Arts & Events

Inferno Theatre and their multidisciplinary collaborators from all over are staging the third annual Diasporas Festival all three evenings this weekend (8 p. m. Friday, 7 on Saturday and Sunday) at the South Berkeley Community Church, 1802 Fairview (entrance around the corner on Ellis), two blocks off Adeline/MLK, a few minutes' walk from Ashby BART. -more-

In mid-May the Pierre Bonnard exhibit “Painting Arcadia” closes at the Legion of Honor and the newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) opens to the public. Having just taken in both, I highly recommend the first show which closes Sunday May 15. But don’t rush to see the renovated MOMA; the crowds will be huge for a while, and the museum isn’t going anywhere. -more-

On Sunday, May 1, I attended the Opera Parallèle production of The Lighthouse, a 1979 opera by Peter Maxwell Davies. Based on a true story about lighthouse keepers who mysteriously disappeared in 1900, leaving no trace, from a lighthouse on Flannan Island in the Outer Hebrides, The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies is heavy on atmosphere but somewhat spare and chilling in musical terms. The orchestra offers an unusual mix of jangly out of tune piano, guitar, banjo, flexatone keyboard, blaring brass, strings, and exotic percussion. The music is jagged, often piercing, and the singing is largely declamatory. Three singers play the three lighthouse keepers. They seem to switch back and forth between the keepers who mysteriously disappeared, on one hand, and those who discovered that the original keepers had disappeared into thin air, or, possibly, into the sea. -more-

In a season-ending series of concerts honoring the 30^th anniversary of Nicholas McGegan’s tenure as Music Director, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra performed works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. I attended the Saturday evening concert, April 30, at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church. While I don’t like to make a point of disagreeing with San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic, Joshua Kosman, I must say that I found an extreme lack of balance in Kosman’s review of this program, for he so over-weighted his praise for the Mendelssohn 2^nd Symphony, or Hymn of Praise, Op. 52, that he relegated the Beethoven works performed on this program to a mere afterthought at the end of his review. To my mind, Mendelssohn doesn’t deserve all that much praise for this uneven though impressive work, nor, to put it mildly, does Beethoven deserve to be so cavalierly treated, even for works that are relatively unfamiliar to us. -more-

As usual, the April 29 gathering at Berkeley's historic Fellowship Hall (at Cedar and Bonita) was an energizing experience for the activist community. Dozens of local action groups were represented at the "Active Hope: Going Forward" event but the main draws were Joanna Macy and Ray McGovern.

Among those assembled for an evening of music, potluck dining and discussion were members of Codepink, Berkeley Progressive Alliance, Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, Sunflower Alliance, No Fracking/No Nukes, Black Lives Matter, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, End Mass Incarceration, Sustainable Berkeley, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Occupy the Farm, Postal Banking, Move to Amend, Divestment from Fossil Fuels, Save the East Bay Forest, and Stop Destruction of Ace Hardware. -more-