July 2015 – Repeat Performances

July 31, 2015

Music@Menlo – a Schubert Festival

A classy phenomenon held for three weeks on the peninsula, Music@Menlo is devoting this year’s summer festival to the short and prolific life of Franz Schubert. Their fifth main concert program, titled “The Setting Sun,” perused chamber works from the last two years of his life including the powerful Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major for piano, violin and cello. Friday’s concert, on July 31, was an opportunity to hear his natural exuberance tempered by ill...

Categories: music

July 26, 2015

Valley of the Moon Music Festival in Sonoma

Sonoma finds a sweet spot The sleepy town of Sonoma is celebrating the inauguration of a new music festival this year. Sited in a bucolic vale but easily accessible to the Bay Area, the Valley of the Moon Music Festival is the brainchild of a well-known East Bay duo, pianist and composer Eric Zivian and cellist and early music enthusiast Tanya Tomkins. ...

Categories: music

West Edge Opera’s “As One”

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Categories: opera

July 17, 2015

A chameleon/activist speaks out at Berkeley Rep

Anna Deavere Smith: “Save the children!” I’m not an actor, but this week on Addison Street I performed in the second half of Berkeley Rep’s latest...

Categories: theater

July 16, 2015

A Spanish classic at Cal Shakespeare

Cal Shakes mounts a dream of a play When I was a kid, a bouncy song called “Sh-Boom,” featuring the lyric, “Life is but a dream,” was a big hit. So was the movie The Bad Seed, about a sneaky monster of a child. Though I couldn’t have guessed it, I had butted up against plot elements of 17th century Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca’s classic, Life Is a Dream, now strutting its stuff, in a translation by Pulitzer Prize winner...

Categories: theater

July 15, 2015

Mendocino Music Festival celebrates 29 years of excellence

On the fog-shrouded coast of Mendocino one can find half-hidden troves of berries, small and surprisingly flavorful. And like coastal berries one can find artists and artisans, singers and music lovers who emerge each summer to support their beloved Mendocino Music Festival, now in its 29th year. And another surprise of the North Coast is the hospitality of the locals, who open their homes to house 90 musicians for three weeks every summer. ...

Categories: music