What did you do in the arts this weekend?

I attended all three performances of Union-Endicott High School’s amazing production of Godspell. How were the arts a part of your week and weekend?

Fenimore Quartet makes trip to West Kortright Centre worthwhile

Reviewed by Lee Shepherd

Take four fine musicians, put them in an 1850s church surrounded by farm fields frequented by horses and other critters, and ask the performers to play their favorite works, and you’ll get the marvelous concert performed last night (July 25) by the Fenimore Quartet at the West Kortright Music Centre.

Disturbing Shostakovich, delicious Beethoven lead another balanced BPO performance

Reviewed by Lee Shepherd

It’s not a tune you’d go home humming. World-class cellist Amit Peled declared his adversarial relationship with his cello in the grim five-note motif within the first bar of the work, creating a tension that soon rose to a shriek. Hysterics, grimness, angst — these are all adjectives that came to mind when listening to him perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Cello Concerto No. 1” with the Binghamton Philharmonic Sunday (Jan. 29) at Binghamton University’s Anderson Center.

BPO, under Novo, teams with pianist Wosner for top-flight concert

Editor’s note: Julian Shepherd kindly wrote this review so that his wife, Lee, could attend a Madrigal Choir of Binghamton rehearsal. She was loathe to skip any rehearsals, with MCOB’s “Lessons and Carols” concert coming up on Thanksgiving weekend.

By Julian Shepherd

Maybe the reason for existence is what Charles Ives questioned in the The Unanswered Question, but the Binghamton Philharmonic provided one answer for us last Sunday (Nov. 6) at Binghamton University: great music performed with great skill and sensitivity. Accompanied by guest pianist Shai Wosner, the orchestra played a program of two well-known and beloved pieces by Beethoven and Schumann, introduced by the lesser-known work by Ives. The performance, in the Anderson Center’s Osterhout Concert Theater, was dedicated to the memory of Marianne Wallenberg, a long-time violinist, teacher and proponent of music in Binghamton. (Wallenberg and her husband, the late Fritz Wallenberg, founded the Binghamton Symphony, now the BPO.)