February 2009 – Repeat Performances

February 25, 2009

Sophia Gubaidulina at San Francisco Symphony

At the present moment Composer Sophia Gubaidulina first discussed her violin concerto, In tempus praesens, with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the violinist who commissioned the work and to whom it is dedicated, one hour before their first rehearsal for its...

Categories: music

February 22, 2009

Cecilia Bartoli at Cal Performances

Satin and sparkle The dress said it all. Acres of iridescent midnight blue satin embellished with glittering, silvery rococo decorations, a bodice with no visual support above which lay fields of feminine pulchritude, and an ornament-bordered train that went on for some yards. Dazzling touches of light on that smooth skin: necklace and flashing ring. When Cecilia Bartoli walked on the Zellerbach Auditorium stage in an outfit that could have been the physical manifestation...

Categories: opera

February 21, 2009

Pappa Tarahumara at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Sailing into the Past Out of 12 dancers in Japan’s Pappa Tarahumara dance-theater group, seven danced in Ship in a View when the work debuted in 1997 in Tokyo. Director Hiroshi Kioke has worked with one of his...

Categories: dance

February 7, 2009

Music in the 21st Century: San Francisco State hosts ambitious new symposium

How do faith and science interact in the creative arts? In the octatonic, according to rumors at a two-day symposium of 21st-century music held at SF State Feb. 6 and 7. The high-powered gathering included a fascinating retrospective of works by SF State professor and composer Richard Festinger and a concert of pieces by seven winners of the Emerging Composers competition. Saturday’s events also focused on Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter, honoring these two modern giants with papers, a...

Categories: music

February 6, 2009

‘Monsters and Prodigies’ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Hybrid life The partially open curtain reveals a man naked from the waist up. He has clattered to the front of the stage, and he reveals in words what he disguises behind a waist-high screen inscribed with a white circle—that he is a centaur: a half-man, half-horse monster. After telling a series of histories about deformed children caused by an “excess” of sperm, he draws a parallel between himself and a manmade phenomenon of Baroque opera: the castrato. The...

Categories: opera