September 29, 2025 • 9:37 am Comments Off on The Freedom of Change: Víkingur Ólafsson’s Conversations Across the Centuries
I wrote this profile of Víkingur Ólafsson for Cal Performances, which is featuring the pianist as Artist in Residence for the 2025–26 season:
“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next” …
Filed under: Bach, Beethoven, Cal Performances, pianists
March 13, 2025 • 12:02 pm Comments Off on The Spasms of History: Inside William Kentridge’s “The Great Yes, The Great No”
Here’s my feature on the new project from William Kentridge, which will be presented this weekend in Berkeley by Cal Performances:
A new production by William Kentridge is always a major event. Few other artists at work today span so many media while at the same time reimagining them: drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, animated film, and musical-theater performance are all encompassed within his practice. But what makes Kentridge especially resonant for a global audience is how his innovations push beyond merely aesthetic considerations to pose big, open-ended questions about history and identity.
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Filed under: Cal Performances, William Kentridge, Cal Performances, William Kentridge
September 25, 2024 • 9:13 am Comments Off on Julia Bullock Launches Artist Residency at Cal Performances
Julia Bullock is the 2024–25 season Artist in Residence at Cal Performances. Her first appearance in that capacity is in a collaboration with her colleagues in the American Modern Opera Company (also known as AMOC*, of which she is a founding member) for a boldly original staged production of Messiaen’s Harawi, which was premiered in the summer of 2022 at the Festival Aix-en-Provence and subsequently toured across Europe. The performance takes place on 27 September at Zellerbach Hall.
I wrote about this extraordinary artist and her fascination with Harawi for Cal Performances:
The first time Julia Bullock heard Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle from 1945, she recalls that both the poetry and the music “shook me to a fundamental core … even though I didn’t fully grasp the depths of the content and the references on first listen….”
Filed under: Cal Performances, Olivier Messiaen
April 13, 2024 • 2:14 pm Comments Off on Thomas Adès and the Danish Quartet
Wreath — for Franz Schubert is the latest creation from one of the world’s most-sought-after composers. “I am most grateful to the great Danish String Quartet for giving me the time and encouragement to realize and develop this new path in my work,” Adès writes in the freshly completed score.
My program notes for the Cal Performances performance in April 2024 can be found here.
Filed under: Cal Performances, chamber music, commissions, Danish String Quartet, Schubert, Thomas Adès
February 19, 2024 • 7:15 pm Comments Off on <i>Bark of Millions</i>: Fantasy and Mystery, Rooted in Queerness
My essay on Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s latest epic, Bark of Millions, for Cal Performances:
“All we do is sing songs,” says Taylor Mac about Bark of Millions, the new show he and composer Matt Ray have created together with their team of like-minded collaborators. “But there’s something about the ritual of song after song after song inspired by different queer people from world history that is really liberating” …
Filed under: American music, Cal Performances, theater
November 11, 2023 • 9:26 am Comments Off on Takács Quartet Plays Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Haydn, and Beethoven
Cal Performances presents the Takács Quartet in a program Sunday afternoon 12 November at 3pm including the world premiere of Flow by the California-based violist and composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama (shown above discussing her music), along with Haydn’s Sunrise Quartet and the second of Beethoven’s Op. 59 Razumovsky quartets.
My program notes include an introduction to Flow :
The string quartet, according to composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama, “is considered a ‘perfect’ ensemble. It inspires delicacy, sensitivity and adventure. The core range is smaller than that of the piano, yet its timbre allows for beauteous interplay.” For the first of its two Cal Performances appearances this season, the Takács Quartet presents the world premiere of Ngwenyama’s debut in the genre, which the ensemble commissioned “because of our admiration for her as a virtuosic violist and performer who understands the dramatic and sonorous possibilities of a string quartet.”
Filed under: Cal Performances, commissions, string quartet
March 11, 2023 • 8:00 am Comments Off on William Kentridge at Berkeley
A centerpiece of the current Cal Performances season has been a campus-wide residency with the artist William Kentridge, which culminates on 17 March the U.S. premiere of SIBYL. Here’s my essay on the making of this unclassifiable new work and its place in Kentridge’s oeuvre:
William Kentridge’s SIBYL: The Reassurance of Uncertainty
“There will be no epiphany.” “Wait again for better gods.” “You will be dreamt by a jackal.” “Heaven is talking in a foreign tongue.”
The oracular messages that course through SIBYL, the most recent performance work by the towering South African artist William Kentridge, tease with tantalizing ambiguity. They seem to wryly provoke an irresistible urge to twist whatever information is at hand into interpretations best suited to our desires….
Filed under: Cal Performances, essay, William Kentridge
April 28, 2022 • 12:56 pm Comments Off on Danish Quartet: Doppelgänger II
Friday night brings the second installment in the Danish Quartet’s ongoing Doppelgänger Project at Cal Performances, with the world premiere of Finnish composer Lotta Wennaköski’s Pige, her response to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. Here’s the introduction I wrote to this program (click on tab “about the performance”).
Filed under: Cal Performances, Danish String Quartet, Schubert
December 4, 2020 • 10:31 am Comments Off on Dover Quartet at Cal Performances
While preparing to write program notes for the upcoming stream from Cal Performances — a concert by the Dover Quartet that premieres on 10 December — I got to submerge myself in some glorious string quartets. Along with Haydn’s Op. 76, No. 2 (“Die Quinten”) and Dvořák’s magnificent Op. 106, the Dovers will perform an early work from the years while György Ligeti was still in Budapest (Métamorphoses nocturnes).
Here’s a look at the Ligeti, with score included:
Filed under: Cal Performances, Ligeti, string quartet
September 18, 2019 • 9:41 am Comments Off on Reframing the Image: A Contemporary Lens on Robert Mapplethorpe’s Provocative Art
Later this month, Cal Performances will present Triptych — a meditation on the legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe 30 years after his death that was composed by Bryce Dessner to a libretto by korde arrington tuttle. Here’s the article on this hybrid theatrical work I wrote for Cal Performances:
In this age of selfies, promiscuously disseminated Snapchat sexting, and Instagram—the omnipresent reflection of our image-saturated, disposable culture—it almost defies belief that an exhibition of photographs was once the flashpoint for the culture wars that continue to divide America…
Filed under: art exhibition, Bryce Dessner, Cal Performances, Patti Smith, photography
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 