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Rogovoy Report 8/7/20

This week’s cultural highlights include indie-rock legends, new music, old music, jazz, plus a whole lot more.

Yo La Tengo — one of the most celebrated and adventurous bands in rock history — returns to MASS MoCA in North Adams for two acoustic, socially distanced concerts on tonight and Saturday, both at 8:30pm. The unassuming, self-effacing trio featuring husband-and-wife singer-songwriters Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley and longtime bassist James McNew has been making influential, below-the-radar music for three-dozen years, maintaining an ardent cult fan base and support from both critics and peers.

Contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform the New York State premiere of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds — originally composed for the group in 2014 – live at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., today at 4pm. The performance will also be live-streamed and is part of a week-long residency.

Brooklyn goth-folk duo Charming Disaster will bring their playfully macabre duets about love, death, crime, ancient mythology, and the supernatural with two live shows at The Foundry in West Stockbridge, Mass., tonight, and Saturday at 7pm. Charming Disaster was formed in 2012 by Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris. Inspired by the gothic humor of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, the noir storytelling of Raymond Chandler, the murder ballads of the Americana tradition, and the dramatic flair of the cabaret, they write songs that tell stories, using two voices to explore dark narratives and characters with a playfully macabre sensibility.

An octet of BSO musicians will play works by Nico Muhly and Paquito D’Rivera among others as part of Tanglewood’s online BSO Musicians in Recital series tonight at 8pm. Musicians including Bonnie Bewick, Mickey Katz, and Lawrence Wolfe will perform traditional, folk, and contemporary selections arranged and composed by Bewick and Wolfe themselves, as well as a performance of #cellominute - a world premiere compilation of small works for solo cello. Cynthia Meyers, Robert Sheena, Michael Wayne, Richard Ranti, and Jason Snider round out the program with a performance of Umoja by celebrated composer Valerie Coleman. The event is hosted by Lauren Ambrose. And on Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm, Tanglewood streams an encore performance of the BSO with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Children’s Choir performing Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, featuring mezzo-soprano Susan Graham.

A free, live-streamed Hudson Jazz Workshop Concert featuring pianist Armen Donelian and saxophonist Marc Mommaas with bassist Jay Anderson on Sunday at 4pm, is the culminating event of a series taking place as part of the 14th annual 2020 Hudson Jazz Workshop, including a two-day Online Composers Forum (today and Saturday) and an Online Masterclass with Jay Anderson on Sunday.

Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.