Victor L. Schermer

The long-awaited Frank Gehry interior redesign of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is finally open to the public. Does it enhance the museum’s original vision and speak to art in the 21st century? Victor Schermer considers.

The second in a series of Dolce Suono concerts of American chamber music highlighted varied instrumentation and concepts from the fertile midcentury period, reviving music rarely heard today. Victor L. Schermer reviews.

The Jerusalem String Quartet brought out their best at this Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concert. Victor Schermer reviews.

In 'Les Innocentes' ('The Innocents'), director Anne Fontaine draws from the story of Madeleine Pauliac, a WWII-era doctor called to assist a convent filled with pregnant, traumatized nuns.

The Dolce Suono Ensemble's 'The Americas Project' takes a musical trip through North, Central and South America, jet setting around the material with panache.

Ruth Naomi Floyd sings with a great seriousness that made me quake a little in my seat

45 Years is like a Rorschach inkblot onto which we can project many layers of meaning. We know that Geoff and Kate are stunned and puzzled, but much of what is going on inside each of them is left to our imagination.

Cold Mountain manages to retain enough of the grandiose proportions of plot, effects, and setting to satisfy the opera buffs while — largely though the words and music — a more humble humanity comes through.

This Philadelphia Orchestra concert succeeded so admirably because all the musicians were on the same page. They embodied a fundamental idea that romance and boundaries, emotion and structure, are reconcilable opposites that, under the right circumstances, attract. The composers put this idea down on paper, and the musicians executed it in real time.

The music in this concert of Viennese pastry reflected both of the faces of Vienna: It was romantically sweet but with a bitter crust. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, while exploiting the rich sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra to bring out the grand sonorities, also conveyed Vienna’s underlying disturbances and tensions.

Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Jay Roach’s Trumbo are reminders, instructive and nostalgic, that what scares us now happened before, and we survived.

Tom Lawton's Man Ray Jazz Suite, performed in the main hall of the Art Museum, was a stunning musical evening that combined the intimate, spontaneous experience of a jazz club with the seriousness of a classical concert.

Yardbird composer Daniel Schnyder went well beyond 1930s popular music (the legacy that Parker and cohorts unabashedly used as a foil to create the new bebop jazz) to create a unique synthesis of many other musical ingredients and flavors.

While Bonhoeffer’s theology is important, we remember him today for his courage in seeing through the Nazis' lies and his willingness to die so that others might live. While it asks penetrating questions, this play is ultimately about Bonhoeffer the man.

The recent performance of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society emphasized lyrical beauty over struggle, power, and tension, yet in its own way it achieved a measure of greatness and depth of feeling.