Iris Dement
COUNTRY-FOLK SINGER-SONGWRITER IRIS DEMENT at CLUB HELSINKI
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Iris DeMent brings her unmistakable soprano and authentic country-folk songs to Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday, April 20, 2013, at 9 p.m. Had Iris DeMent been making country albums in the ’70s and ’80s and had more commercial ambition, she’d probably now be considered right up there with Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Instead, she’s lived a contemporary life, a somewhat private life. As she recently told an interviewer, “There’s a lot that goes into life besides songwriting.” And she’s taken her time in composing songs that fit into no genre easily.
ASO Music Director Leon Botstein
AMERICAN SYMPHONY to SAMPLE WAGNER OPERAS at BARD COLLEGE
(ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.) – From a vision of the Holy Grail to the longing for and redemption of love, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra will perform pieces of Richard Wagner’s most famous operatic works at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, the final concert of the 2012–13 season, on Friday, April 19, 2013, and Saturday, April 20, 2013, at 8 p.m., with a preconcert talk at 7 p.m. The program includes Lohengrin: Preludes to Acts I and III; Tristan und Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, and Die Walküre: Act I, featuring Julie Makerov, soprano; Richard Cox, tenor; and Peter Volpe, bass.
NANCY KRICORIAN to READ FROM WWII NOVEL at SPOTTY DOG
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Author Nancy Kricorian will read from her new novel All The Light There Was at Spotty Dog Books and Ale on Saturday, April 20, 2013, at 4 pm. Kricorian’s new work tells the story of an Armenian family’s struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 1940s, and has been called “an unforgettable story of loyalty, love and the many faces of the resistance, meticulously researched and lyrically told.”
JAZZ MASTERS DUO CONCERT to BENEFIT HUDSON JAZZWORKS SCHOLARSHIP FUND
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Pianist Armen Donelian and saxophonist Marc Mommaas will perform a duo concert to benefit the Hudson Jazzworks Scholarship Fund at Hudson Jazzworks Studio (338 Kipp Road, Hudson) on Sunday, April 21, 2013, at 3pm. Now in its seventh season, the world-class Hudson Jazz Workshop offers a supportive context where musicians may focus intensively on personal expression. Under the guidance of master faculty/artists Donelian and Mommaas, participants are attracted from around the block and around the world. For several days in August, they experience accelerated artistic growth with other like-minded musicians, free from commercial pressures and academic prerequisites.
TSL CELEBRATES FIRST 40 YEARS with ANNIVERSARY BENEFIT
(HUDSON, N.Y.) –Time & Space Limited Theatre Company, Inc., better known around town as TSL, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, which will be marked this Saturday, April 20, 2013, from 6:30pm to 9pm, with a benefit event, TSL: The First 40 Years.
Mezzo-soprano Malena Dayen
CONCERTS at BARD COLLEGE FEATURE MUSIC of THE HOLOCAUST
(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is presenting a special concert series titled Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism, featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II, on Saturday, April 20, and Saturday, April 27, 2013. Both concerts will be held at 7 p.m. at Olin Hall on the Bard Campus. Admission is free and open to the public and no reservations are necessary.
“Nationalism, Continuity, and Creativity: Music of Warsaw, Lodz and other Eastern Ghettoes” will be performed on Saturday, April 20, and will include Robert Cuckson’s 2003 song cycle, “Der Gayst funem Shturem” (The Spirit of the Storm), with text taken from the poems of ghetto survivor Binem Heller. It will be performed in Yiddish by mezzo-soprano Malena Dayen, with piano accompaniment by David Rosenmeyer, the couple for whom Cuckson composed this cycle. The Warsaw Ghetto song cycle is informed by the rift within Jewry itself between Western and Eastern European models of Jewish accommodation and Jewish being in the modern world, a recurrent theme in Arendt’s Jewish writings. The musical performances are all, each in their own way, an expression of this internal struggle within the larger Jewish community during the Holocaust. There will be a panel discussion with Cuckson and others immediately following the performance.