How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
Arts & Life
- Details
- Written by: Debra Fredrickson
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Members of the Lake County Symphony Association got a taste of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in August in a virtual presentation featuring LCSA Board President Camm Linden.
Now, Linden returns to the stage to play all three movements of Haydn’s Concerto in another virtual performance, conducted by John Parkinson.
The first public performance of this Concerto took place in Paris in 1784. According to the renowned Haydn scholar, H.C. Robbins Landon, this work soon became an audience favorite due to its “sparkling keyboard writing and general sense of energy.”
This joyful, upbeat musical offering was composed in a popular “galant” style which makes for easy listening. Watch for syncopated rhythms, crushed grace notes, and the passing of lyrical themes between the keyboard and orchestra.
Haydn is considered the “Father of the Symphony,” with 106 symphonies to his credit. Ironically, this was Haydn’s first concerto ever to include the use of wind instruments — something the current COVID-19 safety guidelines advise against.
So, the LCSA Chamber Orchestra is presenting this piece in a smartly adapted, all-strings version.
The symphony had hoped to play live and in person at the Soper Reese Theatre starting in November, but due to the County’s current COVID-19 numbers, this performance will once again be a virtual one, as will the very popular Christmas Concert.
The November concert premieres Sunday, Nov. 21, at 2 p.m. on Lake County Symphony’s YouTube channel.
Click on the link to LC Symphony Musicians on the LCSA website.
Linden is a longtime musician who studied piano at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she received the Duke Ellington Jazz Masters Award for Keyboard Excellence. She also earned a diploma in composition from the LA Film Music Institute and has a master’s in business management, along with a Doctorate of Music in composition and conducting.
Linden is semiretired from the motion picture industry where she specializes in composing scores for art films.
She also continues to work as an orchestra rehearsal conductor for various movie studio soundstages and recently has been engaged by several orchestral groups around the world to write arrangements for all non-wind instruments in the hopes of restarting their live music seasons during the pandemic.
Linden has traveled extensively performing on piano and guitar with her family music trio — vocalist Jude Darrin and pianist Slade Darrin — and has played both brass and percussion with orchestras from LA to Boston.
She currently plays trumpet (and sometimes, piano) with the Lake County Symphony Orchestra.
- Details
- Written by: Kwame Dawes
The elegant irony of Elaine Equi’s lament — what the Germans, I am told, call, “Weltmüdigkeit” (world-weariness) — in her poem, “In an Unrelated,” about the very contemporary phenomenon of “the news cycle,” is that despite what may seem like a grand separation of human beings in the world, we, in the end, have a common sense of collective connection.
In other words, the poet recognizes that we are all in this thing together. This is one splendid use of poetry, to be the “campfire” of our humanity.
In an Unrelated
By Elaine Equi
We have almost nothing left,
no ground in common.
At best, a brand
or maybe a miniseries.
No campfire to gather around.
The big stories—peckish news
gets told in tweets,
gets old so quickly.
In place of one place
a billion tiny customized versions
appear targeted specifically
to your tastes.
You see only what you want to see.
Maybe you always did.
American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2019 by Elaine Equi, “In an Unrelated” from The Intangibles (Coffee House Press, 2019.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2021 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Kwame Dawes, is George W. Holmes Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska.
- Details
- Written by: Tim Riley
A better bet is the release of “Halloween Kills,” which is probably the thirtieth or so title in the “Halloween” franchise, which stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle reprising their respective roles of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers.
To put everything into perspective, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode made her first appearance in “Halloween” in 1978 and was the sole survivor of Michael Myers’ killing spree. “Halloween Kills” has been released in theaters and is streaming on Peacock.
Talk about an odd couple pairing, rapper Snoop Dogg and media personality Martha Stewart host the competition special “Snoop and Martha’s Very Tasty Halloween” featuring talented bakers who face off in a delectable Halloween showdown.
Teams of three bakers, called “Scare Squads,” are tasked with baking and building a full sensory 12x12 Halloween world that people can literally explore. The catch? Their worlds must be inspired by the concept of fear. Imagine larger-than-life chocolate spiders.
New horror films to air include “Separation” from director William Brent and “You Should Have Left,” Blumhouse’s psychological thriller starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried about an isolated country home where nothing is quite as it seems.
Classic monster movies are on tap. One of them being “Dracula,” which we assume is the 1931 version starring Bela Lugosi as the County. The Peacock classic films to be aired, including “Frankenstein” and “The Invisible Man” all come from Universal Pictures’ horror collection.
Halloween-themed episodes of favorite TV series will be shown, ranging from sitcoms like “Cheers” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” to silly gags on “Saturday Night Live” to dramas like “Law & Order” that go to serious places with their Halloween tales.
Even family-friendly thrills suitable for a younger audience are to be found with “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” television series and the “Monster High” film series.
Starting on Oct. 29, TCM will deploy its extensive library of classic films to satisfy every taste in spooky, creepy, horrifying (and sometimes humorous) entertainment over the course of 48 hours of its Halloween Marathon.
The fun starts on Friday night, two days before Halloween, as Vincent Price stars in 1971’s “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” as a highly creative madman mimicking the Biblical plagues of Egypt to exact revenge on the doctors believed responsible for his wife’s death.
Two great classics of the genre follow: the granddaddy of all zombie pictures, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978). The last one is on late, but don’t fall asleep – you know what can happen!
The 1970s scream queen Linda Blair can be seen in 1981’s “Hell Night” and 1977’s “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” which offers the added treat of hearing the great Richard Burton utter the immortal line: “Pazuzu, king of evil spirits of the air, help me find Kokumo!”
Saturday, Oct. 30, is jam-packed with Halloween tricks and treats, including 1961’s “Creature from the Haunted Sea,” featuring an appearance by future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (“Chinatown”).
The most famous mad scientist/monster team of all time gets its due in three films: James Whale’s original and still unsurpassed “Frankenstein” (1931), and the Hammer Films retelling in 1957’s “The Curse of Frankenstein,” starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
The third film of this august group has a completely different take on the zipper-necked monster. That would be Mel Brooks’ hilarious spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974), a classic film in its own right.
Speaking of British horror legends Lee and Cushing, they are the lead characters in the classic “Horror Dracula” (1958), respectively as the vampire Count Dracula and the vampire hunter Doctor Van Helsing.
Hammer, the leading British studio for shock and gore, is represented again with 1966’s “The Devil’s Own,” released in the U.K. as “The Witches,” in which Joan Fontaine seeks to outdo big sister Olivia de Havilland’s forays into the genre in the 1960s.
No compendium of great movie horror would be complete without at least some of the films released at RKO under the aegis of producer Val Lewton.
Eschewing monsters, shock effects and obvious gore, Lewton was remarkable for a series of low budget pictures that were subtle in their approach to the genre; dark shadowy tales of psychological terror that also fit them perfectly into TCM’s Noir Alley series.
Vincent Price starred in the original version of “The Fly” (1958) and in two of the notable series of loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations made by Roger Corman in the 1960s, “Pit and the Pendulum” (1961) and “The Tomb of Ligeia” (1964), with a screenplay by Robert Towne.
For a big screen experience, Universal Studios and Fathom Events present a double feature at local cinemas on Saturday afternoon, Oct. 30, of “The Invisible Man” starring Claude Rains and “The Wolf Man” starring Lon Chaney Jr.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
- Details
- Written by: Kwame Dawes
Bruce Willard’s poem, “Song Sparrow,” captures with such intimacy, the interruption of the comforting rituals of time: seasons changing, children growing older, water under the bridge, the world continuing its march.
Here, in the midst of this, our long and tumultuous pandemic “season,” I am struck by how familiar the breathlessness that Willard describes feels.
As with the best poems, the familiarity is formed through empathy — something that poetry teaches us, again and again.
Song Sparrow
By Bruce Willard
That summer we opened the lake cottage,
prehistoric sound of loons before us,
decades of children at our back,
familiar sound of water
under the porch eaves.
A song sparrow
hit the window
just as summer began.
You held it in your hand
bent over, unable to breathe
another year, working
your fingers
under its feathers and bone.
American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2021 by Bruce Willard, “Song Sparrow” from In Light of Stars (Four Way Books, 2021.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2021 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Kwame Dawes, is George W. Holmes Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska.