Arts & Events

This weekend, the Mendocino Music Festival starts up its 28th annual season, two weeks of music of all kinds, with afternoon and evening programs every day ... 

... From famed pianist Stephen Prutsman playing Bach and Mozart to the last tour of the celebrated LA country rock band POCO (the same day as LA country rock veteran Chris Hillman's featured in a duo act), a staging of 'Don Giovanni' with Eugene Brancoveanu singing the title role (as West Edge Opera's opening show a few years back proved, a perfect singer and actor to portray the scandalous Don), big band music led by saxophonist and Festival co-founder, UC Berkeley music professor Allan Pollack, with Kim Nalley singing the hits of Aretha Franklin, bluegrass and flamenco, April Verch's fiddle playing and step dancing, Poncho Sanchez's Latin jazz band, singers Kenny Washington (jazz), Irma Thomas (R&B) and Frederica von Stade ... 

At the heart of the Festival is Susan Waterfall's festival-within-a-festival, the Bach Fest, for four days, starting this Sunday, the most extended yet of her remarkable explorations of music and its multiple contexts. Susan's delivery is unique. More than just talking head commentary, emerging from and lapsing back into gorgeous musical interpretation with occasional illustrative multimedia--her own piano-playing and excellent collaborators--she has evolved a style more like the most engaging of conversations with some rumination, weaving in and out of these wonderful sounds. 

For the Bach Fest, the programs are Bach and Beer (the master was often paid in brew, not cash--so a whole new medium to explore!), Bach at the Keyboard, The Unaccompanied Suites and Musical Offering (with) Prutsman Plays Bach, a trove of exquisite music, erudition and many digressions of pure interest and pleasure ... 

On May 28th, Susan and her fellow players--including cellist Burke Schuchmann, flutist Mindy Rosenfeld and violinist Jeremy Cohen--presented a preview of the Festival in the library of the Berkeley City Club to a packed and enthusiastic audience. Spontaneous standing ovations followed many of the selections: masterful solo work by the players from the D Minor Chaconne for Violin and other Bach suites and sonatas, and finally the ensemble of the Trio Sonata from the Musical Offering, as well as the Italian Concerto, showing in advance the fine playing by longtime collaborators that Festival audiences can look forward to hearing ... 

As well as all the other events, another that is something in compositional music a little more modern, and perfectly complementary, to Bach: an evening with the Festival Orchestra, featuring Sibelius' Violin Concerto, Rachmaninoff's Symphony #2--and new works by Allan Pollack and Julian Pollack, son of the co-founders--longtime residents of both Berkeley and Mendocino--who grew up at the Festival, now a rising young jazz pianist in New York City.