October 24, 2009
Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Dancing to the light of Jason...
Jaime Robles
October 22, 2009
‘Salome’ at San Francisco Opera
Worlds ruled by the moon . . .
When the scrim, which is like a sheer veil before the audience’s gaze, rises what is thrown into sharp relief is a severe world of bronze-colored walls at the center of which is a huge black disc. Behind that new moon disc is the cistern in which the prophet Jokanaan is held prisoner. The mouth of the cistern opens and closes like the lens of an eye. To the audience’s left...
October 20, 2009
San Francisco Opera presents ‘The Daughter of the Regiment’
Laughing while marching to a different drum
When we think of opera...
October 18, 2009
Suzanne Farrell Ballet at Cal Performances
Preserving the Legacy
It’s hard to believe that all the works of choreographer George Balanchine are not graven in stone somewhere, that some exist merely in the memory of dancers who are now beginning to forget them. But no suitable notation exists in the world of dance; almost all written recording systems are flawed or awkward at best. Film and videography grew up while Balanchine was coming into his own, and the problems of recording that exist within the film industry...
September 29, 2009
San Francisco Opera presents ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’
The enduring charm of singing Mozart
To an ear accustomed to contemporary World Music with its wide-ranging discography from recordings of villagers in Balkans to slickly produced fusions of Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, Mozart’s Abduction from the...
September 24, 2009
‘Il Trittico’ at San Francisco Opera
A triptych of unusual dimensions
Having announced a season that looks predictable with safe and secure fare, San Francisco Opera is proving that it’s possible to breathe freshness into the tried and true by just tweaking things a bit. And by providing luscious singers who seem to have a bubbling-to-explosive chemistry between them.
For its second opera of the season the company presents Il Trittico, and, sure, it’s Puccini, he who hath composed three of...