Clark Art Airs Production of 'I Puritani'

08:16AM / Wednesday, January 07, 2026Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute continues its broadcasts of The Met: Live in HD's 2025–26 season with Vincenzo Bellini's "I Puritani" on Saturday, Jan. 11 at 1 pm.

This award-winning series of live, high-definition cinema simulcasts features the full live performance along with backstage interviews and commentary. The Clark broadcasts the opera in its Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

For gorgeous melody, spellbinding coloratura, and virtuoso vocal fireworks, I Puritani has few equals. In the first new Met production of Bellini's final masterpiece in nearly fifty years, Charles Edwards makes his company directorial debut after many successes as a set designer. The Met has assembled a world-beating quartet of stars, conducted by Marco Armiliato, for the demanding principal roles. Soprano Lisette Oropesa and tenor Lawrence Brownlee are Elvira and Arturo, brought together by love and torn apart by the political rifts of the English Civil War, with baritone Artur Rucinski as Riccardo, betrothed to Elvira against her will, and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as Elvira's sympathetic uncle, Giorgio.

To complement the opera's underlying theme of battle over governance, the Clark's Manton Study Center for Works on Paper hosts a pop-up exhibition of prints and drawings highlighting artists' representations of government in its many forms. The free pop-up display is on view from 11 am to 1 pm on January 11, prior to the broadcast.

The Clark is showing a prerecorded broadcast of this production.

Tickets $25 ($22 members, $18 college students, $5 children 17 and under). Advance registration encouraged; capacity is limited. To purchase tickets, visit events.clarkart.edu or call the box office at 413 458 0524. No refunds.

iBerkshires.com Text Ads

rk MILES Blding Materials

Are You Ready to Update Your Home? Start With rk MILES. 4 Locations (800)670-7433

www.rkmiles.com

Now's the time...

to harvest value from your home. Click for more details about a HELOC. Insured by NCUA.

www.greylock.org

If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

View Full Story