Winterfresh Snocore Tour

The Winterfresh Snocore Tour is into its 10th year as an entity. A lot has changed since its inception—for one thing, tour-founding band Sublime pretty much came and went within the first year. The tour routing is a bit different these days, too—that first tour featured a dozen shows, all staged in ski-resort towns, so the bands and managers could “go snowboarding and skiing for free.” This year, there are 38 dates in decidedly nonresort towns like . . . well, Clifton Park. The music, however, has experienced the biggest change. Not just a musical-trend-related shift, the tour’s aesthetic has gone from mixing rock and reggae bands to embracing full-on heaviness. This year’s package features five of modern-rock’s biggest little names: Chevelle, Helmet, Crossfade, Future Leaders of the World, and Strata.

Parenthetically enthusiastic headliners Chevelle currently are riding a wave of popularity thanks to “Vitamin R (Leading Us Along),” the lead single from their second album, This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In). Their moody plod-rock, which owes more to Tool than it does to Creed (a good thing), helped push their album to gold status within the first six weeks of its release (pretty darn quick for a rock act). They might want to watch their backs, though, as Crossfade’s “Cold” was among the most-played singles on rock radio in 2004. Meanwhile, Helmet (pictured)—one of the biggest heavy acts of the early ’90s—are touring in support of Size Matters, their first album of new material in seven years.

The Winterfresh Snocore Tour will invade Northern Lights (1408 Route 146, Clifton Park) on Tuesday (Feb. 22). Tickets for the 7:30 PM show are $25, and are available through TicketMaster or the Northern Lights box office (371-0012).

Afterplay, The Three Sisters

In a clever end run around a frequent caveat in otherwise favorable reviews of Brian Friel’s play Afterplay, the Theater Company at Hubbard Hall is staging both Friel’s work and one of its inspirations and sources. The company also will stage Chekov’s The Three Sisters, from which Friel has lifted the character of Andrey Prozorov, whom he has paired with another borrowed Chekhovian creation, Sonya Serebriakova from Uncle Vanya. The play, which depicts the now-aged characters as they ponder the collapse of Russia’s elite and the meaning of the changing world, enchanted reviewers in England, though it often left them with the desire—or the need—to revisit the source material. Hubbard Hall has provided a timely way to do just that.

The Theater Company at Hubbard Hall (25 E. Main St., Cambridge) will stage Afterplay beginning Saturday (Feb. 19) and running through March 13; The Three Sisters begins tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 18) and runs through March 13. Tickets for Afterplay are $16, $10 students; tickets for The Three Sisters are $22, $12 students. For more information, call 677-2495.

The Bi-Continental Chowder

There’s performance art, and then there’s performance art with soup.

The soup (and the show) in this case is Nicole Peyrafitte’s La Garbure Transcontinental, or The Bi-Continental Chowder, which will presented at Albany’s Firlefanz Gallery beginning Wednesday. For an hour and a half, Peyrafitte will showcase her paintings, perform her own songs with guitarist George Muscatello, do “real-time sound processing with MAX-MSP-Jitter,” and make soup.

Peyrafitte—in case her name isn’t enough of a clue—is from France. Interestingly, her hometown of Luchon, in the Pyrenees, is on the same latitude as her current home, Albany. Hmm. This curious coincidence inspired her ongoing project Latus, of which the Bi-Continental Chowder is the latest work. And yes, at the end of the performance, you get to taste the soup.

The Bi-Continental Chowder will be presented nightly from Wednesday through Saturday (Feb. 23-26) at the Firlefanz Gallery (292 Lark St., Albany). Admission is $10, $6 students. For more information, call 465-5035.