June 2018 – Repeat Performances

June 24, 2018

To read a Will or not: Marin Shakespeare’s “Shakespeare’s Will”

Shakespeare’s Will is the second play in Marin Shakespeare Company’s summer season. The 90-minute play explores the unusual marriage between William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. The couple remained married throughout their lives, even though Shakespeare appears to have left Stratford some time after 1585 and the birth of his children; his plays appearing in London in 1592. He returned to Stratford in 1596 to buy a home, New Place, for his family, but the following year he was...

Categories: theater

June 21, 2018

Garden of Memory Solstice Celebration

A musical party for young and old The longest day of the year, June 21, has been celebrated by avant garde and experimental musicians at Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes since 1996. This past Thursday there were 48 separate events that shared the chapels and rooms of this unusual space, some of them solo composer/performers, many duos and several large groups. Titled, “Garden of Memory,” this acknowledgment of the summer solstice was created by Sarah Cahill, a remarkable...

Categories: music

June 17, 2018

A glittering Ring

The lyrics and even the action of the Ring Cycle are a series of repeating stories in which different characters retell past and future moments, all of which move inexorably toward the culminating deaths in Götterdämerung, the cycle’s concluding opera. It’s almost as if Wagner was worried the audience might forget the storyline during the cycle’s 17 hours of high-octane emotion. More likely, he was just obsessed, a living paragon of Romantic excess. Of the many stories sung,...

Categories: opera

June 12, 2018

Grabbing the Ring at SF Opera

The opening music of Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins with a single note played by the lower strings. Low woodwinds join in and then horns, until slowly a chord is formed. Wagner believed this first low note was a primal sound, an aural indication of a first slouching-toward-creation. It’s hard to argue his interpretation, for the sound as it carried out from the orchestra on Tuesday’s opening night seemed saturated with the terror of newness and ominous birth. As quickly as the notes cohered...

Categories: opera

June 2, 2018

A gripping “Carmen” at West Bay Opera

Artistic Director José Luis Moscovich led an out-sized production of the opera Carmen on Saturday, June 2 in the South Bay’s intimate Lucie Stern Theater. Brought to musical life by French composer Georges Bizet from a novel by Prosper Mérimée, this steamy pot-boiler was the backdrop for one of the best casts that I have heard here. And hearing that cast in this modest theater was a triumph of nuance over the usual operatic excess, with the title character’s range and deft...

Categories: opera