Before I run down the cultural highlights of the coming weekend, I wanted to share a few observations about Bob Dylan’s concert last Monday night at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady. At age 82, Dylan seemed as lively and urgent as ever. Dylan has come to terms with his voice, playing its limitations as strengths, working with it rather than against it. There is no struggle here, but rather masterful phrasing and diction, colorful tones running through his register from the top to a gleefully eerie deeper bottom.
If you have been dwelling in a cave for the past decade or so, you may not have known that Dylan long ago retired his guitar in favor of the piano keyboard. He rules the roost from the baby grand, and after several years of muddy fumbling with the black and whites, he is an eloquent player, well-versed in styles ranging from honky-tonk to bebop abstraction to Gershwin-like discordances to the basic boogie-woogie chords that he first learned to play as a teen-ager modeling himself after Little Richard. Going into this night, I felt confident that this would be the final time I would attend a Bob Dylan concert. And I’m happy to have this concert be the one that caps a lifetime of seeing Dylan onstage. But based on his terrific performance, his vitality, and the overall excellence of the night, I may just see him again next time he swings by after all.
And now, the weekend highlights:
Me and the Sky, a cabaret of “empowering Broadway hits,” will send off WAM founder Kristen van Ginhoven in style, running at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., tonight and Saturday at 7:30pm. The celebratory evening focuses on a full array of women’s stories, featuring songs from such hit musicals as Rent, Come From Away, Newsies, Shucked, and Waitress. (Fri-Sat, Nov 1-4)
MacArthur Award and Avery Fisher prizewinning flutist Claire Chase performs Pauline Oliveros’ Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase, based on the writings of Claire’s grandmother, and Winsome Brown performs her one-woman show, This Is Mary Brown, at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., tonight at 7pm, and Saturday at 3pm. (Fri-Sat, Nov 3-4)
The Orchestra Now performs its program Exodus: Jewish Composers in Exile at the Bard Fisher Center at Bard College on Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 2pm. The orchestra, under the direction of conductor Leon Botstein, will play seldom-heard works by Jewish composers who were in exile from their homelands during the Second World War, including Alexandre Tansman, Josef Tal, Walter Kaufmann, and Marcel Rubin. (Sat-Sun, Nov 4-5)
The Close Encounters with Music series kicks off its fall season with Virtue and Virtuosity, a concert featuring works by Sarasate, Saint Saëns, and Russian/Ukrainian composer Nikolai Kapustin at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, Mass., on Sunday at 4pm. Performers include pianist Adam Golka, violinist Giora Schmidt, cellist Philip Thompson, and Close Encounters artistic director Yehuda Hanani, also on cello. (Sun, Nov 5)
Also of note:
Jethro Tull brings its Seven Decades tour featuring its legacy of popular progressive rock to Albany’s Palace Theatre on Saturday at 7:30pm
Bard College Conservatory of Music String Trio performs Bach, Sibelius, and others at Saugerties United Methodist Church in Saugerties, N.Y. on Sunday at 3pm.
Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams performs works by Bartók, Chopin, Liszt, and more at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., on Sunday at 3pm)
English rock band Spiritualized performs at Basilica Hudson in Hudson, N.Y. next Wednesday, Nov 8, at 8:30pm.
And Musician and novelist Susanna Hoffs – best known as lead singer of the Bangles -- is in conversation with WAMC’s Joe Donahue at University at Albany next Thursday, November 9, at 7pm)
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.substack.com.
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