The cultural highlights for our region this weekend include a jazzy sound-installation; an online Beethoven concert; a musical celebration of the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois; and a program of French piano music.
The Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, Mass., is home to this year’s W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Festival, which will be available online. The program centers on Great Barrington’s most famous native son and his commitment to racial justice, connecting W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision and work for liberation with ongoing protests for Black lives. On Sunday at 3 p.m., dancer/choreographer Reggie Harris and singer-songwriter Greg Greenway will present “Deeper Than the Skin.” Then the Du Bois Legacy Day event, ”Timeless Messages of Prophecy & Protest,” takes place at the Mahaiwe on Tuesday, February 23, at 7 p.m. The Du Bois Legacy Day proclamation will be read and the 2020 and 2021 Du Bois Legacy Award recipients will be honored: activist and Clinton Church Restoration Founder Wray Gunn of Sheffield and musician-activist Reggie Harris. Dr. Mary Nell Morgan and musician/singer Wanda Houston will join forces for a powerful rendering and examination of the sorrow songs from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 biography “The Souls of Black Folk.” Local activists, musicians, performance artists, community leaders and scholars will reflect on the meaning of Du Bois’s legacy and vision for racial justice in the time of uprisings and movements for Black lives and racial justice today. The free events can be viewed at mahaiwe.org.
The Bard Music Festival presents “A Program of French Piano Music Inspired by the World of Nadia Boulanger,” a recital of French music performed by pianists Danny Driver and Piers Lane, available to stream on-demand through UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center at Bard’s virtual stage, today through next Thursday, February 25. First recorded at The Menuhin Hall, in Sussex, England in fall 2020, the concert features works by César Franck, Lili Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns.
Saturday night is your last chance to hear a sound installation by jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Jason Moran at MASS MoCA in North Adams, as part of the cultural laboratory’s Auditory After Hours series. Moran’s soundscape is specially designed for and inspired by Sol LeWitt's groundbreaking wall drawings at MASS MoCA. Advance, timed tickets are required; go to massmoca.org for more info.
When MTV’s Hip-O-Meter declared accordions and sousaphones to be the least hip instruments – personally, I would add banjos to the list -- the Hudson Valley’s own Brian Mitchell and Clark Gayton launched Fatboy Kanootch to prove them wrong. You can catch Kanootch at the Falcon in Marlboro, N.Y., tonight at 7.
This week’s new BSO NOW ONLINE video stream features Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons leading the BSO in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Pastoral, and Iman Habibi’s Jeder Baum spricht; plus a chamber music performance of Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp. Each new BSO NOW video launches at www.bso.org/now on Thursdays at noon. All BSO NOW online videos are available for viewing for 30 days after their initial release date.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com
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