February 2013 – Repeat Performances

February 23, 2013

Opus Project at Berkeley Arts Festival

Local composers having fun Mark Alburger, a local composer of note, has long cut a colorful figure in the Bay Area’s music and opera scene. In his latest experiment, The Opus Project, he takes a decidedly different format than his usual, or from most concerts for that matter. Rather than pose a concert around a genre or theme, Alburger decided to create a series of monthly concerts around opus numbers, focusing on twentieth century and...

Categories: music

February 16, 2013

Opera Parallèle performs Ainadamar in SF

Compelling performance of a problematic work Imagine an opera scene in which five flamenco dancers are executed by volleys of rifle fire. Horrible. And what, one may ask, makes it opera? Then a singer in uniform hoarsely shouts, “¡Viva la Muerte!” (Long live death!), and his squad continues to fire and the bodies to spasm, until those fusillades of bullets turn into a wild percussion theme. Now that’s...

Categories: opera

February 15, 2013

Lucia di Lammermoor at West Bay Opera

When Italians sing of Scottish blood feuds… A master of bel canto writing, Gaetano Donizetti created his operas out of direct and touching melodies, showcasing a soaring “beautiful song” vocal line. Lucia di Lammermoor, performing this Saturday Feb. 23 and Sunday Feb 24 by Palo Alto’s West Bay Opera, is a pinnacle of the bel canto style. Building on the inevitability and elegance of Mozart, Donizetti added...

Categories: opera

February 7, 2013

Lynn Harrell joins Berkeley Symphony at Zellerbach

Cello artistry and mugging… Finding the sweet spot in a program that mixed nostalgia with bitter cynicism would tax most conductors, but Joana Carneiro energetically led the Berkeley Symphony through that confusing vale last Thursday, Feb. 7 at Zellerbach Auditorium. What they achieved was luminously coloristic. They eased into those back-and-forth emotional demands with the world premiere of Alfama by Andreia Pinto-Correia, the...

Categories: music

February 1, 2013

L’Incoronazione di Poppea at West Edge Opera

Springtime for Nero… Judging by a seventeenth century opera, human nature does not seem to have changed very much in the last 400 years. Claudio Monteverdi’s...

Categories: opera