MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

March 11, 2023 • 8:00 am 0

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….

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Filed under: Cal Performances, essay, William Kentridge

April 28, 2022 • 12:56 pm Comments Off on Danish Quartet: Doppelgänger II

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”).

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Filed under: Cal Performances, Danish String Quartet, Schubert

December 4, 2020 • 10:31 am Comments Off on Dover Quartet at Cal Performances

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

Reframing the Image: A Contemporary Lens on Robert Mapplethorpe’s Provocative Art

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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…

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Filed under: art exhibition, Bryce Dessner, Cal Performances, Patti Smith, photography

March 16, 2019 • 10:36 am Comments Off on World Premiere of Dreamers

World Premiere of Dreamers

article-header-dreamers

If you can’t make the world premiere of Dreamers this weekend by composer Jimmy López and playwright Nilo Cruz, don’t miss the live stream of Sunday afternoon’s concert (3pm West Coast time). Esa-Pekka Salonen is the conductor.

For more background, here’s my preview of a work that could not be more timely.

Filed under: Cal Performances, Jimmy López, new music

February 6, 2019 • 7:10 am Comments Off on Dreamers at Cal Performances

Dreamers at Cal Performances

article-header-dreamers

My story on a major upcoming new premiere by Jimmy López in collaboration with Nilo Cruz has been posted here.

Music Makes the Dream Reality:
A New Oratorio Inspired by the Immigrant Experience

It has been a few years since composer Jimmy López and playwright Nilo Cruz first conceived their latest collaboration, the oratorio Dreamers. But the message behind this musical-dramatic reflection on the challenges faced by undocumented immigrants seems to become more pressingly relevant every day. The work, which was commissioned by Cal Performances and receives its highly anticipated world premiere March 17 in Zellerbach Hall, pays homage to the experiences of Berkeley students who were brought to the United States as children and now face uncertain legal status.

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Filed under: Cal Performances, Jimmy López, Nilo Cruz

October 7, 2018 • 9:04 pm Comments Off on Within and Without: Addressing Citizenship through Artistic Engagement

Within and Without: Addressing Citizenship through Artistic Engagement


Cal Performances at Berkeley has an especially compelling season lined up and is genuinely engaged with issues critical to our time — including the premiere of a new work commissioned by composer Jimmy López and writer-playwright Nilo Cruz. Here’s my preview:

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Filed under: Cal Performances, Jimmy López, Uncategorized

June 15, 2018 • 2:55 pm Comments Off on Bye Bye Beethoven

Bye Bye Beethoven

Last night at Zellerbach Hall, Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s remarkable staged concert,Bye Bye Beethoven, opened the Berkeley edition of the programs she just curated for the 2018 Ojai Festival. One of the most creative deconstructions I’ve seen in a while, one that really achieves what it sets out to do: to shake us out of the stupor of the safe concert routine and show us what we’ve been missing.

According to Kopatchinskaja, “the concert routine around the world is so absurd,” continually replaying the same icons “with not very much imagination relevant to our time.” Bye Bye Beethoven dramatizes her concern “about petrified traditions. I don’t think Beethoven would be happy to know that in the future his music would take so much space.”

It’s not iconoclasm—ultimately, a Puritan approach—but rather a wittily inventive transformation of perceptions that motivates Bye Bye Beethoven.

This is the kind of work being done all the time in the visual arts, in poetry, in fiction, in film. Why can’t we have more of it in concert life?

Filed under: Cal Performances, directors, Patricia Kopatchinskaja

May 2, 2018 • 8:17 am Comments Off on Patricia Kopatchinskaja Comes to California

Patricia Kopatchinskaja Comes to California

ojai-at-berkeley@2xPatricia Kopatchinskaja is an ideal choice to be this year’s music director of the Ojai Festival. In advance of the festival’s northern edition, Ojai at Berkeley, here’s my profile of this incomparable artist for Cal Performances:

Matters of technical proficiency are well accounted for in the arsenal of words that critics have at their disposal to describe what sets a musician apart. What is sorely lacking is …

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Filed under: Cal Performances, Ojai Festival, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, profile, violinists

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