The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include roots-music, folk, Baroque, jazz, classical, and a whole lot more.
In a pairing of roots-music superstars, multiple Grammy Award-winner and MacArthur Fellow musical genius Chris Thile teams with Grammy Award-winning musical polymath Dom Flemons of the Carolina Chocolate Drops in Courtyard D at MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 8pm.
Barrington Stage Company is presenting a virtual reading the popular “Three Viewings” by Jeffrey Hatcher, today through Sunday. Featuring three comic/dramatic monologues set in a midwestern funeral parlor over a three-day Christmas weekend, the cast stars Debra Jo Rupp reuniting with her “That ‘70s Show” co-star Kurtwood Smith, joined by Angel Desai for this special streaming version. When the play opened at the Manhattan Theater club in the mid-1990s, the critic from the NYT wrote, "What makes Jeffrey Hatcher's play "Three Viewings" diverting is his knack for telling stories that at the very moment when they seem to be settling into predictable paths, throw in a zinger."
Upstate New York Singer-songwriter Belle-Skinner brings her hauntingly beautiful, lilting soprano and innate sense of melody to the Foundry in West Stockbridge, as part of the Patio Productions series, on Saturday at 7pm. Though her influences cover a broad range of genres – from French chansons and Russian folk to contemporary alt-pop and rock – Belle-Skinner’s gossamer voice often draws comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Jeff Buckley, Angel Olsen, and Lana Del Rey.
Violinists Hannah Lynn Cohen and Jeremiah Blacklow will perform “The Evolution of the Violin Duo,” a program that includes violin duo selections from the Baroque era up to contemporary 20th-century duets, as part of Bobbie’s Fall Series at the Unicorn Theatre Patio on the Stockbridge campus of Berkshire Theatre Group on Saturday at 2pm. Then on Sunday at 2pm, the Benny Kohn Trio will perform its brand of straight-ahead jazz at the Unicorn.
Things are busy at Dewey Hall in Sheffield this weekend, with several concerts, the first featuring South Street Swing performing pre-rock popular standards tonight at 7pm, followed by Alchemy, a trio of musicians steeped in traditional English Country Dance and Contra Dance music, on Saturday at 2 and 4pm. Alchemy will also perform songs, French folk, new compositions, jigs, reels, waltzes, Scottish melodies, and more.
Every evening around sundown, the Wassaic Project presents Christy Chan’s All is Not Lost, a six-story outdoor video projection of a waterfall flowing backwards on the side of the Maxon Mills in Wassaic, N.Y.
On Saturday at 5:30pm, Leon Botstein conducts the Orchestra Now in a program featuring the Violin Concerto in G by Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The son of a slave and a planter in French Guadeloupe, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was not only the first known classical composer of African ancestry, but also an accomplished violinist, champion fencer and colonel of the first all-Black military regiment in Europe. Bookending the concerto are orchestral arrangements of Solitude and Sophisticated Lady, two mid-century masterpieces by the inimitable Duke Ellington, and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta by Béla Bartók. The concert will be live-streamed for free from the Bard Fisher Center's website, on FB Live, and on YouTube live.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.com
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