Christina Waters

Made by jewelry artist Faye Augustine, the new bracelet sports the title of Lisa Jensen’s forthcoming book, Alias Hook. It adorns her wrist right next to the bracelet commemorating her last book, Sea Witch.

Ah authors and their jewelry…..

In his final opera, Parsifal—whose motifs had been built over a thirty-year period—Wagner fulfilled his vision of operatic “music theater” as something that would go far beyond the classical notion of a drama told in song and music.

The Parsifal of this season’s Bayreuth Festival—direction by Stefan Herheim and set design by Heike Scheele—was in clear and stunning resonance with Wagner’s intention, and used electrifying manipulation of sets, lighting, costume, movement, and voice to achieve a fusion of space, time, and music.

When this production was first mounted several years ago it produced shock and awe. This season the sight of crimson National Socialist banners unfurling swastikas from the ceiling, while the young Parsifal rises from center stage in More…

Chris Cravey and Ari Finkelstein—friends, artists, over-achievers—will take over the Eduardo Carrillo Gallery @ the UCSC Art Department for a week starting March 1. The duo will unleash Collections: Figurative Sculpture, Drawings and Paintings upon a world hungry for enlightened visual culture.
Come take a look. A reception for the artists happens this Sunday, March 4th @ 5pm.

The Carrillo Gallery is an intimate exhibition space adjoining the central quad at the Baskin Arts Complex, across the drive from the Performing Arts Theater, UCSC. For more about the late Art professor emeritus, Eduardo Carrillo, his life and work, go here.

[A. Finkelstein]

For those who like their music live, lively and authentic, join Michael Alpert and Julian Kytasty tonight, February 29, 7:30pm for an evening of “Night Songs from a Neighboring Village,” exploring the vivacious musical lilnks between Jews and Ukrainians via klezmer, Yiddish folk song and the music of Hasidim. Kytasty is a leading bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp) virtuoso and Alpert is a pioneer in the renaissance of East European Jewish klezmer music.It will be a feast for the ears in an intimate house concert setting - 220 Spring St., Westside, Santa Cruz. A $15 donation is suggested - and don’t be afraid to bring a dessert or drink to share.

Pina Bausch was one of my heroes. Most of my life I tracked her conceptual innovations in choreography, and the creation of her Tanztheater company in Wuppertal Germany. Moving dance beyond the lexicons of ballet and even Graham’s modern dance tropes, Bausch used the body to explore the archetypes of animality. Her “dances” are in fact small narratives, riddles, myths and gems of erotic psychoanalysis. In the process she created nothing less than a poetics of pain.

In her pieces, at once expressionist, avant garde, and laced with angular angst, Bausch transformed dance into an emotional incantation in which longing and long-limbed velocity were employed to invoke something like redemption. More…

If you adore the literary ingenuity of Charles Dickens, whose work marks the apogee of the English language, then you’ll be intrigued by the newest exploration of Dickens’ masterpiece, Bleak House, by celebrated scholar and UCSC professor John Jordan.

Better yet, come hear Jordan talk about Dickens, nineteenth-century English narrative fiction and his new book, Supposing Bleak House — Thursday, February 2, 7pm @ Bookshop Santa Cruz.

[Photo credit: Carolyn Lagattuta/UC Santa Cruz]

So many artworks, so little time. Make plans to visit the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery this month.

In the main gallery, prolific alumna Katerina Lanfranco unveils a gallery-sized installation, Natural Selection.
In the adjoining gallery, a group show Clear Cuts features work by Beatrice Coron, Kota Azawa, Matt Farrar, Felicia Gilman, Lauren Scanlon, Jill Sylvia, and Kara Walker.

Across the portico, in the Porter Faculty Gallery, enjoy an exhibition of Laser Cut Relief Prints by Richard Wohlfeiler. All of these shows are free and open to the public.

For details visit the Sesnon website.

A sweeping show of coastal landscapes will fill the Davenport Gallery, starting this Saturday, January 14 (reception from 4-7pm).

The exhibition will offer works by top area painters including Andrew Purchin, Frank Galuszka (Cliff, o/c, r.), Ray Ginghofer and others, including a rarely-seen artist who moonlights as a wine writer. Take advantage of the spectacular weather—and the spectacular coast. Davenport Gallery is next door to the Roadhouse, on Highway One.

Davenport Gallery - 450 Highway One - open Wed - Sun, 11am - 5pm

The soaring quartets, orchestra and choral passages of Beethoven’s mighty Mass in C Major join Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, in an evening of definitive musical bravura— with maestra Nicole Paiement at the helm—for two concerts, Friday November 18 and Sunday November 20.

Concerts begin at 7:30pm at the UCSC Music Recital Hall—an acoustical gem worthy of soloists—tenor Brian Staufenbiel, soprano Patrice Maginnis, baritone Daniel Cilli and mezzo soprano Elana Cowen.

Don’t miss this chance to be enfolded in the sort of life-altering harmonies, fugues and canons that made life, before the Beatles, sweet indeed. UCSC Ticket Office - 831.459-2159; or online.

This is the deal of the week. The month!

Proving how easily a 250-year-old opera can provide musical epiphany, George Frideric Handel came to San Francisco last week with his delectable pastiche of arias, recitatives, and impossible vocalese —the opera Xerxes.

It was probably one of Benjamin Franklin’s favorite operas, this Italian tale of mistaken genders, identities and lovers, written by a German composer and widely performed in London. What San Francisco Opera audiences feasted on at last Saturday’s matinee performance was the aural luminescence of seven of the world’s finest Baroque singers vying with each other for complete dominance of the gorgeous music, the witty set design and some of the longest, most complex passages ever written for the human voice.

It was a banquet of trills, glissandoes and accelerated arpeggios. More…