October 2018 – Page 2 – Repeat Performances

October 7, 2018

A sumptuous “Tosca” at San Francisco Opera

The Opera House curtains open on an elaborately decorated Roman church, its walls deep scarlet, the religious paintings over the altar and on the left side of the apse painted in the fleshy and darkly sensual style of the late Renaissance. There, in front of an easel, the painter Cavaradossi contemplates his portrait of Mary Magdalene and sings about feminine beauty and love. In San Francisco Opera’s Sunday performance of Puccini’s Tosca, “Recondita armonia” revealed all the...

Categories: opera

October 4, 2018

Berkeley Symphony opens the season with virtuosity

Ming Luke nails an “audition” A sophisticated Berkeley audience stood to applaud conductor Ming Luke, violinist Benjamin Beilman and the Berkeley Symphony last Thursday, Oct. 4, in a work that was as severely modern as it was technically jaw-dropping. That work, Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Crafted of harmonics and fierce call-and-responses, the concerto’s architecture and virtuosity were as unexpected as they were challenging....

Categories: music

Sappho’s body is breaking in “extreme lyric I”

Translating a translation highlights the fragility and multiplicity of meaning. A coproduction of Hope Mohr Dance and ODC Theater, extreme lyric I directly challenges the stability of gender and identity by embodying Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. Although Mohr intends to “shed postmodernism with this work and investigate the lyric,” a precise, definable sense of self, the self implied by the I of the title, remains just out of reach. Sappho’s poetry,...

Categories: dance

October 3, 2018

By the “Sweat” of their brow

Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Sweat, opened at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater this past week. The play focuses on workers at a steel mill whose work slowly erodes until finally they are without jobs, and according to Nottage, without identity, marginalized. It was clear the audience wanted to love this play, and it was well cast, well acted and well presented. It is notable that Nottage remarks in the program notes that the Washington D.C. audience received the play...

Categories: theater