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Really, this requiem was marvelous

How do you avoid purple prose when reviewing a splendid concert? Answer: It’s not easy, and that’s the theme of this column. The concert in question is last weekend’s ...

The life of a critic: When art lingers

When music lingers in your mind long after a performance is over, it’s telling you something. It may be a jazz riff or a blooming Puccini aria. It may be a little nothing, or it may lead to ...

Repertory companies rethink classics

How do you perform comedy for an audience with no sense of irony? In Jerry Seinfeld’s case, you don’t – because you’ve stopped performing on college campuses. America’...

Summer lecture series is picture-perfect

As surely as the Snake River pulses through the Tetons, the bloodstream of the mythic West runs through Ansel Adams’s photographs. America’s most famous nature photographer died in 1984, but...

High-octane percussion rocks the Fort

“White Knuckle Stroll” is a title that makes me sit up and pay attention. Last Sunday, percussionist Kyle Hollerbach started his senior recital at Fort Lewis College with a solo ...

Student recitals kick off Durango Bach festival

The eighth annual Bach Festival got off to a spectacular start Sunday. In a week full of musical surprises, C. Scott Hagler, Durango’s own impresario, has organized a winning sel...

Charlie Hebdo and the high cost of humor

“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” – Mark Twain Written in a notebook some time in 1888, Twain’s simple sentence appears to be a casual thought, s...

A bit of Scrooge creeps into holiday cheer

How do you reconcile holiday cheer, societal anger and consumer frenzy? I’m not sure. December serves up a murky platter of expectations, larded with real-time events that are dif...

Friday recital promises pure piano magic

If you love piano music, there’s a recital Friday that will rattle your bones and shake your imagination. At the heart of a program that spans two centuries of music, Marilyn Gar...

In Pagosa play, madness and obsession reign

Between Macbeth and Thomas Magill there’s a certain madness. The question is: What’s the difference between a man who kills for personal ambition and one obsessed by a soiled Ede...

‘Boomtown’ and ‘Pants on Fire’ here Friday

When Creede Repertory Theatre’s improv troupe, Boomtown, riffs on a single word, the players make high-flying connections. Like trapeze artists, the young, energetic actors toss words and id...

Public-art uproar the latest in a long history

Not again – the uproar over “Arc of History” has an upside, a funny bone and a deep history. Every public-art installation in Durango has brought out complaints, jokes and the al...