Younis Raza – Page 9 – Repeat Performances

April 23, 2017

Roomful of Teeth in the Taube Atrium

Dreams and sonnets Roomful of Teeth brought their vocal magic to the Bay Area on Sunday, April 23, courtesy of the SF Opera and SF Performances, who joined together to welcome this exhilarating octet. Performing to a sold out show in the newly renovated Taube Atrium Theater above Herbst, it was clear from their first entrance that the four women and four men who make up this group have created a canvas for the human voice that partakes of the whispering of rock stars...

Categories: music

March 31, 2017

Oakland Symphony- a powerhouse performance

Michael Morgan hits a home run Last Friday, March 31, the deep stage of Oakland’s Paramount Theater was filled with the Oakland Symphony, the Oakland Symphony Chorus, and St. Mary’s College Chamber Singers and Glee Club. They had partnered to bring out the depth and power of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum. Programmed to balance that heartfelt prayer was a work of big bones and simple themes, and an audience favorite (and it was actually the...

Categories: music

March 19, 2017

New Century joins Chanticleer in Marin

Of silken strings and lush voices. For their spring concert, the expressive strings of New Century Chamber Orchestra joined forces with the exquisite vocals of Chanticleer for a “trip” to Paris, stretching from Ravel’s lush songs to Satie’s austere Gymnopédie and from Gershwin’s early jazz to classic French cabaret. These two groups are each at the top of their form, and a number of contemporary composers have...

Categories: music

March 3, 2017

Gloriously tilting at windmills – opera in Alameda

Mad or divinely inspired? Social commentary or tragedy? Those treacherous mires were balanced and carefully unanswered in the opera Don Quichotte by Island City Opera of Alameda, which opened this past Friday in a production that was rich, colorful and energetic. Loosely based on Miguel de Cervantes’ seminal novel, Don Quixote, the 1910 opera by French composer Jules Massenet takes a very French Romantic view of an early seventeenth century Spanish classic and, in the...

Categories: opera

February 24, 2017

North German Masters of the Baroque

Paving the way for Bach… In a concert by the California Bach Society titled “North German Masters before Bach,” we were treated to lovely and little-known music. And that begged a fascinating question: who were the composers that inspired Bach? Paul Flight led a journey through the seventeenth century world of Tunder and Buxtehude, finding Italian influences reshaped by the Protestant Reformation, and a lovely interplay of lines that Bach would...

Categories: music

February 18, 2017

Lamplighters do “Patience”

Of milkmaids in Mountain View There is nothing quite like the frothy comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. That unlikely pair joined forces to write fourteen endearing operas over their long career, bridging high art with popular appeal and plastering them heavily with distressed damsels, fevered wit and the bumbling forces of the law. ...

Categories: opera