Gidon Kremer, a big-league violinist with a large local following, returns in a recital that bears the stamp of his well-known catholic tastes. The lengthy program traverses three centuries and at least five countries. Included are several contrasting pairs: Bach’s “Chaconne” from Partita no. 2 in D Minor and Fratres II for violin and piano by the Estonian neomedievalist Arvo PŠrt, which pays tribute to the intricacies of baroque forms; Prokofiev’s lush Sonata no....

HASSAN HAKMOUN ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fascinated since childhood with the arts and lore of the Gnawa, a tribal people in southern Morocco believed to have migrated from sub-Saharan Sudan centuries ago, Hassan Hakmoun has turned himself into a master of their music. Born and raised in Marrakech, Hakmoun first encountered Gnawa entertainers in the town square, leaping high in the air and moving their heads frenetically to the accompaniment of drums and metal castanets....

On Wednesday nights the Red Dog in Wicker Park usually jumps with hip-hoppers and thumps with the 70s soul and the 80s-90s rap music that nurtures hip hop culture. But there’s something extra happening this particular Wednesday night. The usual poverty-friendly $3 cover has been upped to $5, and the bouncers are wearing serious “this is a goin’-on party and maybe I’ll think about lettin’ you in” attitudes. Inside, a tangible air of expectation floats amid the booming bass lines....

CHANGING VIEWS What counts for the “abstractionists” is not the appearances of nature but the inner principles on which it’s organized. Judy Ledgerwood’s Pastoral has the texture of natural forms but doesn’t depict anything specific. Its mottled mix of colors–the dominant dark green interrupted by deep reds and yellows, each color varying in shade almost continuously–made me think of moss and lichen. At the upper right is a “clearing” of lighter green, suffused with radiant light, but too high in the picture to be an actual clearing in an actual forest....

AMM (MATCHLESS) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the original musical democracies, AMM embraced indeterminacy and sonic noncoherence, vigorously asserting an egalitarian relationship between players. Breaking from the jazz tradition in which key AMM members percussionist Eddie Prevost and saxophonist Lou Gare cut their teeth, AMM undermined traditional hierarchical roles, most notably the one that assumes the rhythm section is a slave to the soloist....

A heist-gone-awry thriller with ironic political overtones, Johnny 100 Pesos is based on an actual hostage crisis that took place in Chile in 1990. What starts out as an attempted robbery of a black-market currency exchange in Santiago turns into a hostage situation and media circus when the hapless bandits are mistaken for terrorists. The Germany-based Chilean director Gustavo Graef-Marino, who cowrote the script, creates plenty of tension by crosscutting between the two sides of the hostage drama....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I disagree strongly with Thom Andersen’s assertion (March 5) that Neil Jordan relies too much on surprise to create interest in The Crying Game. For starters, even a mildly observant moviegoer gets plenty of hints to Dil’s (Jaye Davidson’s) identity. His/her appearance set me to wondering immediately. Then of course one might notice the milieu of the bar she/he frequents....

“A good comedy team is all about learning to compromise,” says Joe Dempsey, a hint of sadness in his voice. “You may fight, you may bicker, you may have your clashes of ego. But in the end you find a way to reconcile your differences, because the show must go on.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Over the years, they claim, they made several fruitless attempts to reunite....

David Alden wants to reinvent Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Since his impressive Met debut in 1979 with a revival of the opera, the New York-born director has staged this modernist classic six more times here and abroad. “It’s packed full of possibilities,” he says. “It’s truly about perspective shifts. So my interpretation is influenced by the nationality of the audience, by the social climate of the moment. At the Met I did a more or less old-fashioned historical version....

BOB WOODRUFF Last month’s television broadcast of the Academy of Country Music awards reeked of what it was–a Dick Clark production. It also shed light on which artists get in and which ones get left out of the commercial country-music sweepstakes. In an interview that preceded the show America’s oldest teenager spoke about how pleasurable it was to work with today’s young country stars. He’s right. Many rockers and rappers are unpredictable and often live messy lives, but young country stars are for the most part malleable, manageable, and sober charges....

Bylaw number one: This union will enthusiastically support the immediate firing of all members who hide or burn mail. “Of course, lighting a load of mail on fire is hardly the best solution to the problem,” opines David Futrelle in In These Times (April 18). “What we need is not sabotage, but stronger and more creative unions.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not so scattered....

Kids–try this at home! According to the Wilmette-based Dolores Kohl Education Foundation, Roy Coleman–Morgan Park High School physics teacher and recipient of a 1994 Kohl International Teaching Award–has a favorite experiment for bringing physics out of the classroom and into the home: “the toilet flush, [which] requires students, with help from their parents, to observe the results of flushing their toilet at home once a minute for an hour.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

First, lurid accusations of bizarre child sexual abuse, of children forced to eat fried rats and cockroaches by their sadistic parents. Then the equally dramatic recantations of the children themselves, who now insist the abuse did not occur. By now, one would think, reporters would look upon charges of extreme abuse with an almost instinctive skepticism. But no: in the first Tribune account of the allegations, dramatically announced with a banner headline on the front page, one could read in chilling detail about the horrific crimes said to have been committed by the south-side couple charged with 1,238 counts of “hellish” abuse against their children....

Whenever I watch an old Tarzan movie on TV, right when Tarzan and a few of the intruding white guys are worried sick and looking high and low we suddenly hear the drums. Tarzan stiffens, puts a hand to one ear, and announces, “They have the girl. She is well, but they will not give her back unless you shut down your mines. They are 200 men strong and have guns....

In a college town an outstanding, largely amateur ensemble like the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra can be a source of civic pride. But in Chicago it’s the professional orchestras that command the lion’s share of attention. Yet on any given day the U. of C.’s resident orchestra–or, for that matter, its counterpart at Northwestern–is capable of polished performances that surpass the pros. Much of the credit for its fairly impressive track record of the past decade goes to head maestro Barbara Schubert....

Of all the young choreographers in Chicago, few are as serious–and as successful–as Wini Haun. Offstage, she runs head-on into risky ventures such as organizing last fall’s Next Dance Festival or staging two seasons per year while most companies rely on one. Onstage, she’s equally bold, following her instincts and never looking around to see what other choreographers are doing. Her clean, angular style is unlike any other. Not only is her phrasing unusually rhythmic and precise, the pictures she creates onstage have an odd but genuine compositional harmony....

5 X NO No author in the secular 20th century has reflected romanticism’s morbid preoccupation with death more strongly than the late Yukio Mishima, whose obsession with erotic violence (he once had a photograph taken of himself posed as Saint Sebastian at the moment of martyrdom) and with the past glories of his native Japan inspired a profusion of literary works and a lurid personal life that culminated in a sensational ritual suicide in 1970....

Here’s something you don’t see in America very often: Shakespeare that makes sense. Directors Curt Columbus and Gavin Witt jam 28 University of Chicago students and 18 neighborhood kids into a rollickingly hip, unashamedly rough-edged, and wondrously clear A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed under the stars in the Reynolds Club courtyard. They update the play in an intriguing albeit piecemeal fashion–the Athenian courtiers are blue-blooded resort mavens, Oberon’s spirit entourage are industrial club kids, Titania’s fairy helpers are Victoria’s Secret junkies, and the rude mechanicals are, well, let me get back to you on that....

A NIGHT OFF THE COUCH, at Link’s Hall. The characters in the two one-acts that make up this evening acknowledge the role psychoanalysis has played in making them who they are, but unfortunately neither playwright distinguishes between dramatic action and mere therapy games. Edward Allan Baker’s confrontation between siblings in North of Providence is interrupted by bursts of introspective psychobabble, the characters’ misjudgments are inexplicable as anything but plot devices, and a firearm is tossed about so casually we know there’s no danger of it going off....

Whenever you have censorship, whether by government or the media, democracy suffers. In his article “Running Against Rosty” [October 28], Adam Langer mentions only in passing that I am running as an Independent in this race. As a community psychiatrist and 4th-generation Chicagoan, I entered the race against Rostenkowski to fight crime on our streets and in Washington and break the cycles of gangs, drugs, abuse and welfare in America while saving tax dollars in the process....