Arts & Events

As an opener to the season celebrating Nicholas McGegan's 30th year as music director of the Philharmonia Baroque, the orchestra will perform yet another of the remarkable musical rarities they're famous for, something more and more prevalent in their programming: Alessandro Scarlatti's lavish serenata, La Gloria di Primavera, composed in a month and performed an unusual three times in 1716 to celebrate the birth of Duke Leopold, heir to the Hapsburg throne in Vienna, whose father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, had only recently acquired the Kingdom of Naples as part of the settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession. But Leopold died a few months later, and the work fell into obscurity, performed only in London five years later as a commercial venture by the composer's brother, Francesco. -more-

John Korty, the only American filmmaker to have won major awards in dramatic, documentary and animation work, will tell how it all started, fifty years ago, with scissors, paper and yarn. His first film, ANY MANY AND MAN, was about new math for children. Next, BREAKING THE HABIT was a satire on giving up smoking. And after doing many number and letter spots for CTW, he invented THELMA THUMB, a miniature super-woman. -more-

From the celebrated madeleine crumbled into a cup of tea that brings back lost memories of childhood, to the narrator--only once referred to as Marcel, sign of his identity with the author--in a rage crushing Baron Charlus' hat as Charlus replaces it calmly with one of many more ... and tells Marcel how much he cares for him, to the idea coming to Marcel of the book he wants to write--the same book the reader is plowing though ...

Playwright James Keller performs a very unusual solo act--unusual because it focuses on taking the audience through Proust's seven volume masterwork, rather than avowing the performer's own dedication to and identity with the book--of a tour through 'In Search of Lost Time' (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust, framed by an arragement of flowers that recall "Proust's cathedral of hawthorn"--and his asthma--and the screen for the 180 slides that accompany Keller's delivery, setting the elaborate stories he gives us a gloss on, not like gossip, but like a farsimpler version of what Proust does, as his own Virgil, guiding himself and the reader through the inferno, the purgatory and paradise of his memories, his discovery that they must be involuntary, taken off guard when least expected, so they may briefly live again ... -more-

Emmy-Award-winning director Stanley Nelson has made a great film. For anyone who lived in the East Bay during the Sixties, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution will revive some powerful memories. Running nearly two hours, this documentary serves up a seething, brim-full cauldron of radical history, memorable images and gritty interviews with radicals, reporters, supporters, cops, informers and more than a dozen Panther survivors. Among those interviewed: Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph and Emory Douglas (the cartoonist who became the Party's Minister of Culture and created the indelible caricature of a pig outfitted in a police uniform, surrounded by buzzing flies).

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