Music and Art on Film
The Hamptons Festival of Music, which since 2022 has brought musicians from North America’s leading orchestras together to present concerts of orchestral music, will launch its third season with “Music and Art in Concert,” a six-part series, at the East Hampton Library. Each program will feature an Academy Award-winning or nominated short documentary centered on music or visual arts.
The series will open on Saturday at 2 p.m. with “Close Harmony,” Nigel Noble’s 1981 Oscar winner about how a choir of fourth and fifth graders at the Brooklyn Friends School and elderly retirees at a Brooklyn Jewish senior citizens’ center combine to give an annual concert.
Subsequent titles, which will be shown at 6 p.m., are “The Last Repair Shop” (April 26), “Lady in No. 6: Music Saved My Life” (May 1), “A Concerto Is a Conversation” and “Christo’s Valley Curtain” (May 7), “Music By Prudence (May 16), and “In Search of Cezanne” and “Bolero” (May 23).
All screenings will take place in the library’s Baldwin Room.
Fishermen’s Lives
In conjunction with Earth Day, on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. the Sag Harbor Cinema will screen a pair of short documentaries that reflect life in two small fishing communities. A presentation by the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Back to the Bays initiative will follow.
Anne Belle’s 1976 film “Baymen — Our Waters Are Dying,” recently restored by the New York Public Library, portrays the life of baymen on the East End and their growing concerns about water pollution and commercial fishing.
“Fishermen and Fishing,” a 1961 film by Leon Loisios, documents the communal life of fishermen of the Molyvos community on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Concert for a Garden
A benefit concert to raise money for Matthew Lester’s pollinator garden at the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum will be held at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on Sunday afternoon at 3.
A celebration of Earth Day, the program will be performed by Beyza Yazgan, an award-winning Turkish pianist and composer, and will feature a three-part work by the composer Brian Field titled “Three Passions for a Tortured Planet.” It will also include spring-theme compositions by Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, and Claude Debussy.
Matthew, who died at 17, was passionate about the environment and planned the pollinator garden as his Eagle Scout project. Brought to fruition by his friends, the garden was unveiled in October 2017. At the concert a member of the Farm Museum will speak about Matthew and his vision.
The church hopes to raise funds and recruit volunteers to help the garden continue to thrive.
Works in Progress
The Watermill Center’s In Process series of open studios and rehearsals by its resident artists will resume tomorrow at 5:30 p.m., with presentations by Nemo Flouret, a French performance artist, Nicolas Lange, a writer and performer from Chile, and Talles Lopes, an artist and architect from Brazil.
Mr. Flouret will be working on “Derniers Feux,” a performance piece in progress inspired by the collective and popular memory of fireworks. In the artist’s words, the piece will result from “ongoing research into the intangible ephemerality that draws a tension line between pyrotechny, dance, and music.”
Mr. Lange’s “I Leave You All My Terrors” is a biographical writing project about the arrival of AIDS in the south of Chile, and love and friendship between two generations of queer people in that country.
While at the center, Mr. Lopes will explore not only how Brazilian coloniality was visible in the exploitation of forests and Indigenous people but also how the image of Brazilian tropicality has been exploited in art, architecture, and design exhibitions in New York during the 20th century.
Free registration is requested on the center’s website.
