Smuin Ballet’s Choice Holiday Show

Smuin Ballet’s Choice Holiday Show

WALNUT CREEK, CA—Is it high art, or is it sheer entertainment? The indestructible Smuin Contemporary Ballet has opened up its colorful annual Christmas Ballet, a cornucopia of the new and old offering variety show, modern ballet, night-club pizzazz, step dance, sacred dance, tap, and everything from snowfall to an Elvis impersonator. It’s all carried off with high energy and humor, with sight gags like the spotlight falling on an audience member who pops up a colorful umbrella during a brief…

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Orchestra with Music to be Seen not Heard

Orchestra with Music to be Seen not Heard

REDWOOD CITY, CA—If you want to hear the symphonic sounds of today, in summer you go to the Santa Cruz Cabrillo Festival. In the rest of the year, you’d do very well with the Redwood City Symphony, an (unpaid) community orchestra that bites off contemporary scores with relish, chutzpah and fearlessness. And an audience of some 250 can be counted on to turn out for their adventures, with senior citizens at the forefront in patronage, drinking in all those moderns….

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Korea Travels to Oakland

Korea Travels to Oakland

OAKLAND—In one of the adventurous Oakland Symphony’s boldest and most exotic ventures, half of the Nov. 15 program was devoted to Korean music which, though timeless in style, seems downright avant garde to Western ears. The centerpiece was Cal grad Jean Ahn’s concerto “The Woven Silk,” with soloist Soo Yeon Lyuh playing the two-stringed bowed haegeum fiddle, which resembles the Chinese erhu. The orchestral effects are difficult and unfamiliar, with swooping gestures, low trombone rumbles, and furious drumming. The restless…

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Blazing Sample of Wagner Opera

Blazing Sample of Wagner Opera

It was the Wagner Rush or the Wagner High, hitting again with flashes of lightning, as overwhelming as it is dazzling. It was just a one-hour sampler (out of that 15-hour “Ring” tetralogy), but you wonder if you could ever stay standing coherently and rationally after a full 15-hour, 4-day hit. Well, there’s some semblance of sanity locally, as there are no plans anywhere on the horizon for the “Ring” being staged at the S.F. Opera; so the S.F. Symphony’s…

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Cunningham Dances Go Far Afield

Cunningham Dances Go Far Afield

A highly anticipated centenary commemoration of dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham branched out and went far, far afield with new creations. The grabbag also boasted a whip-cracking specialist, a radio soap opera, improvisation and even a vintage Ohlone Indian singer. To boot, a live performance artist straight out of some contemporary art display spent the time on stage untangling a spaghetti of tangled wires—and doing nothing else. Oh Merce, where are you now that we really need you? When he died a…

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Symphony Restoring Vitality

Symphony Restoring Vitality

ROHNERT PARK, CA—Once again, widespread disruptions threw a monkey wrench into the Santa Rosa Symphony concerts, this time from the Kincade Fire. Once again, evacuations (for 180,000) and power cutoffs forced losing rehearsals, with one of the play-ins, believe it or not, held in a casino out of necessity. But, as in 2017, the plucky SRS sucked it up, bounced back, and gamely played a slightly curtailed program. The musical reprise toward restoring normal life, full-speed-ahead, proved both moving and…

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High-Stepping Nonpareil Russians

High-Stepping Nonpareil Russians

BERKELEY—The Russians serving up a palatial seven-course ballet feast in “La Bayadère:” Take a Barnum & Bailey spectacular, with oompah circus music to match, and a faux-India of snake charmers and rajahs like Hollywood’s, as ground out in 1920s silent flicks. Add arguably the finest dancers in the world, with a depth of ensemble to rival the Vienna Philharmonic or the New England Patriots. There you have the invincible Mariinsky Ballet out of St. Petersburg, Russia, playing here this week….

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Shaw Oratorio Premiere

Shaw Oratorio Premiere

BERKELEY—When it came to commissioning a new piece, Philharmonia Baroque aimed for the stars: composer Caroline Shaw. When it came to carrying it out, Shaw too aimed for the stars with her epic world premiere “Listeners,” now unveiled, played and recorded in several venues. Her uncommon secular “contempo-ratorio” draws in space travel, poetry, the UN and multiple one-world messages touching on eras and galaxies far vaster than our own. We realize we are just humble pixels in the universe’s scheme…

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Concerto Bewails Losing Earth

Concerto Bewails Losing Earth

The new percussion concerto “Losing Earth” lays out before our ears our bigger-than-life environmental predicaments here and now. Composer Adam Schoenberg, 38, spotlighted the diversity of percussion textures—gentle, ferocious, ear-tingling—far beyond the rambunctious noises mostly relegated to the outer fringes at symphony concerts. His world premiere at the San Francisco Symphony was created with the collaboration of concerto soloist Jacob Nissly, who is not only an old friend but also a year-round principal with the ensemble. If the instant standing…

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FIGARO GREAT, ‘MARRIAGE’ LESS SO

FIGARO GREAT, ‘MARRIAGE’ LESS SO

It’s been called the perfect comic opera, “The Marriage of Figaro” or, more accurately, “Figaro’s Wedding.” And the current go-round at the S.F. Opera, while not perfect, catches its humor and dexterity as only Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte could have created. Think about it: In the elegant drawing rooms, intrigue upon intrigue. Assignations in switched identities. Hired help conspiring to outwit the libertine count. The women outwitting the men. Figaro desperately trying to wiggle out of a long-forgotten…

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