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JEFFREY GANTZ
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Celestial voices
Johann Sebastian Bach wasn't the first composer to recycle previous material, but he might have been the first to put together his own greatest-hits album.
Living traditions
"The Celtic Viol" — the title of the Boston Early Music Festival concert Catalan gambist Jordi Savall gave yesterday evening at Jordan Hall — looks like an oxymoron, since Irish and Scottish music is almost by definition traditional and popular and the viol is associated with "serious" early classical music.
Sue Bourne's documentary about Irish stepdancing in general and the 2010 Irish Dance World Championships in particular treads a formulaic path.
Crumhorns calling
What with the operas and the big-name visitors and the demonstrations and mini-classes and workshops and symposia and society meetings, to say nothing of the Early Music America Conference and Young Performers Festival, it would be easy to overlook the Boston Early Music Festival's Exhibition.
End of an era
The bad news — really bad news — this past week is that principal dancer Larissa Ponomarenko is retiring after 18 years with Boston Ballet. (She will, however, be staying on as a ballet master.)
Ballet notebook
It's been a busy week and a half. The first ever Boston International Ballet Competition took place May 12-16 at John Hancock Hall, climaxing with a gala awards ceremony and performance last Monday. On Wednesday, at the Opera House, Boston Ballet presented its second annual "Next Generation" performance.
Mind games
After the frenetic gutbusting of its Elo Experience and "Bella Figura" programs, Boston Ballet is closing out its 2010–2011 season with a breath of classical fresh air — or so it would seem.
Everything is beautiful
"Bella figura" in Italian is more than a phrase — it's a philosophy. It makes life beautiful. "Bella Figura" as the title of Boston Ballet's latest program is an invitation to find beauty in three disparate choreographic styles — one of them incorporating topless women (as well as men).
A feel-good ending
The 2011 Boston LGBT Film Festival kicks off with what amounts to a classy TV-movie from Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) in which fortysomething Berlin professional couple Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper), both feeling the 20-year itch, fall in love with the same man (Devid Striesow).
Moonstruck
George Balanchine didn’t create a slew of full-length ballets, but it’s easy to see why a setting of Shakespeare’s ever-popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of them — and not just because, back home in St. Petersburg, when he was eight, he played a bug in a theater production of the Bard’s moonbeam-muddled comedy.
Honor bound
In 2005, at a bus stop in Berlin, Hatun Sürücü, a 23-year-old German of Turkish descent, was shot to death — by her youngest brother.
Moon landing
Moon landing
And all the better for it
And all the better for it
Cary Fukunaga and Mia Wasikowska hold forth
Jane Austen has been a movie and television icon for some time now, and yet the Jane that both big and small screens just can't get enough of is the "poor, obscure, plain, little" heroine of Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel.
Its own stamp
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet — all of 10 dancers — blew into the Tsai Performance Center last weekend with a Celebrity Series program that included two choreographers — Jirí Kylián and Jorma Elo — who've been Boston Ballet staples of late.
Venice Rising
In their dark suits, they could have been Milanese bankers, except for the brightly colored ties (each different), puddling trousers, and full spectrum of hairstyles.
Coolidge Corner Theatre | February 20, 2011
Live opera — at least, live opera from the Met — has been a huge success in movie theaters. (In Boston, the Fenway routinely sells out two screens.) What about not-quite-live dance?
Mary Poppins touches down at the Opera House
"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," Julie Andrews sang in Walt Disney's 1964 movie-musical adaptation of Mary Poppins . The medicine in P.L. Travers's original children's stories — eight volumes spanning the years 1934–1988 — was more like a rum punch.
Dead end?
Bobby Fischer was (a) a former world chess champion; (b) the greatest chess player who ever lived; (c) an idiot savant; (d) a prodigy; (e) a megalomaniac; (f) anti-Semitic; (g) paranoid; (h) the guy Barbra Streisand had a crush on in high school; (i) all of the above. Correct answers? Definitely (a) , (e) , (f) , (g) , and (!) (h) , and quite possibly (b) , but not (c) or (d) .
Good Will hunting
If you're thinking that Shakespeare never released a greatest-hits play, you've never seen Cymbeline . Then again, that wouldn't put you in a very elite group, since this late (1610 or 1611) romance is one of the Bard's least-produced works.
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