April 2018 – Repeat Performances

April 21, 2018

SF Ballet’s Unbound dances on

The second program of San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Work presented work by choreographers Myles Thatcher, Cathy Marston and David Dawson. Marston and Dawson trained at the Royal Ballet, and Thatcher was trained at SF Ballet, where he currently dances with the company while developing his choreographic skills. Thatcher’s Otherness opened the evening, tackling the difficult question of how social roles affect and distort an individual’s identity, narrowing...

Categories: dance

April 20, 2018

Kitka stars in primal “Iron Shoes” at Ashby Stage

On a darkened stage spattered with stars, 15 courageous singers, dancers and actors taught us about the power of narrative. Kitka, America’s premiere Balkan women’s chorus, wove together three fairy tales with discordant drones, powerhouse harmonies and primal wails of sorrow to bespell a sold-out audience. Composed by 30-year Kitka veteran Janet Kutulas, this song cycle had depths made more accessible by the edgy story-telling and remarkably fluid movement. Kutulas brought together...

Categories: music, theater

April 19, 2018

Ken-David Masur leads Berkeley Symphony

Four world-class soloists, one hundred and seventy-five tightly knit choristers, and a remarkable young German conductor wowed a sold-out audience at Zellerbach Hall last Thursday, April 19. For their season finale the Berkeley Symphony performed one of the pillars of Western music, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, written three years before his death. That larger-than-life work was a game-changer, ushering in the Romantic era and inspiring Wagner and Mahler to their own out-sized works,...

Categories: music

April 9, 2018

Other Minds speaks out

In his lecture on sound poetry, Italian poet and artist Enzo Minarelli briefly described his practice, saying all his sound poems began with words. That may seem obvious and not much help as a definition, but in the context of the Other Minds festival that ran last week at ODC Theater in San Francisco it made startling and concise sense. For the sound, rather than the meaning, of words was essential to the pieces performed. How each performer broke words into sound units and reassembled those...

Categories: music

April 8, 2018

“Ode to California” – Ferrandis leads the Santa Rosa Symphony

Luminous and thoughtful. For the past eleven years Bruno Ferrandis has led the Santa Rosa Symphony with skill and balance. After this season he is stepping down to return to his home in France. I was able to see him last weekend in a program titled “Ode to California” in the lively acoustics of Weill Hall at Sonoma State, and enjoyed his genius for programming and the wordless way that he communicated his insights into the music. This has been a busy year for North...

Categories: music