I was very busy for a while and then I was very tired, so I have some catching up to do, and how better to start than by prefacing the main feature with previews of coming attractions, in this case for the generally slower month of July:
Festival Opera at the BART-accessible Dean Lesher Center in Walnut Creek presents La Traviata on July 9, 12, 15, and 17.
The Royce Gallery offers "a new chambre [sic; not sure what they're getting at with that spelling] music series" hosted by Pamela Z: July 8 and 9 the Robin Cox Ensemble plays contemporary chamber works by Bay Area composers including Amy X Neuberg and Pamela Z; on July 29 we have Poetry + Motion, featuring The Atchleys, Kinji Hayashi, Dean Santomieri, Shinichi Iova Koga, Pamela Z, Leigh Evans.
American Bach Soloists presents its first summer Bach Festival & Academy, from July 15th through the 23rd, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Check out the schedule of lectures, master classes, and performances (including two of the B Minor Mass) here. And it's not all Bach; the festival includes Handel's great opera Ariodante on July 22, starting at 7:00.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs from July 14 through 17 at the Castro Theater; they have as usual lots of great stuff, and the closing night film is the amazing Victor Seastrom film HE Who Gets Slapped, featuring Lon Chaney as HE, a bitter, vindictive circus clown who . . . gets slapped. That's his act, or at least part of it: the full thing has to be seen (in all its wild Expressionistic glory) to be believed. Incidentally I've read the Leonid Andreyev play on which the film is based, and HE's act isn't described beyond the slapping, so what we see in the film is the invention of the film-makers. Bitter, vindictive clowns . . . that's entertainment!
The Merolini are in town: check out the next generation of opera stars on July 22 at 7:30 in the Schwabacher Summer Concert in Herbst Theater and July 24 at 2:00 in a free public concert at Yerba Buena Gardens.
Berkeley/West Edge Opera brings us into August with the world premiere of Caliban Dreams, an original work inspired by characters from the Tempest, featuring John Duykers, with a libretto by Amanda Moody and music by Clark Suprynowicz, July 30 and August 5 and 7, at the El Cerrito Performing Arts Center.
And if I were going out of town, it would be to the Cincinnati Opera to see Nathan Gunn's role debut as Eugene Onegin at the Cincinnati Opera, July 14 and 16.
4 comments:
If I go out of town for opera in July, it'll be for Griselda and Wozzeck - not a couple - at Santa Fe.
Why do I always think Santa Fe is in August?
There's also Bayreuth!
Santa Fe also has The Last Savage, a Menotti rarity. . . .
Griselda and Wozzeck actually would have been good for each other: she wouldn't have driven him crazy with betrayal, and he would have been much much kinder to her than her actual husband. One of the great never-to-be's, I guess.
Is Nathan taking off his shirt for Onegin?
Russian winters are famously cold, so in the interests of verisimilitude, I would doubt it.
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