North Star Vocal Artists go deep in “water”

Watery themes, sea of harmonies Last weekend the North Star Vocal Artists presented an a cappella program on texts about water at three locations around the Bay Area: Novato, San Francisco, and Healdsburg. I attended the Saturday night concert at St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco and enjoyed the lively and spacious acoustics of the main dome, where excellent singers sang unusual arrangements by contemporary composers. Led by Sanford Dole, who is a composer and also...

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Program 3 is Distinctly SF Ballet

San Francisco Ballet’s Program 3: Distinctly SF Ballet presented three pieces by choreographers involved directly with the company: Artistic Director and Principal Choreographer Helgi Tomasson, Val Caniparoli, who joined the company in 1973 and continues as principal character dancer and choreographer, and Myles Thatcher, who joined the company in 2010 as a dancer. That each of these choreographers is a product of his times is clear in the pieces chosen for the...

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Central Works winds through the maze in “Bamboozled”

Central Works opened its 58th world premiere this past weekend with Bamboozled, a play written by Patricia Milton and developed in the company’s Writers Workshop. The play like so many of Central Works’ creations is political, full of ironic humor and blessed with a twisty-turny roller-coaster plot. The play takes place in a law office in a small town in Tennessee during February 2017. A young African American woman, Abby, has been accused of fraud by one of the local pillars of...

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Fidelio at West Bay Opera

Freedom, a constant struggle. Big themes and a big orchestra filled Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theater last Friday, Feb. 16 for the opening of Beethoven’s Fidelio. It was his only opera and he cursed the ten years that he spent writing and revising it. Although Beethoven was the Grand Master of many musical forms from symphonic to sonata, his one attempt at opera was cautiously received in 1804 and then again in 1814 and still performed less than one might expect from the...

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Opera Parallèle’s on-pitch tribute to Bernstein and love

Opera Parallèle celebrated the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth this past weekend in a performance that included two short operas and several dramatized musical pieces woven into a loose narrative, rather like the one-act that was the finale of the evening, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Perhaps in honor of their collaboration with SFJAZZ at the Center where the performance was held, the evening began with a jazz-infused selection from West Side Story, blazingly...

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Opera San José’s haunting “Dutchman”

The curtain opened on a three-sided set of wood walls that rose from stage floor to flies. Projected on the surface of these walls was a film of stormy sky and sea separated by a line of seemingly enormous craggy cliffs. The deep blue sky was coursed by turbulent clouds; waves rose in turmoil. Agitated movement flowed across the entire stage, only to be replaced by equally striking imagery. Out of a blood-red world the silhouette of a ship appeared. Flames engulfed the stage as the Dutchman...

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