New Works

A steady snap of beer cans being opened punctuated the air as members of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society gathered earlier this week to rehearse — this volunteer, do-it-yourself ensemble runs on beer. They may need a few more cases, given the challenges they've set for themselves. The creators of the 31/2-hour medieval fantasy "Grundlehammer" that launched the BROS to a heavy metal beat in 2009 are back with a double-header that premieres this weekend in their new home, a newly renovated theater in Charles Village.

A Washington, D.C., artist who works in multiple media was awarded the 2012 Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize - a $30,000 purse - at a ceremony Saturday evening at the Baltimore Museum of Art . Renee Stout, whose painting, drawing, prints, sculpture and photography explore her African-American heritage, beat five other finalists for the honor, according to a statement from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, which sponsors...

The Chamber Music Society of Baltimore presents what promises to be a terrifically interesting program Sunday at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Washington-based American Chamber Players will perform masterpieces by Stravinsky, Debussy, Penderecki and Max Bruch, alongside some new works by Chicagoan Max Raimi -- if the same sounds familiar, that's because he's brother to filmmaker Sam Raimi -- and by New Yorker Roger Ames. The Ames work, a song cycle that will be performed by soprano Susan Boykan and pianist Edward Newman, is a setting of poems by mentally ill patients.

In the past two years, Mac Miller, a 20-year-old rapper from Pittsburgh, could have signed a number of deals from major labels. Instead, Miller stayed loyal to his hometown independent label, Rostrum Records. The payoff came in November, when Miller's first album, "Blue Slide Park," debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the first independent album to do so in more than 15 years. In Miller's world, a major label simply isn't necessary, not when he can continue to release free mixtapes (such as last month's "Macadelic")

Nothing says "winter's coming" quite like new music from Bjork. The Icelandic pop iconoclast has devoted her whole career to understanding, if not overcoming, the deep freeze. The cold is a primary character in the songs of her new Vespertine, and informs her sonic signature - the eerily pristine, near-barren instrumental landscapes; the ice-pick words; the overcompensating hot breath of her voice. Where she's from, "chill" isn't a casual word. It's what one must constantly overcome. It hovers over everything Bjork has done, the metaphorical "wintry mix" that threatens to interrupt communication, put the lights out, force isolation.

`New Works' Most of the dozen or so paintings and mixed media pieces in Janet Mathias' new exhibit depict figures through vibrant colors. The exhibit, New Works, is based on Mathias' travels through the mid-Atlantic and New Mexico regions. It opens at Meredith Gallery today and runs through May 31. There will be a reception 5 p.m.-8 p.m. today. Meredith Gallery is at 805 N. Charles St. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, call 800-753-3575 or visit meredithgallery.

If you've ever wondered what makes Twyla Tharp dance, or how she concocts dances, her latest endeavor -- "New Works," now at the Kennedy Center -- will give you a closeup view of the choreographer's personality and methods.Ms. Tharp has changed how dancers dance, but also dance's basic ingredients. It was a real treat to watch her and a select group of dancers work through their dances in an informal setting.For two months, seven dancers and Ms. Tharp have taken up residency in Washington, to create the "New Works."

When an artist changes direction radically, there may ensue a period not so much of transition as of feeling one's way into the new means of expression. And that's what I think is happening with Barbara Price, judging by her nine paintings in the current Artshowcase exhibit.Two years ago, Price showed a group of waterlily paintings at Loyola College that were striking because they dealt with such formal concerns as surface, space and color, and managed to be ruminative as well: They suggested musings on the nature of beauty and our response to it.In her artist's statement accompanying the current show, Price says her sojourns in Italy over more than a decade have led to a fascination with aspects of the interplay of architecture and landscape -- the enclosed vs. the vista, aspects of color and light, and so on.It was not until last summer, however, after a period in which her impressions became thoroughly internalized, that she began to make art based on her Italian observations.

Sculptor Karen Acker's shapes of delicate porcelain, with surfaces that look like skin, are put together into compelling works at the School 33 Art Center; they have the perverse fascination of something horrible that you can't takes your eyes off of.A faculty member at Goucher College, Acker showed some of her porcelain and steel sculptures there in the spring. The broken and pierced bodies of those surrealist works were a kind of physical manifestation of fears and neuroses, such as might occur in dreams.

Washington --It was feared that last year's financial woes would keep the Dance Theatre of Harlem from making its annual pilgrimage to Washington. But much to the delight of dance fans, this company opened its two-week engagement last night at the Kennedy Center.While the company has trimmed its acquisition of new works -- only two new dances are on the performance roster -- the Dance Theatre of Harlem has always featured a solid repertoire and powerful dancing."Ginastera" was the premiere featured on last night's program of three dances.

The intersection of art and commerce has always been a dangerous spot. It gets extra slippery at a cheeky exhibit at Current Space, the ever-funky gallery that has staked out an oasis on an otherwise development-shy block of Howard Street. Titled "CART," this show occupies a room of the gallery that has been turned into a mini-mart environment, with neatly packed aisles of merchandise from more than 60 artists. Near the cashier, there are shopping baskets and a stack of point-of-sale items.

A steady snap of beer cans being opened punctuated the air as members of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society gathered earlier this week to rehearse — this volunteer, do-it-yourself ensemble runs on beer. They may need a few more cases, given the challenges they've set for themselves. The creators of the 31/2-hour medieval fantasy "Grundlehammer" that launched the BROS to a heavy metal beat in 2009 are back with a double-header that premieres this weekend in their new home, a newly renovated theater in Charles Village.

When Ron Griffin received a solicitation for Lyric Opera Baltimore a few weeks ago, he had some questions. The organization sounded a lot like the Baltimore Opera Company, which folded midseason in 2009 because of financial problems, leaving Griffin and many others holding worthless tickets. "It was an abrupt end, and it wasn't handled well," said Griffin, a property manager. He and his partner were subscribers and patrons of the old company for more than a dozen years. "I asked what kinds of changes had been made.

They looked so innocuous, the two women, both in their 70s. Their stated intention — to provide shelter for the homeless — seemed so laudable. It took a Los Angeles traffic officer operating on a hunch to determine that the two senior citizens had planned and put into action a bizarre murder-for-profit plot. The real-life arrests of Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt in 2006 riveted local writer Susan Middaugh, and formed the basis of "Black Widows," one of the featured dramas in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, which begins its 29th season this weekend.

A few years ago, Sylvia McNair felt she had reached "the bottom of the bottom." Not long after discovering that her husband of two decades wanted out of their marriage, she learned that she had breast cancer and might have only six months to live. Today, the Ohio-born soprano could not look healthier or happier as she rehearses a new work fashioned out of Kurt Weill songs and created expressly for her by the American Opera Theater; it premieres this week at Baltimore's Theatre Project.

Nearly two weeks ago, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 provided the finale to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's splashy season-opening gala concert. The Tchaikovsky thread has carried over into the BSO's first subscription series concerts of 2009-2010; one of his greatest hits, Symphony No. 4, closes the program. Next week's lineup will end with yet another Tchaikovsky war horse, the Violin Concerto, so we've got a clear little trend going on here. (And people complained that former music director Yuri Temirkanov did too much Russian stuff.

EUBIE BLAKE CULTURAL CENTER409 N. Charles St. "Local Color and Other Colors."Claire Freeman, a prize-winning Maryland folk artist whose career didn't begin until she turned 50, has 35 of her paintings on display (through July 30) in this show that opens with a reception today from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Described by critics and artists as a true primitive painter with a style all her own, Ms. Freeman has never had any formal art training. Among the works featured here is "A Photo Finish," which will be donated to the planned American Museum of American Visionary Art; she won the juried grand prize "Governor's Award" in 1984 for this work.

Everyone knows that art dies without a constant flow of new works, but that hasn't stopped any number of organizations from stubbornly wallowing in the past, relying on the tried-and-tired-and-true. The Ying Quartet, one of the bright, younger-generation lights on the chamber music scene for more than a decade now, took a bold stand against such self-defeating conservatism in 1999 by launching a project called LifeMusic. With support from the Institute for American Music, the quartet commissions two new works every year, one from an established American composer, the other by an emerging one. Each piece has only one requirement - that it describe in some way the American experience.

"I wanted to write something that reaches people," says composer Jonathan Leshnoff. The result of that desire, Requiem for the Fallen, receives its premiere tomorrow by the Handel Choir of Baltimore and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra. The score, which incorporates traditional Latin and Hebrew liturgical texts, poems from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and a well-known prayer attributed to St. Francis, commemorates both military and civilian casualties of war. Leshnoff, a faculty member at Towson University and the BCO's composer in residence, does not specify which war. "The piece could apply to anything," he says.

Kamaal the Abstract, one of my favorite albums of 2002 that I still jam today, has never seen the light of CD shops. And it's a shame because the record is a sterling effort from Q-Tip, one of hip-hop's more progressive MCs with musical talent to spare. It was supposed to be the follow-up to Amplified, the New York rapper's 1999 solo debut that sold gold but was slightly conventional for Tip. I received a press copy of Kamaal about a month before it was scheduled to drop that April. I even published a review praising Tip's insightful raps, loose vocalizing and spacious arrangements that braided Beatles-style pop-rock with rap and jazz.