The light and shadows of “Lightfast”

Theater, with its melding of text, performance, music and dance, has long depended on collaboration, but among artists working in forms that are most often practiced separately and individually collaboration takes on a very personal dimension. And its relationship to the audience is also less formal and more approachable. Lightfast, a multimedia performance and installation at the wonderful Museum of Design and Art in San Francisco, explores the realm of collaboration between artists....

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Susan Graham and the beauty of the art song

The fabulous Susan Graham sang in recital this past Sunday afternoon at Hertz Hall as part of Cal Performances 2020 season. She was accompanied by the equally fabulous Malcolm Martineau, pianist to the diva stars. The house was packed and the venue provided its wonderful concert hall acoustics. The well-loved, and rightly so, America mezzo opened the program with five songs by Reynaldo Hahn. Her interpretation like her voice was warm, and her French graced with clarity, which enhanced the...

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Renée Fleming at Cal Performances

The always lovely Renée Fleming gave a recital filled with her personal beauty at Zellerbach Auditorium this past weekend. Accompanied by pianist Richard Bado, a sensitive accompanist and skilled musician, she gave Cal Peformances’ adoring audience a remarkable tour through the history of European and American song. The recital began with four songs by Schubert, described by Fleming as the “foundation of classical recitals.” The songs were filled with the composer’s heated intensity...

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Mapplethorpe and the question of beauty

Since the mid 20th-century and perhaps earlier, depending on the art form and how radical the practitioners, beauty as a feature of high art has been suspect. Beauty, it’s claimed and with reason, soothes and distracts, makes us accept the unfair and corrupt in our society and revel in the gorgeousness of art before all things. Beauty is easily duplicitous. Certainly Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), which played at CalPerformances’ Zellerbach Auditorium this past weekend,...

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Welcoming the summer in the Garden of Memory

Held each year on the summer solstice, the Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes is an experience that no Oakland resident should miss. As the sun sets, over fifty experimental musical performances congregate in the columbarium’s many magnificent rooms to commemorate the longest day of the year. This annual event, which began in 1996 and held into one of the Bay Area’s most exquisite places, has exploded in popularity over the last few years. This year, big names in the world of...

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Piedmont East Bay Choirs: youthful voices, new music

The Piedmont Choirs were joined by the St Catharine’s College Girls’ Choir of Cambridge, England, for their spring concert last Friday in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. Led by founding choral director Robert Geary, this concert was also a coming-out party for composer and new Piedmont Chorus Artistic Director Eric Tuan, whose own composition was featured on the program. The variety and abilities of the several choruses featured here were simply staggering, and it is no...

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