My car’s passenger seat is piled with programs from a busy week of performance-going. Have you seen any of these? I’d love to know what you thought.
• I saw “Der Rosenkavalier” April 4 and loved the lush music and singing. I noticed a few of the folks I follow on Twitter checked out the production this week — what’d you think? (Here’s a UCSD-TV tour of the production.)
• I also stopped in to the San Diego Repertory Theatre on Thursday to check out “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” with the fabulous Angela Carone from KPBS. (She blogged about the prop design for those attention-grabbing props the play is named for). It was fun to see the myriad onstage costume changes we learned the logistics of in our recent visit to the fitting rooms at the Rep.
• Friday, I checked out opening night for “The Floating World,” the Malashock Dance performance at the San Diego Museum of Art. After watching these dancers work on their steps in the Malashock studio in Liberty Station, it was interesting to see the performance happen in the round and with costumes and video projections.
• And yesterday I went to San Diego Symphony’s concert with percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie performing a concerto written by composer John Corigliano. Usually a concerto features a melodic solo instrument like a flute or a piano or a violin, and the orchestra plays as a partner, magnifying, supporting and advancing the soloist. But an orchestral percussionist plays tons of instruments, so the challenge for the composer was to feature dozens of drums, chimes and marimba. It was one of the most experimental things I’ve seen this symphony perform.
Here’s a video from Glennie rehearsing the Corigliano piece a couple for its premiere in 2008:
Evelyn Glennie, 2008 Cabrillo Festival Rehearsal from Cabrillo Festival on Vimeo.
Did you check out any of these? What have you seen lately that you’d recommend? I’d love to hear what you thought were the strengths and what you wished might have been different. Leave us a comment and share your take.
I’m the arts editor for VOSD. You can reach me directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531 and follow me on Twitter: @kellyrbennett.