April 2009 – Repeat Performances

April 26, 2009

Cal Performances brings Andreas Scholl to Zellerbach

Understated yet charming Countertenor Andreas Scholl, lauded on world stages for purity of sound and expressive core, came to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium April 26, backed by the 22-member Australian Chamber Orchestra. It was a mutual alliance between a group that brings modernity and energy to period works and a present-day countertenor who has been likened to Senesino, the castrato Händel wrote for. The Australians were led with verve by violinist Richard...

Categories: music

April 25, 2009

Big Art Group at Yerba Buena

Sending Out a Stylish SOS The stage was filled with screens; downstage center, three cameras faced upstage into the screens. Wires, cables and the stark trees of tripods clustered downstage. From the ceiling a grid of pipes suspended projectors over the no-man’s-land between stage and audience. It was all part of the act as the New York–based Big Art Group performed its own techno Big Top at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this past weekend, in its most...

Categories: theater

April 22, 2009

Britten’s War Requiem at UC Berkeley

Powerful work done justice Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, one of the pinnacles of the choral world, is rarely heard due to the huge cast and attendant costs. The Bay Area has been fortunate to have it produced twice recently. Last summer Robert Geary...

Categories: music

April 17, 2009

Beethoven at the Oakland East Bay Symphony

A stellar concert Music often finds itself in a curious double role: it can stand alone or it can support the other arts. The Oakland East Bay Symphony held its spring concert Friday, April 17, and three of the four pieces referenced another form. Led by...

Categories: music

April 7, 2009

San Francisco Performances presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard

The mysterious, the sexual “At the root of each new work there is always what I call the ‘mystery’—an unknown wavelength that calls out to me ... My work consists of capturing this primordial wavelength, of ‘tuning’ it in a sense, and of arranging it in space and time with a structure and form proper to it.” So writes Marie Chouinard about her work as a choreographer. No description could be more exact for the works that her dance group, Compagnie Marie...

Categories: dance

April 4, 2009

Haydn—lamb and lion

Two very different programs showed Josef Haydn in different lights last week. And then turned around and delivered stunning modern works. At an April 4 program featuring Thomas Adès’ 2005 Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths), Leila Josefowicz wowed a packed...

Categories: music