ENTERTAINMENT

12/31/2008

Year in Review 2008: Look ahead

Jim Mahoney / DMN

Construction continues on the Winspear Opera House, part of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

It will be hard to find a more significant opening this year than the Oct. 12 arrival of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. City leaders say the Center will complete the vision of the city's Arts District and, they hope, put Dallas on the map as an international arts destination. Its pending arrival tops the list of our arts staff's predictions for 2009.
GuideLive.com Year in Review series: The arts, video games, obituaries, books, movies and more
Dallasnews.com Year in Review series: The best of the best from DallasNews.com and The Dallas Morning News

12/20/2008

Classical Music Review: Audience cheerfully chimes in at Orpheus Chamber Singers' Christmas concert
The highest compliment to the Orpheus Chamber Singers may be paid by the audiences that turn out for the choir's annual Christmas concerts. In Saturday evening's concert, the audience-participation carols all but raised the roof of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church.

12/17/2008

Classical Music Review: Dallas Bach Society's 'Messiah'
Not even threats of freezing fog deterred a good turnout Tuesday evening for the Dallas Bach Society's Messiah . In fact, with only one person tearing tickets at one door of Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church, the line of Handelian devotees stretched quite a distance.

12/16/2008

Classical Music Review: Turangalîla Symphony
NEW YORK – Two major composers' centenaries occurred last week, and both were celebrated in New York concerts over the weekend. The American Elliott Carter, amazingly, is still composing; the Frenchman Olivier Messiaen died in 1992.

12/15/2008

Opera Review: The Met's 'Queen of Spades' is done in style
What would be more apt to a cold December afternoon than a dark, cynical Russian opera? The Metropolitan Opera obliged Saturday with the final performance in a run of Tchaikovsky's also-ran, The Queen of Spades. And the Met did it in style, with a cast that, apart from Ben Heppner's announced indisposition, went from vocal strength to strength.

12/14/2008

Opera Review: 'Elektra'
It's a lurid story. Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and murdered her husband, Agamemnon. Of Agamemnon's two daughters, Chrysothemis just wants to get on with life and make babies. But Electra vows revenge, and when their brother Orestes resurfaces after a period in hiding, he kills Clytemnestra.

12/13/2008

Opera Review: 'Tristan und Isolde' alive and gripping at the Met
For both performers and audiences, an opera as long as "Tristan und Isolde" - five hours Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera - challenges concentration. Imagine then, just off the center of your view of the Met stage, a woman fiddling with her PDA, flashing green light and all. That was my experience for the first 30 minutes of the opera's last act Friday. Oh, for some of Isolde's death potion.

12/10/2008

Appealing concertos by British composers Pitfield and Bowen
When American think about 20th-century British music, they rarely think much beyond Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. But so great was the flourishing of new music during the last century that many worthy works got lost in the shuffle. Hats off, then, to the Lyrita, Hyperion, Chandos and Naxos CD labels for resurrecting so much of this worthy repertory.

12/06/2008

Opera review: Soprano makes dazzling debut in 'Die Fledermaus'
Viennese high society, circa 1870, was partying on the Music Hall stage Friday night. But the scene was stolen, again and again, by a mere chambermaid.

12/04/2008

Classical Music Review: Takács Quartet program a nice balance of Hadyn, Schumann, Bartók
FORT WORTH–On paper, Thursday evening's program of string quartets by Haydn, Schumann and Bartók looked like a generic "one from column A, one from column B..." affair. But the actual three programmed by the Takács Quartet did suggest some shared DNA.

12/02/2008

Classical Music Review: Music of the Spheres Society has good intentions, but ...
Every so often there's a concert whose good intentions you applaud, and yet... .

11/30/2008

Classical Review: Orchestra of New Spain brings 'villancicos' tradition back to life
In 18th-century Spanish churches, villancicos were precursors of today's pop-idiom "praise music." To catchy, dancing tunes, these quasi-cantatas wove folksy contemporary tales into religious observances, often with what today would be thought politically incorrect humor.

11/23/2008

Choral Review: UNT faculty, students sing Saul oratorio at Dallas Museum of Art
Horchow Auditorium, at the Dallas Museum of Art, used to be a pleasant place to hear small-scale music. But Saturday afternoon's Fine Arts Chamber Players concert confirmed rumors that the acoustics have been ruined by a recent renovation.

Classical Review: Meadows Symphony fires up with a witty concert
Some Meadows Symphony Orchestra concerts this season are programmed around the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Sunday afternoon's concert, at Southern Methodist University's Caruth Auditorium, celebrated fire, in quite a provocative musical mix of Haydn, Liszt, Wagner and Tan Dun. Led by music director Paul Phillips, SMU's student orchestra again gave professional and compelling performances.

11/21/2008

Dallas family's painting by Sebastiano Ricci fails to sell at auction
Expected to bring bids in excess of $1 million, a circa 1700 painting owned by a Dallas family failed to sell Thursday, possibly a victim of the economic downturn. The Vision of St. Bruno by Italian artist Sebastiano Ricci was part of a morning auction at Heritage Auction Galleries' Slocum Street annex.

Two more curators will leave Dallas Museum of Art

FILE

William Rudolph (right), Suzanne Weaver

Two more curators are exiting the Dallas Museum of Art for other jobs.

11/18/2008

Kimbell Art Museum plans expansion designed by Renzo Piano

FILE

Kimbell Art Museum

Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum will unveil preliminary plans today for a $70 million addition designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. View the plans.

Architect Renzo Piano reveals a few details of his Kimbell Art Museum expansion
FORT WORTH – Plans for expansion of the Kimbell Art Museum were clarified a bit at a Tuesday morning news conference at the museum.

11/16/2008

Classical Review: Pianist Stephen Hough stops time in memorial concert
PLANO – We would all like to be so warmly remembered as to merit the memorial recital Stephen Hough played Sunday afternoon. Honoring the late David Grice, a beloved Plano piano teacher, Mr. Hough reminded us just how transcendent an experience music can be.

Classical music: Van Cliburn in Moscow DVD

Classical music: Dvorák

11/15/2008

Opera Review: 'Figaro' at Music Hall one of best Dallas Opera productions in memory
The decors and dress are 18th-century, but the Marriage of Figaro that opened Friday at Fair Park Music Hall is as lively, as au courant, as a first-class TV sitcom.

Pianist's Sunday recital to memorialize Plano piano instructor
It says a lot about David Grice that one of the world's most prominent pianists volunteered to play a recital in the late Plano piano teacher's memory.

11/14/2008

Concert Review: Dallas Symphony Orchestra makes magic with unexpected Elgar piece
What's the very last piece you'd expect to hear on a Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert? A pretty good guess would be Sir Edward Elgar's The Music Makers , a 40-minute piece for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra set to poetry by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

11/13/2008

Dallas Opera 'Figaro' is easy on the eyes, ears

Natalie Caudill/DMN

Lyubov Petrova (left) as Susanna, and Daniel Okulitch as Figaro

Opera has a reputation as an indulgence for the mature set.

11/12/2008

Dallas Symphony Orchestra changes 2009 lineup
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has cancelled its May 2009 concert performances of Madame Butterfly . Instead music director Jaap van Zweden will conduct the Brahms Academic Festival Overture and Schicksalslied (with the Dallas Symphony Chorus), and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and 1812 Overture.

11/09/2008

Classical music review: Bartók, Divertimento

CD Review: Elliott Carter's Complete Piano Music

11/08/2008

Classical Music Review: Richardson Symphony Orchestra rounds up unfamiliar all-American works
RICHARDSON – Local orchestras have been venturing a little beyond the tried and hackneyed lately, and good for them. On Saturday night, the Richardson Symphony rounded up some unfamiliar suspects for its all-American concert at the Eisemann Center. Even Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was presented in a newish edition with quite a few surprises.

Fort Worth Opera to premiere Martín work
Fort Worth Opera will present the world premiere of a new opera at its 2010 festival. Before Night Falls , by Cuban-American composer Jorge Martín, is based on an autobiography of the same title by Reinaldo Arenas, the late Cuban poet, novelist, playwright and outspoken critic of Fidel Castro.

Van Zweden can't work miracles every night with Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Jaap van Zweden has been working miracles. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra's new music director has tightened and polished the ensemble and stretched its pianissimos as well as its fortissimos.

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