Atmospheric photos at Forbes Library

NORTHAMPTON — Hosmer Galley at Forbes Library features the work of three photographers this month who work in black and white but take different approaches to their work. Yet all three capture a sense of mystery and wonder in their pictures, whether abstract or more detailed.

Virginia Sandman says dreams are the source of some of her photos, while others can come from “simply touching and interacting with materials like thread and clay and playing around with light.” She also has a background in sculpture, video installations, and performance art that factors into her photographs.

Paul Griffin says a trip to Ireland last year to trace his Irish roots led him to photograph ghostly stone ruins in isolated parts of the country — an ancient farmhouse half covered in vines, the remains of a church next to a Celtic cross in an empty field — with the goal of hopefully evoking “some of the atmosphere, mystery, wonder and the connection I felt to this enchanting land.”

And Ken Kipen contributes striking landscape photos, such as sunlight breaking through a forest canopy like a message from heaven, that he’s created while traveling, allowing him to “connect with worlds very different from my own.”

In the end, Kipen writes in exhibit notes, his travels have provided “subjects I somehow recognize from an awareness beyond seeing. Then the subject itself is transcended, giving way to feelings rooted deep in our collective memory.”

There will be an artists’ reception at the galley tonight (Friday, Oct. 13) from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Historic photos in the Hilltowns

WORTHINGTON — The town’s Historical Society will open its featured exhibit for 2023, “Harriett Langdon Pruyn Rice: Seeing Worthington Through A Different Lens,” Oct. 29 at 6 p.m. at the Worthington Historical Building, located on 6 Williamsburg Road.

Rice, born in Albany, New York in 1868, married Worthington native William Gorham Rice in 1892. Though the couple and their son lived primarily in Albany, they spent time in summers in Worthington well into the early 20th century, where Harriett Rice kept journals and developed a keen interest in photography.

The exhibit features some 50 of her photographs in Worthington from 1892 to 1906, along with background research and excerpts from Rice’s journals. Her photos of the town’s residents offer a candid and natural look at their lives, in their homes and yards and surrounding fields.

At the exhibit opening, researchers/curators Jim Downey, Kate Ewald and Arthur Tuttle will speak briefly about the the artist and the gift of her glass negatives to the town’s library in 1944, as well as about her journals, now at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Pioneer Valley Symphony opens new season

GREENFIELD — Now celebrating its 85th year of performances, the Pioneer Valley Symphony (PVS) and Chorus will launch its 2023-2024 season tonight (Friday, Oct. 13) at 7:30 p.m. at Greenfield High School Auditorium.

The concert features “three moving reflections on immigration,” beginning with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, written as the composer returned home to Russia after several years in Germany.

Smith College Assistant Professor of Music Jiayan Sun, acclaimed for his piano skills by the New York Times and other reviewers, will join PVS to play the concerto.

The PVS Chorus then joins the orchestra for “Life of an alien,” a passage from the Nigerian opera “Ìrìn Àjò (Odyssey of a Dream),” composed in 2018 by Mount Holyoke College music professor Olabode Omojola as a reflection of emigrating from Nigeria to the U.S.

The concert concludes with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which the composer wrote in New York City in 1943 as a bitter reflection on his exile from his home in Hungary during WWII.

PVS has also scheduled performances in Amherst, Belchertown and Chicopee for its 2023-2024 season, in addition to other concerts in Greenfield.

Symphony Director Tianhui Ng says each concert includes a major work well known to audiences as well as “lesser-known yet spectacular works like … Roxanna Panufick’s ‘Abraham: Violin Concerto for Hope.’”

Tickets and additional information are available at PVSOC.ORG or by calling (413) 773-3664.

Ukraine calling

HOLYOKE — Everyone’s heard of gangsta rap. But how about “Odessa Gangsta Folk Music”?

Kommuna Lux, a band from Odessa, Ukraine that blends klezmer music and what the group calls “rowdy speakeasy tunes” from its hometown, will play The Divine Theater at Gateway City Arts on Oct. 19 at 8 p.m.

The seven-member group formed in 2014 and did its first performances in “noisy flash mobs” across Odessa, including the city’s famous fish market, Privoz; on tram lines; on the noted Primorsky Boulevard promenade; and on “rusty rocking boats” along the beach.

All of this activity ended up “perplexing residents of the city,” the ensemble notes.

Today band members employ a variety of instruments — accordion, guitar, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, bass and drums — to play music with a Bohemian sensibility that blends klezmer with other Eastern European sounds, Balkan rhythms, and traditional tunes from Odessa, long a center of Jewish life in Ukraine.

The band’s appearance in Holyoke is part of a worldwide tour that’s taken the group across much of Europe and to Israel. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kommuna Lux has also collected donations at its shows for humanitarian relief in their home country.

Tickets for the Oct. 19 concert are $30 in advance and $35 at rhe door. The Bistro at Gateway City Arts will be serving food and drink from 5 to 9 p.m. that evening.

Curtain rises at UMass Amherst

AMHERST — The University of Massachusetts Theater Department opens its new season Oct. 27 with performances of “The Hatmaker’s Wife,” a play by Lauren Yee that examines the different legacies of family, love and home.

The story begins with a character known simply as “Voice,” a young woman who moves into her boyfriend’s rented house outside of New York City in the expectation of domestic bliss.

Instead, the character finds she’s essentially sharing her new home with the troubled previous inhabitants, an elderly hatmaker, Hetchman, and his long-suffering wife, both of whom are conjured into being by talking walls.

“The Hatmaker’s Wife,” directed by UMass Theater Professor Gina Kaufmann, blends elements of modern rom-coms, including gross-out jokes and a stereotypical goofy neighbor, with close attention to Jewish culture and folklore, like a snack-eating Golem and the Jewish immigrant experience in America.

The play will be staged at the Curtain Theater, in the Bromery Center for the Arts, Oct. 27-28 and Nov. 1-4 at 7:30 p.m.; there’s also a matinee pn Nov. 4 at 2 p.m.

Tickets — $17 for general admission, $5 for students, seniors, and Card to Culture patrons — are available at the UMass Fine Arts Center box office at 1-800-999-UMAS.

— Compiled by Steve Pfarrer