Arts & Events

Berkeley Chamber Opera Finale Saturday Night at 7

Friday November 17, 2017 - 03:11:00 PM

Luisa Miller, by Giuseppe Verdi

Opera in Italian with English supertitles, with chamber orchestra

Sunday Nov 12th, 2pm, Saturday November 18th, 7pm

Berkeley Hillside Club
2286 Cedar St. (at Arch), Berkeley


Tickets: $35 general, $20 Students/Seniors, Children under 12 free

Buy online from Brown Paper Tickets, by phone, 1-800-838-3006. -more-


AROUND & ABOUT--Dance: Mary Sano & Her Duncan Dancers' Sunday Evening Salon Concert

Ken Bullock
Friday November 17, 2017 - 02:48:00 PM

"Life is the root, and art is the flower." ~ Isadora Duncan

Mary Sano, who has been keeping the spirit of Isadora alive the past two decades in her Studio of Duncan Dance just a few blocks from the great pioneer of modern dance's birthplace, has returned from teaching and performing in Japan & will be hosting the third of her recent salon concert series this Sunday evening at 6.

Besides Mary performing with her Duncan Dancers, the program will feature singer-songwriter Tony Chapman from LA with his new compositions.

Sunday, November 19 at 6 p. m. at the Mary Sano Studio of Duncan Dance, 245-5th Street, studio 314, between Howard & Folsom, San Francisco. Suggested donation: $20-$30 (Admission includes an entry for the anniversary raffle--all proceeds go to the Studio's 20th anniversary performance project this coming June.) www.duncandance.org or: (415) 357-1817 -more-


William Christie and Les Arts Florissants Perform Charpentier and Purcell

Reviewed by James Roy MacBean
Friday November 17, 2017 - 03:01:00 PM

If you search in the catalogues of classical recordings under Marc-Antoine Chapentier, you will find that William Christie’s ensemble Les Arts Florissants gets highest marks for their recordings of this 17th century French composer’s output, both the sacred works and the operas. Often, Christie’s group is the only one to have recorded these works. In short, William Christie has almost single-handedly resurrected Marc-Antoine Charpentier from oblivion, even taking the name of his group Les Arts Florissants from a musical idyll of that title by Charpentier. So how appropriate it is that for this visit to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on November 9 under the auspices of Cal Performances, William Christie led off the program with Charpentier’s Actéon, a tragédie en musique in the style of Lully, Charpentier’s illustrious predecessor at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles? Actéon recounts the Greek myth of a great Theban hunter named Actéon who chanced to glimpse Artemis (Diana in Charpentier’s version) bathing nude in a spring with her company of nymphs, and as punishment was transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hunting hounds. -more-


Tetzlaff Quartet Plays Mozart, Berg, and Schubert

Reviewed by James Roy MacBean
Friday November 17, 2017 - 02:59:00 PM

The Tetzlaff Quartet, formed in 1994, is comprised of Christian Tetzlaff as first violinist, Elisabeth Kufferath as second violinist, Hanna Weinmeister as violist, and Tanja Tetzlaff as cellist. On Sunday afternoon, November 12, under the auspices of Cal Performances the Tetzlaff Quartet gave a concert at Berkeley’s Hertz Hall in which they played Mozart’s String Quartet No. 16 in E-flat Major, K. 428, Alban Berg’s String Quartet, Op. 3, and Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G Major, D. 887. All three of these quartets were written by composers in Vienna: Mozart’s in 1784, Berg’s in 1910, and Schubert’s in 1826. -more-