Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Berkeley

Eifman has said he wants move dance back into theater and to use movement to explore the psychological. Both of these the company accomplishes.

He turns and turns, elliptically and with the speed of a skater on ice. Sheer muscle defies gravity and the friction of feet on terra firma.

What makes this piece entirely Mark Morris is, even more than the dancing, the music. 

A cube hangs suspended at an angle and Ramirez, harnessed to a line above the stage, floats above it, fulfilling the promise of dance and the human desire to escape gravity – to fly in angelic weightlessness. 

Eclectic and contemporary, The Joffrey Ballet reimagines human and kinetic beauty.

Ian Bostridge and Wenwen Du deliver Schubert's song cycle with great musicianship, but Bostridge lacks the presence that makes live performance a special treat.

What the choreography of everyday movement creates in the viewer is a sense of nostalgia and poignancy. 

Cal Performances and Philharmonia Baroque present a lavish modern-day première of the 1745 version of Rameau's Le Temple de la Gloire. 

Repetition is central to the Available Light's formal elegance.

Letter to a Man is a surrealist recount of Nijinsky's mental downward spiral as interpreted by Mikhail Baryshnikov, a man dedicated to a lifetime of dance.

“I sing a wordless song that arises from and combines joy and sorrow into a single melody that resonates through my bones.” 

The staging required that the dancers move through and around the musicians, and this intertwining gave the piece a coherent visual identity and a flowing energy. 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Company in their annual residency at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall

Shiva draws in the audience, presenting the anguish and struggle of both the human and the divine as they are captured in existence, reeling in the universe in the midst of great pain and great joy. 

West Edge Opera has come up with a means to engage and develop opera audiences in that home of West Coast radicalism, the San Francisco Bay Area.

The eighth and newest creation of Les 7 Doigts de la Main "contemplates the role of the ‘other’” in a breath-taking performance of mental and physical acrobatics.

Robert Wilson's The Old Woman is "perfectly picturesque – gorgeous in its stark and intensely highlighted patterns." Performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe

Sasha Waltz & Guests restructure body and space, to the Romanticism of Schubert's impromptus.

Few choreographers can match Mark Morris and his dancers for exuberant beauty or musical savvy.

The shining music of Handel and Mozart in the world premiere of Mark Morris's latest springtime ballet, Acis and Galatea, at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. 

The Kronos Quartet celebrated its 40th birthday on Friday. In Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, the ensemble explored its history with a performance of Black Angels but also offerred a few surprises.

French-Argentine Unión Tanguera is keeping us up at night at Cal Performances in Berkeley with Nuit Blanche, their imaginative evolution of tango.

The curtain went up at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall last night on Nederlands Dans Theater in Sehnsucht and Schmetterling (“Homesickness” and “Butterfly,” in German) and the pleasure of seeing these magnificent dancers was heavily diluted by the machine-gun-like choreography and leaden attempts at humor. Beethoven’s ecstatic Symphony no.

All was set for the Berkeley Symphony to launch its new season, the fifth under the direction of Joana Carneiro, when a moment of panic, no doubt, rattled the front office. Due to a medical condition that temporarily prevented air travel, Carneiro would be unable to reach Berkeley in time to lead on 3 October.

Bass-baritone Eric Owens is no stranger to Bay Area voice aficionados. After making his local debut as Lodovico in Otello with San Francisco Opera in 2002, Owens memorably created the diet-regiment-reciting General Leslie Groves there in the world première of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in 2005. Most recently he did yeoman's work with a smaller role in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi in October.

Maestro Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela completed a four-day residency at Cal Performances with two concerts that rocked, rolled, and astounded audiences in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall.

The San Francisco Bay Area made another strong case for itself as a focal point for contemporary music on Saturday night. The setting was Trinity Chapel in Berkeley which hosts the Trinity Chamber Concerts series. This particular concert, entitled On and Off the Keys, simultaneously marked the culmination of their 10th annual season and the beginning of the Festival of Contemporary Music.

Anticipation is running high for the kick off of San Francisco Opera’s summer season on Friday, June 8, 2012, with the local premiere of John Adams’s Nixon in China. As a sort of appetizer to the five-week season music director Nicola Luisotti and his players gave an orchestral concert on June 3 at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley.

Five years on from her historic appointment as the first woman to head a major American orchestra, Marin Alsop took to the stage of Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley Friday night with a swagger, leading the impressive Baltimore Symphony, the orchestra with whom she has made her mark as one of the world’s leading conductors.