ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON — The Montagues and Capulets are at it again with their legendary feud played out through music and dance. But in the new production by the Mark Morris Dance Group, Friar Laurence arrives in time to tell stricken Romeo that fair Juliet is alive. She awakes and they flee. Hearing the news, the families kiss and make up. The twists in “Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare,” which opened Friday...

In 1988, accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros made a recording with a trombone player and a percussionist inside a 2 million-gallon empty cistern buried 14 feet below ground at Fort Worden, near Port Townsend, Wash. The resulting CD on New Albion Records was titled “Deep Listening,” a play on the unusual location and also an apt description of the trio’s meditative and reverberant improvisations. Soon...

At last month’s Champaign on the Park, the annual fundraiser for the Lark Street Business Improvement District, Michael Weidrich did something of a runway turn on the stage. First, he was presented with an award for his work as founder of First Fridays, the successful gallery night based primarily in the Center Square neighborhood.  Moments later he returned to the stage having just been re-introduced as the new executive...

In 1969, the city of Cohoes purchased the abandoned National Bank Building at the northern end of Remsen Street for $1 to save the prominent 1874 edifice from imminent destruction. As city officials began examining the building’s interior, they couldn’t find any stairs to a third floor. Eventually, they broke through a ceiling panel, only to discover that hidden away in the top half of the building was a gem of...

The late great gay poet Alan Ginsberg channeled a ferocious anger and fear over nuclear proliferation into his 1978 epic poem “Plutonian Ode.” Composer Philip Glass, who was a friend and East Village neighbor of Ginsberg, responds with a similar urgency in his Symphony No. 6 “Plutonian Ode,” a mercurial score that’s nearly an hour-long (Orange Mountain Music). Soprano Lauren Flanigan gives the searing vocal part...

Every month Harold Lohner flips through the new issue of Art Calendar, a magazine that provides copious listings of exhibitions and other opportunities for artists. He regularly finds calls for submissions to shows of female artists and occasionally of gay artists. “I’m gay and an artist, but I don’t want to be a practitioner of gay art. It’s like you don’t have to be very good,” says Lohner,...

On March 21, the same day that George W. Bush said that U.S. troops would remain in Iraq at least through the end of his presidency, a group of fed-up soldiers’ wives came together. To end a seemingly never-ending war and their strategy, they decided to withhold sex until a truce was called. The women, of course, weren’t American or Iraqi but from Athens and Sparta. They appeared on the stage of the New York City Opera...

On the morning of 9/11 from his Greenwich Village apartment, David Del Tredici could hear the sirens — and their unsettling sound opens his newest work “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Patriotism may have led Del Tredici to the famous Longfellow poem (“Listen my children and you shall hear…”), but his grand and colorful setting for soprano, chorus and orchestra is more fantasy than jingoism. It receives a thrilling,...

Tenors will forever owe a high note of thanks to the late gay British composer Benjamin Britten, since virtually everyone of his many works featured a glorious role for his lover, the late tenor Peter Pears. One of the most intriguing British singers since Pears is tenor Ian Bostridge who takes up three prime Britten song cycles in a beautiful new recording with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle (EMI). Bostridge...

In the anything-goes environment of the 1970s musical avant-garde, the late African American composer and baritone Julius Eastman was both out and outrageous. Giving his pieces names like “Crazy Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla,” he apparently took inspiration from Richard Pryor (“That Nigger’s Crazy”) as much as from any high-minded musical theorems. Eastman’s antics even managed to rattle the Zen-like John Cage,...