Profile reviews
8“In an evening designed to make classical music more hip, Hildegard von Bingen isn’t an obvious choice…But in the space, Bingen’s music came alive. The women sang the florid lines with impressive coordination.”
beautiful and quite moving, Bohlin’s piano complimenting the soloist’s every emotion
Past Production Reviews
2Yet the beauty and depth of this “L’Enfant” is in the orchestra, which made a huge effort to prove it has retained its soul. St.Clair, who first conducted the opera with the Pacific Symphony in 1992, the year after Landauer began, captured the flickering orchestral changes with a brilliance that demonstrates both how much the orchestra has grown — technically but also, yes, soulfully — over the past quarter-century.
Eliza O’Malley, Berkeley Chamber Opera’s founding Artistic Director, wrote that in the present Covid pandemic, she searched for two one-act operas she could present in a program that wouldn’t require an audience be confined in a small theatre space over more than two hours. As a further caution, she asked patrons to wear N95 face masks that were handed out at the door of Berkeley’s Hillside Club on the nights of performance. Thus, two one-act Russian operas, Maddalena by Sergei Prokofiev, and Mavra by Igor Stravinsky, were given three performances over the weekend of June 17-19
