The Bad Plus at Herbst Theatre

Makeovers—taking Stravinsky out on the town The Bad Plus, a Minneapolis-based jazz trio, came to San Francisco last week with a fascinating creation that they have been polishing for a year at New York’s Lincoln Center. Their approach to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a potent jazz treatment of a revolutionary work. In 1913 Stravinsky’s piece, written for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky,...

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La Bohème at Livermore Valley Opera

The little opera that could… The tiny Livermore Valley Opera delivered a coup last Saturday, Oct. 6, at the Bankhead Theater in downtown Livermore. Their season opener, Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, is an enduring and popular opera, and is, in fact, the single most performed opera of all time. A punchy libretto by playwrights Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa had pin-turn mood swings that battered the audience time and again and...

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Carneiro leads Berkeley Symphony at Zellerbach

Season opens, Symphony hunting for “Innovators.” What does a fifth Century B.C. numerologist have in common with a contemporary musician and inventor? Quite a bit, actually. Along with the theorem that bears his name, Pythagoras was the father of harmonic theory and ancient Greek tuning. ...

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Bychkov conducts SF Symphony

A passion for life… Last weekend, Semyon Bychkov completed his collaboration with the SF Symphony in style. After a first week program that included famed violinist Pinchas Zukerman in Bruch’s Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s elegant Symphony No. 5, they essayed Shostakovich’s blockbuster Symphony No. 11, the “1905,” to high acclaim. Schubert’s marvelous two-movement “Unfinished”...

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Rigoletto at the SF Opera

Fools and Curses at the SF Opera A lone trumpet set a fragile entrance in the darkened house, followed by melancholy horns. As the curtains rose, a spotlight shone down on a lump of limbs and bells, slowly defined by motion—the hunchbacked jester, Rigoletto. Masked revelers, frozen in the arches, were backlit in red. Leaning into the distance, colonnades mirrored the sharp disaffection and stark shadows of Di Chirico’s “Girl with a...

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