A classical summer begins: eight Tanglewood picks

Aerial view of The Shed at Tanglewood.
Aram Boghosian


Aerial view of The Shed at Tanglewood.
The Tanglewood classical music schedule is loaded with gems. Here are eight to consider:
Thursday, July 9, 8 p.m., in Ozawa Hall. The dynamic duo of Augustin Hadelich, violin, and Seong-Jin Cho, piano, take on works by Brahms, Janacek, Beach and Prokofiev. Whether you get seats in the hall or sit outside on the lawn, you will not regret getting to this one.
Friday, July 10, 8 p.m., in the Shed. Seong-Jin Cho plays Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and excerpts from “Swan Lake.” This special evening features dancers from Boston Ballet and will be wonderful for the ears and the eyes.
Saturday, July 18, 8 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO, with Joe Hisaishi conducting, Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano and Song Hee Lee, soprano, will perform Hisaishi’s “Adagio for Two Harps and Strings,” Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, Hisaishi’s “Da-Ma-Shi-E” and Hisaishi’s “Symphonic Suite from Princess Mononoke.” The multitalented Hisaishi will be the most accomplished Japanese artist to grace the grounds since Ozawa’s time. Not to be missed.
Sunday, July 19, 2:30 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO, with Andris Nelsons conducting, Daniil Trifonov on piano and Thomas Rolfs on trumpet, presents a powerful program: Haydn’s Symphony No. 22, “The Philosopher”; Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1; and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2. This is quite a lot to take in. Rolfs remains one of the orchestra’s most compelling virtuosos, and his trumpet playing is always worth hearing live. Trifonov, legendary on piano, playing another Russian legend’s finest music; extraordinary. Then, Beethoven. Better get there early.
Friday, July 24, 8 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO, with Andris Nelsons conducting and the brilliant Augustin Hadelich on violin, performs Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, “Polish.” Hadelich is worth seeing again and again; the tones he produces are so sweet.
Saturday, July 25, 8 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO, with Andris Nelsons conducting and Paul Lewis on piano. The super-catchy Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27, K. 595, will have Lewis demonstrating his artistic command of tempo and tone while dancing and blending delightfully with the orchestra. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 follows after intermission, and you’ll practically float home.
Thursday, July 30, 8 p.m., in Ozawa Hall. The Danish String Quartet, which brings a lot of energy to the stage, performs Stravinsky’s “Suite Italienne,” Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135, and arrangements of Danish folk songs. Come to hear Frederik, Rune, Asbjørn and Fredrik. Skål!
Friday, July 31, 8 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Yefim Bronfman on piano. The power of Wagner’s “Prelude and Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde,” followed by Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” will leave you feeling like you are the new emperor.
Other events of note: Friday, July 17, 8 p.m., in the Shed. The BSO performs John Adams’ selections from “Nixon in China.” Also, don’t miss Laurie Anderson’s curated series of events Aug. 13, 15 and 16.
For a full schedule and tickets, visit bso.org/tangle
wood
Graham Corrigan
As student enrollment declines across the region, local school districts are falling short of using the full amount of state Pre-K funding available to them. But local superintendents say the shortfall reflects fewer children enrolling — not money being left on the table.
A recent NY Focus analysis of State Education Department data compared New York districts’ Pre-K enrollment with the amount of Pre-K funding provided by the state. It found that most districts did not meet their maximum allotment.
During the 2024-25 school year, $1.2 billion was set aside for public pre-K statewide. By the end of the school year, roughly $170 million remained unspent. For the 2025-26 school year, the state estimates another $87 million will go unused.
Deficits exist across the state. In Northern Dutchess, Millbrook Central School District fell $156,600 short of its maximum state allocation, while Pine Plains was $64,801 below its cap.
Data for Webutuck Central School District was not immediately available. Earlier this year, Webutuck announced it would expand its Pre-K offerings to include 3 year olds in addition to 4 year olds.
Superintendents from Millbrook and Pine Plains say the disparity comes from a question of enrollment, rather than the funds allocation. “The state provides a per-pupil allocation of money,” said Millbrook Superintendent Caroline Hernandez-Pidala. “If you do not have enough students enrolled to encumber the total amount available to your school district, it is forfeited. You are not able to use it for other programming.”
Superintendent Dr. Brian Timm of Pine Plains ran into the same problem. “When the initial amount for Pine Plains was given to us, it was based on a projected enrollment of 47 students,” he said. “But when our students actually enrolled, we had 35 students. So what the state is saying is, ‘Here’s the amount if all your students were to enroll, but we’re only going to pay you for the amount that actually shows up.’”
Changes are on the horizon. The state budget passed last month raised the per-pupil reimbursement for pre-K from $5,400 to $10,000.
While that won’t affect enrollment, it will free up local school dollars previously used to support Pre-K. Millbrook and Pine Plains spent $181,989 and $221,739, respectively, from local funds to fund Pre-K.
Pre-K and child care have been a central component of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2026-27 budget. The state has earmarked $4.5 billion for the programs, a $1.7 billion increase in funding. Hochul has set a goal of achieving universal Pre-K by the 2028-29 school year.
Nathan Miller
Volunteer firefighters work to extinguish the last remnants of a blaze that destroyed a third-story porch atop a four-unit apartment building located at 5 Broadway St. in Amenia near Fudgy's Ice Cream Shop on Monday, July 13, at about 4 p.m.
AMENIA — A house fire erupted on the third floor of an apartment building at 5 Broadway St. near Fudgy's Ice Cream shop just after 3 p.m. on Monday, July 13.
No one was injured and no one was taken to the hospital in the blaze that erupted on the third floor of a four-unit apartment building.
A dispatch call alerting Amenia's Empress ambulance, the Amenia Fire Co. and the Wassaic Fire Co. to smoke in the building went out over the radio around 3:15 p.m.

Medics confirmed the presence of a fire upon arriving on the scene, triggering a mutual aid response that brought fire crews from Millerton, Dover, Millbrook and Sharon, Connecticut, to the scene.
Amenia Fire Chief Chris Howard said he was awaiting the Dutchess County fire investigator around 4:30 p.m. and the cause of the fire had yet to be determined.
Fire crews battled the blaze for about an hour before the fire was extinguished. The fire damaged a protruding section of the roof in the rear of the building above the two-story back patio.
Once the fire was extinguished, firefighters could be seen crossing Broadway to visit Fudgy's for ice cream to help beat the heat of the fire and the summer sun.

Millerton News
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D.H. Callahan
Cheers! The Revolutionary Whisky Series at Ten Mile Distillery, each named for a significant battle of the American Revolution, celebrates America at 250.
In December 2024, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau officially established the Standard of Identity for American Single Malt Whisky. It was the first new classification in more than half a century, creating new possibilities for American distillers. One of the distilleries taking advantage of this new landscape is Wassaic’s Tenmile Distillery. It is well positioned to make history because Tenmile has always honored traditional whiskey-making practices.
Single malts are often associated with Scotch whisky. Perhaps that’s why, years before the new standard was adopted, Tenmile hired Shane Fraser, a Scottish master distiller with 30 years of experience at some of Scotland’s most prestigious distilleries. Fraser began designing the distillery from the ground up. Alongside owner and general manager Joel LeVangia, he emphasized time-honored traditions, favoring hands-on craftsmanship over the increasingly automated methods used by larger producers. When it comes to making the best whisky possible, Tenmile believes in learning from the past. That philosophy extends beyond the distilling process.

In late 2025, in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the distillery introduced its Revolutionary Whisky Series. The collection features 57 unique expressions, each with its own combination of barrel types and aging periods, and each named for a significant battle of the American Revolution.
LeVangia sees the series not only as something collectible — a hallmark of the international craft distilling world — but also as an opportunity to educate. Most Americans learn about the Revolution in high school U.S. history classes, but LeVangia wanted to go beyond familiar stories such as Washington crossing the Delaware or the famous command to wait until soldiers could see “the whites of their eyes.” Each bottle helps tell a deeper story.
To bring those stories to life, Tenmile has gone the extra — dare they say, 11th — mile. Tom Bouldin, Ph.D., serves as the distillery’s historian. He consults on the series, helping LeVangia and Fraser connect each expression to an appropriate battle of the American Revolution. He also leads Tenmile’s lecture series. While some of Bouldin’s talks explore the history of popular music, his primary focus is the battles of the American Revolution.
With each new release, Tenmile hosts an intimate evening of history and whisky tasting. Centered on Bouldin’s meticulously researched lectures, the events often spark broader conversations about the battles, the people who fought them and what those events still mean today. It’s a style of promotion rarely seen today. Although the distillery and its grounds are stunning, these gatherings are not designed as Instagram photo opportunities. Instead, they bring together a small group of people eager to learn from the past while tasting something new.
That is what the Revolutionary Whisky Series — and Tenmile Distillery as a whole — is all about: learning from history while forging its own.
D.H. Callahan
Belinda Sinclair
Sinclair’s show explores the ways women have been practicing forms of magic for centuries, and there is plenty of history to tell.
Belinda Sinclair is the kind of magician who impresses people who don’t like magic. Her tricks are mind-boggling. Her stories are captivating. And if she picks you to write your name on a card, get ready to be wowed. Repeat attendees of her shows, of which there are many, take almost as much delight in watching new jaws drop as they do in seeing an illusion reach its astonishing conclusion.
Since the summer of 2025, Sinclair has been baffling local audiences at the Hughes Memorial Library in West Cornwall, but her magical run comes to a close at the end of August.
For 45 years, Sinclair, a New York City native, has been hosting small, intimate performances in the “Conjuring Room,” her Victorian parlor in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a place made for magic, with built-in surprises designed to disorient. But the Hughes Library doesn’t have the same potential to perplex. The room is, as the name suggests, a library, with shelves packed tightly with old books. Some of those books, stocked by Sinclair herself, dive into the history of women and magic. That particular topic is the organizing principle of her show.
Today, we live in a world with large-scale magic productions from household names like David Blaine. Penn & Teller and Criss Angel had widely popular television series, while performers like magician and comedian Justin Willman have found audiences on Netflix. David Copperfield, the most commercially successful magician in history, only recently had his 25-year Las Vegas residency cancelled, after allegations connected to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation resurfaced. But very few women, arguably none, have reached the highest levels of fame in the magic world.
Sinclair’s show explores the ways women have been practicing forms of magic for centuries, and there is plenty of history to tell. Her head is simply full of historical anecdotes and interpretations. She seems to know everything there is to know about magic and how, over the centuries, it has been feared and misunderstood.
It’s knowledge she acquired through decades in the world of magic. Sinclair got her start by accident. After graduating from New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, she was hired to entertain a long business conference as a clown. Despite having no clowning experience, she did so well that she was hired for a party on the spot where she was expected to perform magic. She didn’t know a single trick. So she headed to Tannen’s, the legendary Manhattan magic shop that is still open to this day, and asked them to teach her.
She was so captivated by the first trick she learned that she soon began illustrating the shop’s newsletter, the “Trickune.” Soon, she had worked her way into the world of magic. But her trajectory seemed limited. Women in magic were, and frequently still are, relegated to the role of “lovely assistant,” and Sinclair was no exception. She played along, laughing at the bad jokes and flirting with the right men, all the while knowing she could perform better than most of them.
Soon, she stopped playing along. She started developing her own routines. She became increasingly proficient with a deck of cards. She practiced and practiced and practiced. Eventually, the magic establishment took notice of this young magician with the audacity to be a woman.
As her reputation grew, so did the challenges she faced. Breaking into the inner circles of magic is no easy task, but Sinclair knew that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she needed to impress the people at the top. The Magic Circle, a prestigious British society whose members have included Penn & Teller, Stephen Fry and King Charles III, evaluates prospective members through a rigorous performance examination that includes required tricks. Sinclair earned a perfect score of 100 out of 100, proving not only that a woman could perform magic, but that she could perform it as well, if not better, than anyone.
As remarkable as her skills are, there’s a lot more to Sinclair than magic. She’s a ceramicist, hypnotherapist, author, game creator, actor and coder. But perhaps most importantly, she’s a teacher.
Sinclair thrives on helping others navigate through whatever obstacles life throws their way. For a time, that meant helping military veterans with PTSD transition to civilian life. She teaches children how to code so they can build their own websites. She works with unhoused children, using magic to boost their confidence. But if she has her way, the most important lesson she can teach is that with the right amount of work and determination, anyone — and especially little girls — can do the impossible.
Jack Sheedy
The cast and crew of “Rebeltown: The Musical.”
John Alan Segalla was working in Boston a few years ago, giving historic tours at the site of the Boston Tea Party. Now, as America celebrates 250 years as a nation, the Canaan native is about to debut a new version of his original musical, “Rebel Town,” inspired largely by the Boston Tea Party, the protest that helped launch the American Revolution.
“It wasn’t until I got to Boston and learned the Tea Party story that I fell in love with this moment in history, and I saw the story as wildly compelling and very important, and really a story that was very misunderstood, mistaught in schools,” Segalla said at a recent rehearsal in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, ahead of the show’s July 10 opening.
Segalla wrote most of the script during 2020, hoping to produce it by 2023, the Tea Party’s 250th anniversary. He finally mounted a version of the show in Stockbridge in 2024. It ran a bit long, he said, so the current iteration is more compact, running well under two hours.
The musical focuses on the lives of carpenter William Grey (played by Segalla), his wife Sarah Grey (Emma Robertson) and apprentice Peter Slater Jr. (Ryleigh Fillio), with appearances by historical figures such as Paul Revere (Chris Vecchia), Samuel Adams (Ryan Mascilak) and John Hancock (Christopher Boswell).
The action follows the clandestine meetings of the Sons of Liberty as they plan the bold destruction of British-taxed tea in Boston Harbor, culminating in Paul Revere’s storied ride, featuring a mechanical horse designed by technical director Ronald Piazza. According to the show’s website, “As rebellion turns to revolution, the cost becomes deeply personal: families are torn apart, loyalties tested, and the line between heroism and sacrifice begins to blur.”
The show is directed by Actors’ Equity member Michael Siktberg, who has worked at Bucks County Playhouse, Sharon Playhouse, the Ogunquit Theatre among and other venues during the past 20 years. He said, “I originally agreed to do this because of John, because of my love and respect for him and our growing friendship.”
He said he sees parallels between events of 250 years ago and today, noting “how they echoed the themes of our lives now.”
The participants in the Tea Party thought they would make a difference. “What is fascinating to me,” Skitberg continued, “is that they really tried to do it peacefully, they really tried a statement without bloodshed.”
But it didn’t work. King George III retaliated with the Intolerable Acts, ultimately inspiring the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution.
Rebecca Gardner, assistant stage manager, said the show could be thought of as the “Hamilton” of Boston. “It’s not Hamilton’s Revolutionary War story; it’s not ‘1776’; it’s another story of that era, which hasn’t been told before,” she said.
Emilyn Bona, also an assistant stage manager, said she has known and worked in theater with Segalla since high school. Even though she now lives in Albany, she said she jumped at the chance to work on Segalla’s latest creation.
Segalla is a Dramatists Guild member and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater from Russell Sage College. He has toured nationally as Jack in “Magic Tree House: Soars with Reading.” He co-authored a farce, “Moral Dilemmas of the Modern Day Vampire,” which was produced Off-Off-Broadway and in New England. He has performed extensively and received numerous awards, including the New Hampshire Theatre Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his performance as Don Armado in Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
“This is not a musical that’s taking any political side, left or right,” said Segalla. “It’s meant to be a unifier, and it’s meant to be something to educate and to remind people that this moment in history seeded the Declaration.” He said he hopes it will inspire “a renewed sense of pride in the earliest American values of what we wanted to be, a renewed sense of spirit in what we could become: that shining city on a hill.”
“Rebel Town: The Musical” runs July 10 through 19 at the Kathleen E. McDermott Auditorium, Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. For tickets and more information, go to www.rebeltownthemusical.com.

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