Kurtag’s ’Kafka Fragments’ at Cal Performances

Preview When Peter Sellars called photographer David Michalek to talk about his staging of György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, he described the world that singer Dawn Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall would inhabit during their hour-long performance of the hermetic composer’s settings of Kafka’s text. Sellars and Upshaw “felt there was something extraordinary in this piece but it needed to be contextualized differently so that people could find a way...

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Stanford Lively Arts presents Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi

Through worlds of dance Full of energetic movement executed by powerful dancers in the full flow of their bodies’ vigor, The Scales of Memory is an 80-minute collaboration by the men of the Senegalese dance company, Compagnie Jant-Bi, and the women of the American dance company, Urban Bush Women. Cross-cultural dance concerts are specialties of both these excellent companies. “Resistance,” the first of the work's three parts, began with all the dancers...

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Messiaen at Stanford

A concert of revelations and extremes at Stanford This year marks the centenary of Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who had a profound impact on 20th century music. Last Thursday Stanford Lively Arts kicked off festivities in his honor with a concert of one of his seminal works, Quator pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), which Messiaen composed while a POW in a German concentration camp, Stalag VIIIA. The unusual instrumentation—violin, cello,...

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Oakland Symphony Chorus at Lake Merritt

Inauguration of the new Oakland cathedral Constructed  over the last three years, Oakland’s newest cathedral held an inaugural concert Sunday evening, Nov. 2, with the Oakland Symphony and Symphony Chorus. Rising like a glass ship at the edge of Lake Merritt, the huge Cathedral of Christ the Light is the headquarters for the Oakland Catholic Diocese. Offices and outreach programs are housed in the immense concrete lower level, including a health clinic for those...

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San Francisco Opera’s ’Elixir of Love’

Mix me an elixir, 101 in the shade Who cannot love Donizetti? Especially at his wittiest and most playful: L’elisir d’amore, or Elixir of Love, as it is titled in San Francisco Opera’s current production. Imagine Donizetti and his librettist, Felice Romani, recasting the story of Tristan and Isolde, deciding, with roguish glee, to juxtapose that mythic story of frustrated desire and magical love to the tale of a mischievous village girl taunting her...

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