Today the Boston Globe features my interview with Brian Dennehy, who will be the honored guest this weekend at the annual fundraising gala for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Dennehy has acted in Williams plays but he's best known as an interpreter of Eugene O'Neill, and I talk to him about that work, which has taken up much of the last 10-15 years of his professional life. I had to leave out his candid and funny talk about something else he and O'Neill have in common, which is an overfondness for the bottle. Suffice to say he has a story about being brought home in a shopping cart. (Photo courtesy Goodman Theatre.)
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May 31, 2016
May 25, 2016
Young composers at BU
Recently, on the day job, I was one of seven people in a drab room at BU's College of Fine Arts for an experience that only I found extraordinary. One of the others was a sound guy. Four of them were the alt-rock-band-looking, 50% beardo JACK Quartet, one of the nation's premiere contemporary-music ensembles. The violinists, violist and cellist sight-read their way through a twisty new composition full of jagged tempo changes, twists and turns. They kept stopping for mistakes and wry commentary, eventually playing the piece through twice.
The seventh person in the room was the composer of Experiment in String Quartet, a ponytailed BU freshman named Daniel Collins. That's right, I said BU freshman.
Collins is one of a couple of dozen undergraduate composition students in the music department, and I profiled him and others in this BU Today feature, accompanied by Jackie Ricciardi's pictures and a video by Jason Kimball.
Photo by Jackie Ricciardi shows Collins, in white shirt, with cellist Kevin McFarland and violist John Pickford Richards of the JACK Quartet.