Classical
Fiesta: . Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor. Released on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Retail price about $17. Available from various retail and online stores.
One way to deal with all the heat at this time of year is to just crank up the air conditioning and chill. Another is to pour on even more heat.
For a particularly steamy dose of the latter treatment, check out Fiesta, the newest CD by the sensational Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra and its high-wattage conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
This live recording of Latin-American music gets the temperature rising from the first percussive rumblings of Sensemaya by Mexico's Silvestre Revueltas. Richly pictorial pieces by Venezuela's Inocente Carreno, Antonio Esteves and Evencio Castellanos generate plenty of expressive warmth as Dudamel draws brilliant playing from his young musicians.
And just try to sit still during the Malambo from the Estancia ballet by Argentina's Alberto Ginastera. Ditto for the sole North American item, the Mambo from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, a calling card of this uplifting, bravura-packed orchestra.
Tim Smith
DVD
The Counterfeiters: Sony; DVD, $28.96; Blu-ray $38.96; Available Tuesday
Austrian writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters, like The Lives of Others , is the rare Academy Award-winner that actually deserves its best foreign film Oscar. Based on a real-life story, this picture starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift. The anti-hero, Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), is the world's best counterfeiter. When the Nazis throw him into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he gets the chance to achieve a goal long thought impossible: Creating a perfect copy of the U.S. dollar bill. Sally mostly saves - from the Nazis, and from themselves - the diverse designers, photographers, artists and printers in his group. Yet he supervises the forgeries so well that he may enable the Nazis to make good on a plan to devalue Allied currency. The Counterfeiters is more than the tale of a craftsman's pride overtaking his ethics. Sally's normal ethics amount to demanding prompt payment for his services. The movie is really about the value and the danger of improvising one's existence day by day. It generates two-tiered suspense: will Sally survive? And will he survive with honor? This movie has the power of a one-two punch.
