May 2013 – Repeat Performances

May 24, 2013

Otello at West Bay Opera

Vittoria! Evviva! Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, co-produced by West Bay Opera of Palo Alto and Festival Opera of Walnut Creek, affirms the vitality and relevance of Bay Area regional opera. This unique collaboration shows both a prudent response to financial challenges of producing opera and creates an exciting partnership that brings into our communities a cultural experience of magnitude and beauty. An enthusiastic full house packed Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern...

Categories: opera

May 11, 2013

Santa Rosa Symphony in Cotati’s Weill Hall

Russians! Bruno Ferrandis conducted the Santa Rosa Symphony last Saturday with flamboyant gestures and exacting tempi, braving an all-Russian concert. This was the culmination of their first season in the blond magnificence of Weill Hall, recently built on the grounds of Sonoma State, and the hall’s wooden vibrancy may have factored in the success of the program. They began with the Prelude to Khovanshchina, composed by Modest Mussorgsky at the end of...

Categories: music

May 8, 2013

SF Bay Choir in Oakland

Two poets, eleven composers and thirty-two lovely voices Two great American poets, set to music by a variety of modern composers, were the subjects of a concert last Saturday at Oakland’s St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Anthony Pasqua led the San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir through the diverse program, rendering hugely difficult harmonies into simple-sounding expressions that packed a wealth of nuance. Centered on poems by Emily Dickinson and...

Categories: music

May 3, 2013

Oakland East Bay Symphony at Paramount

A program packed with religious Mysteries, swaggering horns, and coy piano phrases. For an end-of-season program that bordered on extravaganza, the Oakland East Bay Symphony paired the world premiere of Daniel Reiter’s Mysterium with Bach’s glorious Magnificat, with singers from the Pacific Boychoir and four excellent soloists. And that was all before intermission. After came pianistic fireworks in Beethoven’s...

Categories: music