Rogovoy Report 1/31/20

The upcoming cultural highlights in our region include South African dance, new age music, Renaissance music, and a whole lot more.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Ben Cosgrove brings his nature-inspired, new-agey instrumental sounds to Dewey Hall in Sheffield, Mass., tonight at 7:30pm.

Gregory Maqoma, the South African choreographer of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, returns to the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., with Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro, performed by the Vuyani Dance Theatre, on Saturday at 8pm. The work weaves a narrative of greed, power, and the pain of mourning with a moving live score interrogating Ravel’s music through South African vocal traditions. This event is co-presented by Jacob’s Pillow.

The Crescendo music series hosts “Thanksgivings for Life and Love: 16th Century Spanish Polyphony and Contemporary Latin American Folk Music,” a program that illustrates a parallel between spiritual issues set to music by Spanish Renaissance masters, and social justice and human rights matters expressed musically in a merging of folklore themes, popular songs and classical contemporary works by famous 20th century Latin American composers, on Saturday at 4 pm at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Mass., and again on Sunday at 4 pm, at Lakeville United Methodist Church, in Lakeville, Conn. Six to eight-voice motets by some of Spain’s most remarkable Renaissance composers are featured, along with choral and instrumental arrangements based on Latin American folk melodies.

Musicians and cultural figures including Richard Barone, David Amram, Milton, Marc Black, David & Jacob Bernz, Steve Addabbo, Lydia Adams Davis and others team up for a program called “Music + Revolution: Greenwich Village in the 1960s,” at the Towne Crier Cafe in Beacon, N.Y., tonight at 8:30pm. Even before the “Beatnik Riots” of 1961, New York City’s Greenwich Village was the epicenter of a revolutionary movement in the history of American music and culture. In the early 1960s and throughout the decade, a new wave of writers and performers, inspired by the folk revival of the fifties, created socially aware and deeply personal songs that changed the notion of what a song could be, changing the “folk” repertoire from traditional songs to songs sprung from personal, contemporary experience and the nation’s headlines; raising the level of political self-expression to high art.

Next weekend, The Orchestra Now performs Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica, in the Fisher Center at Bard College on Saturday, February 8, at 8pm, and Sunday, February 9, at 2pm. The program, under the direction of Leon Botstein, includes The Consecration of the House overture and Piano Concerto No. 4, featuring soloist Anna Polonsky.