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Author: Paul Hertelendy

Ballet Blends Balanchine, Shakespeare

Ballet Blends Balanchine, Shakespeare

For a rare in-depth look at George Balanchine going back to his Russian roots, check out his lavish “Midsummer Night’s Dream” on a stream at the S.F. Ballet. It’s a stunning phalanx of 50 or more perfectly attuned dancers, a spectacle of palatial elegance and dance perfection. If only it had similar sparkle or propulsion. We regard Balanchine as a great, one of the fathers of modern ballet. In this 1962 “Dream” however he reverted to the spirit of 19th-century…

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Intimate Sounds of Women’s Music at Forefront

Intimate Sounds of Women’s Music at Forefront

The San Francisco Symphony’s latest aphoristic streaming program “Nostalgia” suggests more the dimensions of opera and Broadway theater than of mere chamber music. The focus is on three American women composers still on the way up, the best-known of them the pride of Brooklyn Missy Mazzoli, 40, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning Caroline Shaw, 38. And their deft music for strings is enhanced with elaborate lighting, split screens, and forest backgrounds, all of it in lighting so sparsely atmospheric you’re still not sure…

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Play Maestro, Select the First Program

Play Maestro, Select the First Program

Care to play maestro? Want to assist your orchestra? Then help select a promising opening concert program. Right now you can step in and help your long-dormant local symphony conductor plan his/her Resumption Concert, likely the first one in a year. Not even world wars have been as successful as that detested virus in shutting down our vibrant nationwide concert activity. The programming for the Resumption will be tricky, with contrarian motivation. The maestro may well want to commemorate the…

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A Singer with Consummate Sensitivity

A Singer with Consummate Sensitivity

BERKELEY—Julia Bullock doesn’t just sing the music. She has a unique knack for feeling the music in every pore. She prompts you to exclaim, “Drop everything, Julia’s on!” In the surprisingly effective new format called the virtual recital, the Munich-based American mezzo is giving a 3-month-long display of German lieder and American show tunes, with that magnetic bi-national songwriter Kurt Weill linking in between. For this repertory, she is a stunning interpreter, with an enviable German pronunciation helped, no doubt,…

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CLEVER NEW PATH TOWARD AN OPERA PREMIERE

CLEVER NEW PATH TOWARD AN OPERA PREMIERE

If you have the heart of a gambler with the talent to carry off a tennis doubles tournament, you could be running a company like the East Bay’s West Edge Opera. Meet Mark Streshinsky, general director of spunky West Edge, who is selecting the best possible creative team for a world premiere opera a good two years down the road. All without mirrors, tricks, or foundation underwriting. There’s both the heart and the gambling. And then, resembling a tennis tourney,…

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Celebrating Beethoven’s 250th

Celebrating Beethoven’s 250th

If you think of Ludwig van Beethoven mostly as the Ninth Symphony and the dih-dih-dih-DAH Fifth, I propose your spending his epic 250th anniversary these days by looking at him as the audacious innovator, many decades ahead of his times, as reflected in his late string quartets. He had been many things to many people: a feminist (in “Fidelio”), a freedom fighter battling oppression (“Egmont”), a master reformulator of the piano, and an unprecedented purveyor of high drama in music…

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Vibrant Symphony in Technology, Diversity

Vibrant Symphony in Technology, Diversity

The new reality in classical music is virtual, with a totally new genre of concert: close-knit ensembles playing, even though they might never meet each other. The San Francisco Symphony tackled the mid-pandemic problem Nov. 14 with an elaborate, costly, hi-tech solution to bring forth an hour-long prerecorded program crackling with energy, talent, modernity and diversity, filmed in part “around the world,” per drum-beating press release. Featured with the classical players were contrasting figures rarely in the concert hall, like…

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Not in Nirvana Any More

Not in Nirvana Any More

Dozens of wildfires all over our state right now, none completely under control, blackening a staggering 5,000 square miles.  The biggest negative for most, surprisingly, is mental health. These West Coast fires are mostly in remote parts with few inhabitants, few homes. (Exception: in remote Butte County California, just this week, the tragedy of a dozen or more who lost their lives.)  The situation is unexpectedly depressing, piled on top of other existing news: The killer Coronavirus that just won’t…

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Clarinet for our Times

Clarinet for our Times

The most telling statements are often the simplest. Instead of symphonic moving vans, we get the highly manoeuvrable vehicle of an unaccompanied instrument, telling us that more is less. No music emanating from our days of unrest is more eloquent than Anthony McGill’s brief and understated clarinet solo variant on “America, the Beautiful” that we hear on You Tube as part of his “TakeTwoKnees” series. As one of the most esteemed black figures in American symphonic music, he is a…

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Mozart Opera Lives Again

Mozart Opera Lives Again

Currently streaming free over the web, Mozart’s early opera “Idomeneo” is a flawed masterwork wrapped in a rare treat. It fairly glows with the composer’s mature musical style in arias, ensembles and scenas, but it lacks the conciseness and sparkling libretto characteristic of his later stage pieces. For the next few weeks at any time, you can catch a very presentable, elegant and at times compelling version over the web. This was the 2011 production by Opera San Jose recalling…

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