Once again, the Westport Arts Center is embarking on an exciting, innovative chamber music series. Russell Platt, composer, senior editor for classical music at The New Yorker and curator for the Westport Arts Center, has brought back violinist and cellist Colin and Eric Jacobsen of the Brooklyn Rider Quartet for a concert on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 8:00 p.m. at the Westport ...
Half the month is almost over and this movie blog almost forgot to mention National Novel Month. Yes, I do mean novels, books, fiction of course! For, where would the movies be without great novels to provide the stories that come to life on the screen. I’d run out of fingers and toes if I tired to count the number of authors I’ve heard speak that have had a book optioned for a film and are hopeful that maybe, someday, just maybe, their words will be spoken by an actor. There is always hope, as this month alone, at least...
It's been twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down. This spontaneous, populist act was a rousing confirmation for freedom from the tyranny of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany. It was astonishing to see all of the young people converge at that site, climb over it and chip it away. Leonard Bernstein joined in the celebration with Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus on Christmas Day, 1989, The concert was heard in over twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the Ode to Joy with...
November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As you may recall from experience or world history class the cold war was at its most chilling point prior to and for many years after the construction of the wall in 1961. Here’s what an authoritative source, Discovering Collection, wrote. "Large numbers of refugees from Communist Europe and particularly East Germany were using Berlin as an escape route to the West. They were able to cross freely into the Western sectors of Berlin and were then flown to West Germany. From 1949 to 1959, over two...
