Younis Raza – Page 32 – Repeat Performances

March 18, 2013

Earplay at ODC

Early modernism to moving contemporary… and lots of fun in between! Earplay, a pillar of the Bay Area’s contemporary music scene, held a concert on Monday March 18 in San Francisco’s ODC Theater, a newly built facility in the Mission with a lively sound. While Herbst is closed for construction, the ODC should be getting lots of play. Their new theater on 17th St and Shotwell, though substantially smaller than Herbst, is a choice location for dance,...

Categories: music

March 17, 2013

Manasse/Nakamatsu Duo at Kohl

Polished pair charm Burlingame A spirited concert in Burlingame’s Kohl Mansion made this a record year for the Music at Kohl program, now celebrating its thirtieth season. According to Executive Director Patricia Kristof Moy, the concerts are nearly all sold out, a combination of intimate hall, top performers and a widening reputation. On March 17 we heard a polished piano and clarinet duo, the remarkably fluid Jon Nakamatsu, winner of...

Categories: music

March 3, 2013

California Symphony in Walnut Creek

Serving up dishes with gusto… A hugely talented young winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition wowed an East Bay audience last Sunday at the Lesher Center for the Arts. It also offered a joyous remembrance of Cliburn, who died on Wednesday, Feb. 27 and whose memorial service was held that same Sunday, March 3. The 22-year-old pianist, Haochen Zhang, gave a truly memorable performance that translated the searing passions of two hundred years ago, framed with...

Categories: music

March 2, 2013

A Secret Garden at Zellerbach

A garden blooms in Berkeley I’m not a gardener. Sun plants tend to wilt at my hands, and shade plants fry. But the Secret Garden, a new operatic adaptation of a children’s classic premiering this week at Zellerbach Hall, would inspire all of us to try our hand at gardening, or at the least to dig into the loam of British children’s literature. A collaborative venture between the San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances, the...

Categories: opera

February 23, 2013

Opus Project at Berkeley Arts Festival

Local composers having fun Mark Alburger, a local composer of note, has long cut a colorful figure in the Bay Area’s music and opera scene. In his latest experiment, The Opus Project, he takes a decidedly different format than his usual, or from most concerts for that matter. Rather than pose a concert around a genre or theme, Alburger decided to create a series of monthly concerts around opus numbers, focusing on twentieth century and...

Categories: music

February 16, 2013

Opera Parallèle performs Ainadamar in SF

Compelling performance of a problematic work Imagine an opera scene in which five flamenco dancers are executed by volleys of rifle fire. Horrible. And what, one may ask, makes it opera? Then a singer in uniform hoarsely shouts, “¡Viva la Muerte!” (Long live death!), and his squad continues to fire and the bodies to spasm, until those fusillades of bullets turn into a wild percussion theme. Now that’s...

Categories: opera