 setting up the concert in the Berkeley Museum |
JUST THREE SHORT NOTES tonight — it's late; my eyes are glazing. But I have to mention:
Fool for Love, the play by Sam Shepard, opened last night in Sebastopol's Main Stage West. Elizabeth Craven directs;Brent Lindsay and Amy Pinto star as Eddie and May with very able assists from John Craven and Keith Baker as Old Man and Martin. Lindsey and I thought it a really fine performance — tense and laconic, scary and funny, ultimately resonant with all the incestuous power of Greek tragedy, packaged in a seedy desert motel. The show runs another couple of weeks in Sebastopol, then moves to Santa Rosa. See it if you possibly can.
Lou Harrison's music was featured in a marvelous concert Friday night in the Berkeley Art Museum, where Willie Winant played the beautiful Solo (to Anthony Cirone), for tenor bells tuned to just-intonation D major (but on a mode resting on A), Sarah Cahill gave us the piano solo Dance for Lisa Karon from 1938 but only rediscovered recently, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio played the Varied Trio written for them in 1986, and a large combined chorus under Marika Kuzma's energetic direction, with the joyful William Winant Percussion Group at Lou's American Gamelan, honored the audience and Lou's memory with the cantata La Koro Sutro of 1971.
Lou's music is strong, sweet, honest, humane, and passionate; it exactly expresses the magnificent gift and pleasure that was Lou himself. We saw Eva Soltes's film about Lou a week or so ago — Lou Harrison: A World of Music and were reminded, as if we could ever forget, what a fine and fabulous man and mind and musician he was, and how incredibly lucky we were to have known him — and, never forget, his partner Bill Colvig too. I miss them both: but it is some solace to have their sound still resounding in our ears.
On a much lesser note, I've just published The Idea of Permanence, a book version of most of last year's posts to this blog, with reviews of Orphée and Satyagraha and Nixon in China and Le marteau sans maître, and comments on painters and their work, and many reports from a month in Venice, and things too fugitive to mention. It costs $15.95, and you can find out more about it here.
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