September 2010 – Repeat Performances

September 30, 2010

Das Rheingold “Live in HD” event at movie theaters Oct 9

The Metropolitan Opera brings its Peabody and Emmy Award-winning series The Met: Live in HD to movie theaters around the world for a fifth season, beginning with Das Rheingold. This live transmission of Richard Wagner's opera, the first installment in the...

Categories: opera

September 26, 2010

LA Opera’s “Il Postino”

LA Opera's artful new opera The floor of the open stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is covered with blue and white decorative tile, reminiscent of Italian ceramic work, and, upstage, a small movable terrazzo seems to float on air like a balcony overlooking the sea. As the lighting shifts and alters, the tiles transform, seeming...

Categories: opera

September 19, 2010

Chanticleer at San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Earthly and unearthly—a vocal tradition that explores space The twelve gifted men of Chanticleer brought a new choral program to the SF Conservatory of Music this week. “Out of This World!” was a forum that used the harmonies of the human voice to point to the larger harmonies of space. Some physicists speak of the eleven dimensions of string theory—ten curling up...

Categories: music

Berkeley Symphony with Jennifer Koh-preview

A tale of two concertos Two very different concertos will share the limelight in Berkeley Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert next Thursday, September 23 at 7:00. Renowned violinist Jennifer Koh will solo in both Beethoven’s and John Adams’ violin concerti, led by Joana Carneiro for the start of her second season as the BSO’s conductor and artistic director. The early start will allow...

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September 16, 2010

San Francisco Opera’s ‘Aida’

Opera is a many-splendoured thing What’s cyan blue and gold and spectacular all over? Why, the San Francisco Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “Aida” (developed in concert with the English National Opera and Houston Grand Opera), which opened September 10 at the War Memorial Opera House and continues through December 5. This venerable pillar of 19th-century values...

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September 15, 2010

San Francisco Opera’s ‘Werther’

Between the sorrows of love ... Within the series of letters that make up Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” many of the emotions and aesthetics later characteristic of 19th-century Romanticism flow and ebb amid the writer’s youthful enthusiasms. These letters addressed to Werther’s friend, Wilhelm, tell of his brief and unhappy love for a woman who marries another man, his despair and his...

Categories: opera