May 2010 – Repeat Performances

May 24, 2010

Earplay in “Ports and Portals”

Five easy pieces? Not! Earplay finished their season in style Monday night at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, with two World premieres and two West Coast premieres. Additionally, Earplay commissioned three of the five works on the program, no small feat for this small organization, and one that reveals their commitment to the next generation of composers....

Categories: music

May 22, 2010

Pamela Z Performs at Z Space

"Did you pack your own bag?" As a performance artist, Pamela Z travels a lot. And that means carrying heaps of luggage through the endless labyrinths of airports and airport security. As she showed this past weekend at Theater Artaud’s Z Space in San Francisco,...

Categories: theater

May 14, 2010

Alle Menschen werden Brüder

Oakland Symphony Season Finale Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony closed their season May 14 on an uplifting note. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its “Ode to Joy,” filled Oakland’s Paramount Theater with a paean to brotherhood. Morgan enriched that theme by opening with a song cycle by Jake Heggie based on...

Categories: music

May 13, 2010

Sonny Rollins at Zellerbach

At 79 years old, jazz legend Sonny Rollins plays with stamina, lungpower, and intellectual flexibility seldom seen or heard by horn players of any age. Backed by an all-star band consisting of Bobby Broom (guitar), Bob Cranshaw (bass), Kobie Watkins (drums), and Victor See-Yuen (percussion), his performance for Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall on May 13 was a privilege of indescribable proportions. The evening’s concert consisted of six tunes, beginning with the new Patanjali...

Categories: music

Josh Kornbluth at The Jewish Theater in San Francisco

Josh considers Andy In October 2008, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco opened an 18-month exhibition of Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered. The show, which debuted at The Jewish Museum, New York in spring 2008, was...

Categories: theater

May 8, 2010

Laurie Anderson at Cal Performances

The voice of loss The voice of Laurie Anderson is unmistakable: low, almost sultry with the resonance of electronic processing, it has its own cadences, rising and falling with a deadpan irony. And her alternate voice, lowered electronically into the range of a man’s voice is almost as familiar—with delays, distortions and heavy pauses, it navigates Anderson’s numerous stories of cultural absurdity. This past weekend Cal Performances brought both voices back to...

Categories: theater