The Leopard at Des Artistes is an Italian culinary delight. It distinguishes its food from North to South of Italy, with the use of butter versus olive oil, and all kinds of pasta and popular vegetables native to that region. The restaurant prides itself in creating everyday food with respect to Italian cultural traditions with quality ingredients, hospitality, and outstanding service. As they like to say, “Buon Appetito!
Tonight’s Juneteenth Celebration at New York’s Lincoln Center was a reflective, fresh, and vibrant source of inspiration for all participants. This nonpareil venue inspired artistic expression and creativity with its lustrous modernist designs, magnificent facades, soaring columns, and capacious plazas. It was a celebration of elegance, sumptuousness, and breathtaking transcendence.
The American Classical Orchestra ascended to the stage before a packed house in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Under the baton of conductor Thomas Crawford, the concert began with Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture (1829). Marvelously performed by the ACO, this work resides in the canon of intensely popular music. It was received by the audience akin to the intense adulation witnessed at its performance at the Paris Opéra in 1929.
The performance of Mozart’s Requiem, K526, was glorious and ecstatic. The sui generis admixture of rich sounds from soloists, chorus, and orchestra was superb. At the same time, the sumptuous luminosity of the famed Lacrimosa was almost more than an emotive listener could process without soulful introspection.
The Orchestra Now stands proudly in the well-earned tradition of excellence among the superb symphony orchestras that regularly perform in New York City. And while they celebrate major standard repertoire (sometimes called the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), they take care to include adventurous works that warrant recognition and performance before eager patrons.
Hamlet was not written for dance numbers but for murders. But there are ample opportunities for arias. The recent Macbeth version, directed by Sam Gold, added original songs to altered text. A full-length opera of Hamlet is ambitious.
Taking several newbies to The Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York was fascinating and heartwarming as I witnessed their almost instantaneous psychic connection to the multimedia extravaganza with its story, music, drama, characters, setting, orchestra, and amazing choric artistes extraordinaire – the singers.
In the Met’s Don Carlos we are in the time of the Inquisition at the peak of its ultramontane evil powers. We discover love’s immortality.
American Classical Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall with period instruments expressed the music’s affektenlehre, mysticism, reverence, and beauty
From the moment lights dimmed and the curtain raised, we saw Puccini’s vision of Madama Butterfly and entered his artistic world, thoroughly suspending our disbelief to participate in a story of sublime creative beauty, poignancy, and tragedy. Lyric soprano Eleonora Buratto’s breathtaking, sumptuous high Db filled the concert hall with rapturous, soaring grandeur.