Ojai in Berkeley

A festival of beaten gold. The Ojai Music Festival, a venerable institution that has brought unusual music to the quiet Ojai valley for the last 59 years, has been collaborating with Cal Performances for the past four years to bring their weeklong series to the Bay Area. This year was another opportunity to hear the energetic programming that has been their hallmark. Not only is this a celebration of edgy music, but it lives on the edge by changing...

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Summer music madness

After a great year for Bay Area classical music, the summer festival season is fast upon us. This very week Cal Performances closes out a full year of programming with its reprise of the Ojai Music Festival, held on the Berkeley campus this Thursday and Friday evening and all day Saturday, June 20. Each year this long-running festival chooses a fresh artistic director. This year conductor and percussionist Steven Schick will lead an exploration of twentieth century...

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Oakland Symphony delivers a grand “Candide”

The best of all possible worlds? The Paramount Theater, Oakland’s restored Art Deco palace, was filled last Friday with fantastical music and absurdist theater in Leonard Bernstein’s satirical masterpiece, Candide. Based on Voltaire’s heady romp and critique of society, it poses a philosophical nut and then blasts away at it. But that philosophical debate is accomplished with such infectious melodies and pin-turn plot twists that it...

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