naumburg Chamber Music Award and helping to raise awareness of the delights of early music, while also extending its repertoire into jazz and American folk music and commissioning new works by such celebrities as Peter Schickele. Their Helsinki program will range from 15th-century German music to Stephen Foster tunes, plus some rags, all played on viols, recorders, a sackbut, cornetto, and various percussion.Tickets are $20. www.helsinkihudson.com. More at 518-828-4800.

   Hot tip: Nov. 21 at the Hudson Opera House, Close Encounters With Music presents Cuban-born composer Jorge Martin in an illustrated talk about his opera “Before Night Falls,†based on the autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, dealing with the persecution of gays under Castro. Tickets are $15 admission. E-mail cewmusic@aol.com, or call 800-843-0778 or 518-822-1438. 

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less