January 27, 2021

Compatible Spirits: Finding Mozart and Chekhov in Their Letters

By Stuart Mitchner

You cannot imagine how enchanting the music sounds from a box close to the orchestra!

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) to his wife

If we are not together now, it isn’t you who are to blame, but the demon that filled me with bacilli and you with love for art.

—Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) to his future wife

Besides listening to Mozart and reading Chekhov this week — both born in January, the composer on the 27th, the writer on the 29th — I’ve been reading their letters, which are enlivened by the same buoyant spirit, along with a shared understanding of the human comedy in relation to life and love and nature, the joys, temptations, and excesses of existence.

As I read, I kept imagining how two such sympathetic spirits might have viewed one another in the context of their work, the music Mozart might have discovered in Chekhov and the literature Chekhov might have drawn from Mozart. So I decided to compare some letters from their middle twenties as well as letters to their wives later in life. Chekhov was 27 when he wrote the letter below, dated April 25, 1887.

A Cossack Wedding

Writing to his sister Maria after revisiting his birthplace, Taganrog, on the Black Sea, Chekhov sorts through “many discordant impressions” as he recalls the events of the previous day, “a real Cossack wedding, with music, women caterwauling, and a loathsome drinking bout. … I acted as best man, and was dressed in a borrowed frock coat, with fearfully wide trousers, and not a single stud on my shirt. In Moscow such a best man would have been kicked out, but here I looked smarter than anyone. … I saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls, but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles. Probably owing to my drunken condition the local maidens found me witty and satirical!” Meanwhile, “apparently in obedience to a local custom, the newlyweds kissed every minute, kissing so vehemently that every time their lips made an explosive noise, I had a taste of oversweet raisins in my mouth, and got a spasm in my left calf. … I can’t tell you how much fresh caviar I ate and how much local red wine I drank. It’s a wonder I didn’t burst.”

If Mozart were scoring it, the wedding feast would be a scherzo followed by the moody andante of an overnight wait between trains at a place called Zvyerevo: “I had to sleep in a second-class railway-carriage on the siding. I left the car to relieve myself and it was miraculous out there: the moon, the boundless steppe — a desert with ancient grave-mounds — the silence of the tomb, and the cars and rails standing out boldly against the dim sky — a dead world. It was a picture one would not forget for ages and ages.”  more

Lewis Center Presents an Online Production of “Unbecoming”; A Victorian Author Meets Her Medieval Subject in Princeton Alumna’s Play

“UNBECOMING”: The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater is presenting “Unbecoming.” Directed by Eliana Cohen-Orth, the video will be available online, to view for free, through January 31. Above: Lady Charlotte Guest (Paige Elizabeth Allen, center) is torn between Victorian societal expectations personified by the Wife of England (Eliana Cohen-Orth, left) and ambitions to complete a translation of the “Mabinogion,” which includes the tale of Blodeuwedd (Nora Aguiar, right). (Photo by Cathy Watkins, for the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University)

By Donald H. Sanborn III

The Lewis Center for the Arts is presenting the first full production of Unbecoming, a new play by Princeton University alumna Emma Catherine Watkins. The play is inspired by the true story of Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-1895), the Victorian aristocrat who became the first person to translate the Mabinogion — a Medieval collection of Welsh stories that originated from oral traditions — into English.

Unbecoming, which employs a play-within-a-play format, has two protagonists: Guest, and Blodeuwedd, a central character in the last of the “Four Branches” of the Mabinogion. The legend of the “fairest, and most graceful” woman — whom the magician and warrior Lleu Llaw Gyffes conjures out of flowers to be his wife, but transforms into an owl as punishment for infidelity — is juxtaposed against a somewhat fictionalized depiction of Guest, whose husband tries to mold her to Victorian conceptions of an ideal wife.

Guest is given a strong portrayal by Paige Elizabeth Allen, who also is the production’s dramaturg. After Allen discovered Unbecoming through a development workshop hosted by Princeton University in January 2020, she and director (and cast member) Eliana Cohen-Orth proposed the project to the Program in Theater, as their senior theses. The production was developed in collaboration with Watkins. more

The Dryden Ensemble Presents Virtual Concerts

LUTENIST AND MORE: Daniel Swenberg plays rarely heard early music on January 31, in a concert presented by The Dryden Ensemble. The group is doing three virtual performances this season.

The Dryden Ensemble presents three virtual concerts in the coming weeks. Named in honor of John Dryden, the English poet laureate whose words inspired Baroque composers including Purcell and Handel, the Dryden Ensemble specializes in performing music of the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments. 

On Sunday, January 31 at 4 p.m., lutenist Daniel Swenberg will be featured in Extraordinary Tunings, a recital of rarely heard works from 1620-1650. On Sunday, February 14 at 4 p.m., Lisa Terry will present a lecture-recital entitled “Leycester Lyra Viol Lessons.” The ensemble will celebrate Bach’s birthday on Sunday, March 21 at 3 p.m. with a streaming of their live concert of Bach’s St. John Passion, recorded on March 13, 2020.  more

ABT Studio Company Presents Winter Festival

VIRTUAL VIRTUOSITY: Aleisha Walker, a member of American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company, will perform in “Escapades” as part of a two-night festival on American Ballet Theatre’s YouTube channel. (Photo by Jojo Mamangun)

World premieres by Hope Boykin and Lauren Lovette will be presented over two evenings during the ABT Studio Company Winter Festival on Tuesday and Wednesday, February 9 and 10, at 7 p.m., on American Ballet Theatre’s YouTube channel.

The virtual event features 14 dancers from the company, which is affiliated with American Ballet Theatre (ABT) and often serves as a feeder into the main troupe. It is hosted by ABT Studio Company alumni Isabella Boylston and Calvin Royal III, and also includes works by Amy Hall Garner, Marius Petipa, Alexei Ratmansky, Brendan Saye, Antony Tudor, and Rostislav Zakharov.

Company members gathered last fall for a “ballet bubble” at Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, CT, and at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York, following protocol to protect against the pandemic. The performances were filmed at Kaatsbaan. They highlight the studio company’s mission to develop the next generation of ballet dancers, choreographers, and audiences. more

“Yggdrasil”

Landscape paintings by Joe Kazimierczyk are on exhibit at Bell’s Tavern, 183 North Union Street, Lambertville, through the end of February. The artist’s work, in the style of traditional realism, captures the beauty, color, and texture of the woods and streams throughout the countryside in the Sourland Mountains and beyond. Bell’s Tavern is open daily from 5 to 9 p.m.

“Looking Forward” Exhibit Coming to Artists’ Gallery

“1951 CHEVY COUPE”: This watercolor by Richard Harrington is featured in “Looking Forward,” his dual exhibit with Alla Podolsky, on view February 4 through February 28 at the Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville.

Artists Richard Harrington and Alla Podolsky have announced the opening of their joint show, “Looking Forward,” on Thursday, February 4, at the Artists’ Gallery, 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville. The exhibit, which runs through February 28, features watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and oil paintings by the two artists. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, there will be no opening reception for this exhibition.

‘“Looking Forward” refers to the sense of optimism that the new year and approaching season of spring provides for us,” said Harrington.

A native of Kiev, Ukraine, Podolsky creates work that can seem dreamlike. “If I were to distill what I do as an artist, I would say I paint experiences. We have collectively gone through a lot this past year, and I feel the need to impart past experiences of shared warmth, of joyful moments that ground us in difficult times. I like to think of my work as hopeful. Bright settings, vibrant colors, warm undertones. It’s my way of trying to lift some of the burden for my audience.” more

Virtual Programs at Zimmerli Art Museum

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers has announced virtual programs for the new year while the museum building remains closed to the public and in-person events are suspended until further notice.

The free film series The History of Russian Design continues on Thursday, January 28. The 20-minute episode on Zoom will be followed by a live Q&A with Julia Tulovsky, curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli, and Alexandra Sankova, director of the Moscow Design Museum, the co-curators of the Zimmerli exhibition “Everyday Soviet: Soviet Industrial Design and Nonconformist Art (1959-1989),” which is now a virtual exhibition on Zimmerli at Home. Learn more and register at zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.

Express your creativity and fight off cabin fever with Saturday Sparks Adult Art Workshops. Tom Rutledge returns with watercolors on January 30 and April 17 (each session has a different theme), and Wes Sherman introduces a new medium, oil pastels, on March 13. Each workshop costs $30; discounts are available for Zimmerli members or multiple sessions. No experience is necessary, but seating is limited. Visit go.rutgers.edu/artclasses for details and to register. more

January 20, 2021

An Inauguration Day Celebration of the Visual Poetry of Walker Evans

By Stuart Mitchner

It’s transcendent, you feel it. It’s there, the vanished transcendence and insistence of chance, action and fortuity. It’s there and you can’t unfeel it.

—Walker Evans (1903-1975)

Walker Evans is talking about the impact of the moment he encountered “a visual object” he knew he had to photograph. If you read those words after wading through the tide of raw imagery unleashed by the January 6 storming of the Capitol, you know what it means to feel a force so insistent that “you can’t unfeel it.”

In the opening chapter of Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (Princeton Univ. Press $39.95), Svetlana Alpers refers to poet William Carlos Williams’s review of Evans’s groundbreaking 1938 book, American Photography (“the pictures talk to us and they say plenty”). Focusing on the poet and photographer’s shared “passionate belief in American art as they made it,” Alpers quotes from a poem by Williams: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

The idea that poetry and photography have the power to enhance or sustain or even save a life resonates on January 20, 2021, whether in relation to the Capitol riots or the inauguration of the 46th president, who found therapy for a childhood disability by reciting the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The “news from poems” in this tumultuous month ranges from the “terrible beauty is born” of Yeats to President Biden’s campaign mantra by way of Seamus Haney: “Make hope and history rhyme.” more

New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Presents Second of Virtual Concert Performances

By Nancy Plum

New Jersey Symphony Orchestra launched the second of its series of virtual performances this season last Thursday night. Led by NJSO Music Director Xian Zhang (who was also showcased as piano soloist), the concert also featured NJSO concertmaster Eric Wyrick and music of William Grant Still, Giacomo Puccini, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Antonin Dvorák. Recorded in Prudential Hall of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center last October and presented as a “concert film,” in collaboration with DreamPlay Films, the online performance combined the lush music of these four composers with scenes of New Jersey Symphony’s home base in Newark.  

Considered the “Dean of African American composers,” William Grant Still composed nearly 200 works during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Still had a multi-faceted career as classical composer, while also arranging for popular band leaders and film scores. Mother and Child was initially the second movement of Still’s 1943 Suite for Violin and Piano, inspired by a lithograph of the same name by abstract figurative and modern artist Sargent Claude Johnson. Still arranged this movement in several orchestrations, including for strings alone, which was the version heard Thursday night.   more

An International, Digital Cast for 2021 Princeton Triangle Club Show

THE SHOW MUST GO ON: This year’s Princeton Triangle Show is digital, but it is more of a movie musical than a Zoom video. “All Underdogs Go To Heaven” is available free online through February 1.

By Anne Levin

To the Princeton University students who take part in the Princeton Triangle Club (PTC) Show at McCarter Theatre each year, canceling the 2021 production because of COVID-19 was unthinkable.

The PTC is the oldest touring collegiate musical comedy troupe in the nation. Famous alumni of the show, which is written and performed by students and directed by professionals, include author F. Scott Fitzgerald and actors James Stewart, Brooke Shields, and Ellie Kemper. The annual musical comedy with a famous kick-line is a revered tradition, dating back 130 years. Members weren’t about to let the pandemic, which shut down the campus last March, break that tradition.

Thanks to an effort that reached across three continents, a virtual version of the show will go on. But those involved in the creation of All Underdogs Go To Heaven say it is more than just a video. The production, which is available starting tonight, January 20 at 8 p.m., is being billed as “a movie musical.”  more

WW Arts Council presents “Harmony” Exhibition

“HARMONY”: “High Fever” by Erika Hibbert, above, and “Flying Kites Series” by Carole Jury, below, are featured in the West Windsor Arts Council’s new online exhibition. It can also be viewed by appointment at the West Windsor Arts Center through February 26.

Communities often look to artists to provide the bridge between what has happened in the past and what is needed going forward. When the Exhibition Committee of the West Windsor Arts Council sat down last September, this was exactly their intention in creating the “Harmony” exhibition. At that meeting, the conversation revolved around how to bring people together, “There are too many things up in the air right now. What makes us feel grounded and connected and how can art accomplish this?”  more

Hunterdon Art Museum To Open Three Exhibits

“EX UNO PLURES 2”: This work by Laura Moriarty is part of “Laura Moriarty: Resurfacing,” one of three new exhibitions opening at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton on January 24. A virtual opening is Saturday, January 23 from 7 to 8 p.m.

Hunterdon Art Museum will open three new exhibitions on Sunday, January 24: “Glass in the Expanded Field,” “Architectonic: Bruce Dehnert Sculptural Ceramics,” and “Laura Moriarty: Resurfacing.” The museum will make its new exhibitions available virtually in mid-February as part of its ongoing effort to bring contemporary art to underserved communities and those affected by COVID-19. 

A free virtual opening for the new exhibitions will take place on Saturday, January 23 from 7 to 8 p.m. and can be attended by registering at hunderdonmuseum.org.

“Glass in the Expanded Field,” curated by Caitlin Vitalo, highlights the complexity and versatility of glass art and the glassmaking community through the work of 17 artists. In the first half of the 20th century, American glassmaking was limited primarily to factories where workers produced multiples of the same object. Then in the 1960s, the American studio glass movement was born. Focusing on one of a kind objects that highlighted the unique qualities of glass, the early years of the movement set the tone for creative exploration of the material and its artistic capabilities.   more

Michener Museum Reopens February 5 with New Exhibit

“BEST COMPANY, LANGHORNE, PENNSYLVANIA”: This 1981 work by David Graham is featured in “Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley,” on view February 5 through August 15 at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa.

The Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., will reopen to the public on February 5 with the new exhibition “Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley.” On view through August 15, this major exhibition is curated by the Michener’s Curator of American Art Laura Turner Igoe and Curatorial Assistant Tara Kaufman. 

“Through the Lens” explores nearly 70 years of artistic experimentations with photographic processes and subject matter by artists in the Delaware Valley region.

The exhibition is organized through the themes of form, figure, landscape, community, and social and political activism and highlights over 100 photographs by nearly 40 artists. “Through the Lens” draws primarily from the Michener’s own deep collection of local photography, including many works that have never before been on view, from late prints by the modernist Charles Sheeler — whose time in Doylestown cemented his dedication to the medium — to aerial views of industrial sites by Newtown-based photographer Emmett Gowin.  more

January 13, 2021

Reading Sinclair Lewis, Dreaming Lincoln

By Stuart Mitchner

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

—Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

When I skimmed It Can’t Happen Here (1935) at the time of the 2016 election, I thought it might make an interesting column. But since the dystopian fantasy by Sinclair Lewis, who died 70 years ago this week, had already been reprinted to high sales and serious notice with Trump’s ascension to the nation’s highest office, I put the piece on hold.

The problem now is not just that I’m distracted by last week’s real-life invasion of the Capitol, but that I’m finding it hard to believe in a despotic president and former U.S. senator from Vermont named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who, the day after being inaugurated, demands the instant passage of a bill giving him complete control of “legislation and execution.” When Congress rejects the bill a day later, he declares martial law and orders the arrest of over a hundred “irresponsible and seditious” congressmen for “inciting to riot.” During the ensuing nationwide riots that the president has, in effect, incited himself, protestors are attacked by the bayonet-wielding troops of his vast private army, the Minute Men (a term with a certain ring in the era of the Tea Party).

Lewis portrays Windrip as grotesque, “almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes,” and “a luminous, ungrudging smile” that “he turned on and off deliberately, like an electric light, but which could make his ugliness more attractive than the simpers of any pretty man.” His hair was “so coarse and black and straight, and worn so long in the back, that it hinted of Indian blood.” During his years in the Senate, Windrip “preferred clothes that suggested the competent insurance salesman, but when farmer constituents were in Washington,” he “appeared in a ten-gallon hat.” Comparing him to “a sawed-off museum model of a medicine-show ‘doctor,’” who had “played the banjo and done card tricks and handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game,” Lewis details the offerings of “Old Dr. Alagash’s Traveling Laboratory, which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure, the Chinook Consumption Soother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles and Rheumatism Prepared from a … Secret Formula by the Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara.” Windrip had eventually ascended “from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine, standing in front of a megaphone, to the dignity of selling bogus economics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor lights in front of a microphone.”

If you find it hard to take such a character seriously, you’re in agreement with the novel’s hero, a small-town newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup, who at first considers Windrip little more than a bad joke and plays down criticism of the government in his paper, the Informer. “The hysteria can’t last; be patient, and wait and see,” he tells his readers, so hard is it for him to believe “that this comic tyranny could endure.” What most perplexes him is “that there could be a dictator seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulating Fascists …. a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward.” Did that, Doremus wonders, “make him less or more dangerous?”

As someone who, among many others, failed to take the current president seriously when he announced his candidacy, I should mention, as I did at the time, the front page of the June 17, 2015 New York Daily News (“CLOWN RUNS FOR PREZ”) showing the candidate with a red clown nose and mouth under the line: “Trump throws rubber nose in GOP ring.” While the star of The Apprentice has nothing in common with the likes of Twain and Ade (not to mention Will Rogers), it’s fair to say that he’s shared the metaphorical stage with a road show con man of vulgar frauds, shell games, and bogus medicine. more

“Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side” Receives Online World Premiere; McCarter and Round House Theatre Honor “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy”

“ETTA AND ELLA ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE:” Round House Theatre, in association with McCarter Theatre Center, is presenting the world premiere of Adrienne Kennedy’s “Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side.” Directed by Timothy Douglas, the prerecorded video will be available online through February 28. Above: Ella (Caroline Clay) describes a contentious relationship between two sisters, both of whom are authors. (Video still courtesy of Round House Theatre)

By Donald H. Sanborn III

McCarter is partnering with the Round House Theatre (in Bethesda, Maryland) to present an online festival, The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration and Influence.

Kennedy’s many awards include an Obie for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. A press release notes that her plays are “taught in colleges throughout the country, in Europe, India, and Africa.”

This series, which has been a fitting tribute to an underperformed playwright, consists of prerecorded performances produced by the Round House. All four productions have been conceived with a theatrical sensibility, while taking advantage of the visual — even cinematic — possibilities offered by video.

The festival opened with He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, which depicted young lovers, separated by physical space as well as their racial backgrounds. Their letters to each other illuminate America’s history of racial injustice. The excruciatingly relevant second installment, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, is inspired by the treatment Kennedy’s own son (and co-author) experienced at the hands of police officers. Ohio State Murders was the third play presented. While not as overtly autobiographical, it examines the racial prejudice Kennedy experienced on a mid-20th century campus.

Elements from all three of these plays appear, to varying degrees, in the final installment: Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, which is receiving its world premiere via this festival. The multilayered, deceptively stream-of-consciousness piece — which runs a little over a half an hour — is a monologue, though multiple characters speak.  more

Princeton Symphony Orchestra Presents Virtual Concert of Chamber and Piano Music

By Nancy Plum

Princeton Symphony Orchestra continued its virtual concert series with a broadcast performance this past weekend of Classical-era chamber works and solo piano music. Led by Music Director Rossen Milanov, Sunday afternoon’s concert provided cozy music for a winter afternoon.

18th-century French composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was almost as famous for his background as for his music. A contemporary of Mozart, Saint-Georges was born in the West Indies an illegitimate son of a wealthy French nobleman and his slave. Contrary to the customs of the time, Saint-Georges’ father took Joseph and his mother to Paris, where he was well educated in music and athletics. Saint-Georges simultaneously pursued careers in music and fencing, eventually serving in the court of Louis XV and becoming a music teacher of Marie Antoinette. Despite his support from the monarchy, Saint-Georges sided with the revolutionaries in the French Revolution and was later arrested as an enemy of the people. And like Mozart, despite his fame in music circles, Saint-Georges died poor and in obscurity.  

Although much of Saint-Georges’ music was lost in the French Revolution, orchestras have recently turned their attention to his symphonic works. Rooted in the compositional style of Haydn, Saint-Georges’ 1779 Symphony No. 1 in G Major captured the light and playful musical atmosphere of late 18th-century France. In a performance recorded earlier this year in the education center of Princeton’s Morven Museum and Garden, eleven members of Princeton Symphony Orchestra, led by Milanov, played the three-movement Symphony emphasizing the music’s simplicity and charm. In the first movement, subtle winds accompanied string sections busy with motivic melodic material and musical teasing. First violinists Basia Danilow, Margaret Banks and Ruotao Mao led a graceful dialog among the instruments in the second movement andante. Saint-Georges may have been a violin virtuoso, but he composed the violin parts of this Symphony with delicacy and elegance in mind.   more

Grant from Relief Fund Enables Digital Music Classes

STRINGS ONLINE: Virtual music lessons have become familiar to the young artists of Trenton Music Makers. A new set of viola, violin, and cello classes will now be offered.

A grant from the New Jersey Arts and Culture Relief Fund will allow Trenton children and teens to try a new musical instrument from the safety of home. Trenton Music Makers is opening four new string classes for beginners. more

Pandemic Playhouse Entertainment From STNJ

PANDEMIC PLAYHOUSE ENTERTAINMENT: From left, Dino Curia, Jeffrey Marc Alkins, and Ellie Gossage star in George Bernard Shaw’s“Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction or The Fatal Gazogene.” The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey will screen the play as part of a special virtual program. (Photo by Avery Brunkus)

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (STNJ) will screen several plays filmed on the company’s stage at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater, with minimal scenic elements and full costumes. The only thing missing will be a live audience. more

Music Lessons Continue at Westminster Conservatory

DON’T STOP THE MUSIC: Westminster Conservatory offers discounted lessons for all ages through April. Musicians of every stage of ability can enroll.

Westminster Conservatory of Music is offering discounted lessons from now through April 2021, for musicians of all ages and stages of ability. Introductory packages of four lessons for the price of three are being offered.

The offer is valid for both new students and current students who wish to pursue a new instrument. All lessons will be delivered virtually for safety and convenience. more

Artsbridge Artist Series Features Harry Boardman

GREENHOUSES AT FREDERICKS FLOWERS: The work of Harry Boardman will be the subject of the first event in Artsbridge’s 2021 Distinguished Artist Series. The virtual event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, January 21 at 7 p.m.

Artsbridge’s 2021 Distinguished Artist Series begins with “Harry Boardman: So Much to Paint, So Little Time,” on Thursday, January 21 at 7 p.m. The event will feature a virtual visit to Boardman’s studio, gallery, and home, all housed in a former cigar factory in Souderton, PA.  more

RWJ Hospital Hamilton Presented With Painting

“HEALTHCARE HEROES”: New Jersey artist Joe LaMattina’s homage to frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic has been donated to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) Hamilton.

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) Hamilton was recently presented with the donation of a piece of multimedia artwork, Healthcare Angels, by its creator, New Jersey-based artist Joe LaMattina. This original piece, an homage to frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, will be placed on display throughout the hospital units for all staff and patients to enjoy before it finds its permanent home in a place of honor in the hospital’s main building.  more

ACP Events to Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day

CELEBRATING BLACK PRINCETONIANS: A free, limited-edition coloring book featuring prominent Black residents of Princeton from history will be available for pick up, while supplies last, at the Arts Council of Princeton, 102 Witherspoon Street, on Monday, January 18.

Join the Arts Council of Princeton (ACP) on Monday, January 18 to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

The ACP, in collaboration with the Historical Society of Princeton and neighborhood historian Shirley Satterfield, invites families to learn about the impact and influence of Black Princetonians by picking up a free, limited-edition coloring book featuring prominent Black residents of Princeton from history including accomplished business owners, politicians, educators, and influential women, in addition to Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to campus in the 1960s.

Coloring books are free and available for pick up while supplies last at the Arts Council of Princeton, 102 Witherspoon Street, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 18. The coloring books are limited to two per household. more

January 6, 2021

Journeys End in Sherlock Holmes or “What You Will”

By Stuart Mitchner

The blind was down and a strong light was burning in the room. The shadow of a man who was seated in a chair within was thrown in hard black outline upon the luminous screen of the window.

—from “The Adventure of the Empty House”

“What are you doing here?” Sherlock Holmes wanted to know.

Two hours into the new year, after online searches linked to combinations of the numbers 2-0-2-1, I encountered a brightly inviting onscreen image of the cover of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which I’ve been reading. When I clicked on the small red arrow flashing above the title, I was livestreamed into 221B Baker Street, where I found myself facing a facsimile of Holmes like the window-framed silhouette on the front of the book, a replica of the wax bust devised to entrap Dr. Moriarty in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

After the charged silence that followed my rushed account of how I got there, the shadow spoke: “I see you have your own copy of the 1905 McClure Phillips edition previously owned by a Louise K. Ribsam of Trenton, New Jersey.” Indeed, the selfsame volume lay open on my desk, its front and back covers hanging for dear life from the tattered cliff-edge of the spine. “At the moment,” the elegantly mannered voice continued, “you are feeling the effects of a vile combination of Prosecco, hard cider, and Celestial Seasonings iced tea (the Bengal Spice flavor). You have just commenced work on your weekly column for a newspaper that will appear in print and online Wednesday, January 6, the date that some well-meaning if misguided obsessives have settled on as my birthday. In addition to rereading The Return and watching reruns of the BBC series that bears my name, you’ve been reading Shakespeare’s comedy of sociopathic madness, Twelfth Night, in which everyone except the clown Feste is insane without knowing it, thus the subtitle, Or What You Will.”

Right on all counts except the Bengal Spice. In the spirit of “what you will” and anything goes, I tell myself to go  with the flow and stop worrying about how this cyber sleuth could know so much about me — this is Sherlock Holmes. This is what he does.  more

A Musical MIracle

Buskaid, which provides high quality string teaching to less privileged young people in Soweto, South Africa, will be presented by Princeton Symphony Orchestra in a curated, on-demand series of concerts starting January 29-31. Multiple soloists and vocalists take part  and music ranges from classical to popular. The concerts will be available on demand the final weekend of each month from January to May, and cost $5 per device link. Visit princetonsymphony.org for more details.

Digital Programs Continue With Philadelphia Orchestra

MOZART AND MORE: The Philadelphia Orchestra, led here by Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin, keeps the music going this season with online performances. (Photo by Jeff Fusco)

The Philadelphia Orchestra has concerts planned for virtual viewing in the coming months.

On January 14 at 8 p.m., Philippe Tondre is the soloist in Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Also on the program are works by Saint-Georges and Haydn. more