Jim Gasior Trio/Photo by Neil de la Flor

Dressed in all black, the Jim Gasior Trio mesmerized and electrified the audience with cool jazz in a fabulous space that was jam-packed with art and jazz lovers alike. The museum’s performance space, framed by a kaleidoscope of colorful paintings, bathed the audience in a pinkish-orange glow as the sun set. It looked as if the audience was set ablaze, which was appropriate, because the room was on musical fire. The crowd buzzed with energy as heads nodded in synchronicity—even a jazz novice like me felt the communication cord that connects us all through music. The unexpected jolts and variety of rhythms inherent in jazz mirrors our hectic lives—the weaving in and out of traffic—en route to our final destination.

If last Friday is any indication about the future, the upcoming “Hot Nights Cool Jazz” performances should be just as  hot. Don’t miss this ongoing series on select Fridays throughout September at The Bass Museum of Art. Upcoming performances include South Florida jazz favorites Mike Gerber Trio on Friday, September 10^th and John Yarling & Cut In/Cut Out on Friday, September 24^th. Arrive early. The space fills up fast.

7-9pm Friday, September 10^th and September 24^th at The Bass Museum of Art, 2121 Park Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139; Tickets are free to members and $10 for non-members. Call 305-673-7530.

The recent performances of Puccini’s La Boheme (July 15 and 17^th) received very positive reviews by English and Spanish media. I have been lucky enough to receive many calls and emails with compliments and enthusiastic words of encouragement. Some commented that it was one of Miami’s best and most genuine performances of La Boheme in years. Thanks to the media and the public who attended the performances, to the artists who contributed to the success and, principally, thanks to Puccini for creating such a magnificent opera. Now we are committed to do even better with the most-loved opera of Giuseppe Verdi, La Taviata. We are working with passion and dedication to deliver the best of our artistry and resources. Our goal is to reach all the emotions and musical expressions on the passionate drama.

MLO is engaged in presenting opera production with great respect to the composer, libretto and tradition in a cozy venue where the public can appreciate the work. Susana Diaz, a wonderful soprano from Miami, has been working with Miami Lyric Opera for almost two years, including a performance of Violetta at Open Space last year. She has evolved into a passionate, versatile and dramatic Violetta that will be loved by everyone attending La Taviata at Colony Theater. Susana will partner with tenor David Pereira in the role of Alfredo. David is a promising raising star who recently performed Ernesto. Germont is characterized by the magnificent Cuban Baritone Nelson Martinez, who assumed the role of Escamillo in our performance of Carmen last season. Other young and fine singers complement the cast carefully selected to deliver a human and exciting performance of Verdi’s La Traviata.

I encourage the arts community and public at large to attend our production of La Traviata October 7 and 9^th at Colony Theater, 8pm.Tickets available at Colony Theater, Ticketmaster or online www.miamilyricopera.org

Pandemonium @ the Arsht Center: Sept 16-26; tickets $55, VIP $75; visit arshtcenter.org or call 305-949-6722.

Gary is no stranger to ballet – he has spent the past six seasons conducting the San Francisco Ballet and toured with the company to The Kennedy Center and the Peoples Republic of China. Apart from being our newly-appointed conductor, he is also the Artistic Director for the Lancaster (Ohio) Festival Orchestra, a company he founded in 1988 and Principal Conductor for the Festival at Sandpoint in Idaho. Recently, he won The American Prize in Conducting, professional orchestra division! Gary has guest conducted numerous symphony orchestras including the BBC Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Spoleto Festival and Sarasota and Palm Beach Symphonies and conducted for leading artists including Andre Watts, Ella Fitzgerald, Itzhak Perlman and Wynton Marsalis.

Gary will make his Miami City Ballet and Opus One Orchestra debut on October 15, 2010 at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. He will be conducting Fanfare, Bugaku, and Theme and Variations.

Again this year, the Broward, Arsht and Kravis centers have their own series of classical programs, but there’s another group that is beefing up the offerings this coming season, and they’re doing it with some major names.

That group is the South Florida Symphony, which until very recently was the Key West Symphony Orchestra until it decided to expand its brief beyond Monroe County into the rest of South Florida. For this season’s Master Concert series, the group will welcome two leading young violinists to stages in Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.

The first is the fine South Korean-born violinist Chee-Yun, who has had a strong career since emerging in Seoul as an exceptional 8-year-old. She’ll play the Beethoven concerto with the orchestra, led by Sebrina Maria Alfonso, in concerts Oct. 6, 7, and 9; also on the program are the Enigma Variations of Edward Elgar.

Violinist Chee-Yun.

The second is the Canadian violinist Lara St. John, who has released excellent albums of Bach solo works as well as a disc of dueling Four Seasons: the Vivaldi set, and four by Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla. She’ll perform the Mozart Concerto No. 3 (in G, K. 216), a wonderful work, and Sarasate’s Ziegunerweisen on a program with the Beethoven Fourth Symphony on Dec. 1, 2, and 5.

In an e-mail message to me, Alfonso wrote that the South Florida Symphony is aiming to become a cultural force in the area.

“We are committed to becoming leaders in the cultural landscape of South Florida by striving to present high-level classical programming, world-class guest artists, introducing new works and most importantly to become a leader in music education for the area,” she wrote. “We are seeking grants, sponsorships and partnerships that will allow us this privilege.”

This is the second year the orchestra has offered a South Florida-wide series, expanding this year into Palm Beach County. But the Key West ensemble has been presenting similar series for the past 13 years.
Alfonso wrote that the caliber of the concerts was such that she felt they “should reach a larger audience, and felt there was a place for the South Florida Symphony in the region.”

The Belfast-born pianist Barry Douglas, a frequent visitor to South Florida in the season, brings the big Brahms Second Concerto (in B-flat, Op. 83) in concerts Jan. 28, 30 and Feb. 1. The concert also includes music by Vaughan Williams (the Tallis Fantasia) and Khachaturian (the suite from Masquerade).

Part-time Pompano Beach resident and Miami native Ellen Taaffe Zwilich will get two of her works performed on the final two concerts of the series: Her Septet for piano trio and string quartet, which had its South Florida debut earlier this year, on concerts featuring the Sima Trio on March, 2, 3 and 7.

Zwilich’s Fifth Symphony is on the final installment in the series (April 29, May 1 and 2), which also welcomes the American pianist Adam Golka for the perennially popular Tchaikovsky First Concerto (in B-flat minor, Op. 23).

This is an interesting lineup, and certainly adds some depth to the upcoming classical season, which will be another very busy one, especially when you consider smaller recitals and chamber music concerts. But we could always use some more symphonic glamour and interest, and this five-part series helps do that.

Frank McClain joins a celebrated roster of artists, including stars Alvy Powell and Marquita Lister, coming together for the Akron Symphony’s first staged opera performance since La Traviata in 2007. The Akron Symphony’s production of Porgy and Bess is sponsored by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and will hit the stage at The University of Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall on Saturday, April 16, 2011. Tickets are available from $20-$40 by calling (330) 535-8131 or online at Ticketmaster.com.

The Akron Art Museum staff has begun our two year project of making our entire collection accessible online. We’ve hired Keith Freund to be our Collections Information Coordinator. Keith formerly managed our donor database as part of the museum’s development department, and has a master’s degree in library and information science with an emphasis in archiving. He’ll be organizing some of our previously generated data, as well as creating new information for our collection database…

Curatorial staff prepares Etienne Hajdu’s Elles for the camera

Over the past few weeks we’ve done extensive research and consulting to determine what hardware and software will be ideal for our project, and we’ve started to purchase those tools and train on them already.

Our curatorial department has been meeting with other departments and staff to see how the database would best work for them, both in a practical and ideal way as we move forward with design. Everyone at the museum is very excited to make the online collection interesting and easy to approach for any casual browser, as well as in-depth and informative for more scholarly pursuits. We’ve been constantly jotting down new web-based tools and challenging our website designer to figure out how to implement them into the framework.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the art inspection room we are continuing to make digital images of the collection as we acquire new objects, and creating new images of works already in the collection. Many of the pieces have been documented in the past, but we’re combing through and seeing which would benefit from new digital camera capabilities, multiple views, or other techniques. Mostly though, our contracted photographers have been documenting new pieces, including several sculptures from the recent Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection gift.

The gallery has grown up since then, as it should have, with more tightly curated shows and

Sinesa Kukec's "Exquisite Form and Echo" at Dorsch

a professional veneer it once lacked. Tomorrow night, however, will harken back to those days of yore (okay, only about a decade ago, but that’s ages in Miami art years), when Dorsch opens a big group show, with names from past and present, familiar and not so much, along with a number of performances.

The show, “Bubble Raft,” thematically hangs around the concept of the atomic structure of metal, and that of bubbles, which mimic those patterns. More precisely, in terms of form, those atoms group together in an inconsistent pattern that is hard to predict, as do the “raft” of bubbles that gather on the surface of liquid. In any event, moving on from that loose theme, bubbles can burst up, exist on their own, in their own various forms, bounce off each other, rise, fall, and pop. So threading that all together, according to the gallery, “a bubble raft has its own inherent dynamics, like metal, or like a practice, or an exhibition.”

The actual work resulted from recent visits to local studios, and were focused on objects more than installation: “The objects physical form, combination of materials, absurdity, and subtle humor begged comparison to one another, especially when shown together in an exhibition.”

Twenty-four artists and five groups will add their bubbles to the Dorsch raft for the opening tomorrow night, but on closer inspection, the night and the exhibit will differ much from those earlier incarnations. The artist scene itself has moved on and grown, so even the new graduates highlighted here are sprouting from a different soil. We’ll see work from familiar names such a Bhakti Baxter, Daniel Newman, and Brandon Opalka; and from exciting newcomers such as sleeper and Justin Long. We’ll get to see some of the most interesting sculptors in town (and Dorsch “veterans”) Ralph Provisero, Robin Griffiths, and Richard Haden, along with the conceptually intriguing (and often very funny) artist Magnus Sigurdarson — to name, as always, just a few. The evening will be punctuated with sounds and sights from, among others, Viking Funeral and Otto von Schirach.

Kevin Arrow in "New Work" at MAM

In keeping with the musical performance theme, the following night will be another in the “After Hours” events in connection to MAM’s “New Work Miami” exhibit, featuring some bands and celebrating Miami’s rich crossover of art and music. Headling the bill: Beings and Jacuzzi Boys, while the radio collective Talking Head Transmitters will do a segment on ’80s rock. And as has been the case with the first events in this series, the galleries in the museum’s exhibit will be open with some guest appearances from artists, in keeping without the “gallery walk” atmosphere.

An energetic start to September.

“Bubble Raft” opens Wednesday, Sept.1 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. and runs through Oct. 2 at Dorsch Gallery, 151 N.W. 24th St., Miami; 305-576-1278; www.dorschgallery.com.

“New Work Miami: Afterhours” bring on the bands evening, Thursday Sept. 2, 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; 305-375-1704; miamiartmuseum.org.

First Friday Jazz Jams has been made possible with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – the presenting sponsor – and with the support of the HI Foundation, Barbara Cooper, DeMeo Young McGrath – Certified Public Accountants, ArtServe and WLRN FM.