From Oakland Symphony’s new season to a pair of Chicago comedians and a salty exhibit, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Area this weekend.
Here is a partial rundown.
Classical picks: Other minds, Oakland Symphony, Kohl’s concerts
Here are three concerts classical music fans won’t want to miss.
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Bay Area events calendar for Oct. 17-24 weekly editions 7 amazing Bay Area things to do this weekend Bay Area arts: 8 great shows and concerts to catch this weekend John C. Reilly brings his musical “Mister Romantic” to the Bay Area Review: City Lights in San Jose goes for laughs, not chills, in ‘Dracula’New Works at Other Minds: Celebrated pianist Sarah Cahill has devoted her career to new music, and this weekend finds her premiering a new piece by composer Samuel Adams. Commissioned by Cahill and titled “Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright,” it’s a tribute to the late composer Ingram Marshall, who was one of Adams’ mentors. This much-anticipated new work is just one of the many featured pieces on this year’s Other Minds Festival; as in past years, the season’s annual new music bash also includes works by Pamela Z, William Winant and Brian Baumbusch, among others.
Details: Oct. 16-19; Brava Theater, San Francisco; $23-$66; otherminds.org.
“The Firebird!”: Since his appointment as Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, Kedrick Armstrong has delighted audiences by producing one dynamic, wide-ranging program after another. This weekend, he makes Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite the center of a lineup that also includes Anna Clyne’s “This Midnight Hour,” Adolphus Hailstork’s Symphony No. 1, and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, with Sara Davis Buechner as soloist.
Details: 8 p.m. Oct. 17; Paramount Theatre, Oakland; $25-92; oaklandsymphony.org.
Kohl’s 43rd season: Excellence is the only way to describe “Music at Kohl Mansion,” the longtime chamber music series in Burlingame. The 1914 mansion offers a beautiful backdrop for music, and this year has a full schedule of Sunday evening events from this weekend, beginning with the Prague-based Bennewitz Quartet in a program of Haydn, Dvorak, and Janacek.
Details: 7 p.m. Sundays, Oct. 19-May3; tickets are $62 adults, $60 senior, $30 youth; musicatkohl.org.
— Georgia Rowe, Correspondent
In praise of salt
Salt: Without it, life would have no flavor. More importantly there’d be no life, as salts play a crucial part in the world’s biology and ecology. But sometimes salt is a problem, as evidenced in a strangely entrancing photography exhibit at Berkeley’s David Brower Center.
“Salt of the Earth,” by California environmental artist Barbara Boissevain, chronicles salt on the regional scale at South Bay wetlands. Much of the area was historically used as industrial salt farms, as evidenced by the rusty-red evaporation ponds still visible by air. But lately a massive restoration project is bringing life back to the inhospitable coast, reinvigorating the marshes and inviting birds and fish and other creatures back to their former homes.
Boissevain’s nature photography captures these in-transition landscapes in vivid hues and alien geometries, from close-ups of jellyfish-like crystal deposits to aerial shots of what scans like the surface of Mars. Local hikers might recognize their favorite stomping grounds, from Ravenswood Ponds in Menlo Park to Eden Landing Ecological Reserve in Hayward. It’s beautiful, but also hostile and alien; perhaps one reason why Wired Magazine deemed her “Salt of the Earth” one of the best photography books of 2023.
Details: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, through Feb. 13; 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley; free; browercenter.org
— John Metcalfe, Staff
UN Film Festival is back
Thought-provoking documentaries that encourage lively conversations and could even inspire change are the cinematic lifeblood of the 28th United Nations Association Film Festival, running today through Oct. 26 at theaters in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, San Francisco and Stanford University.
Here are three offerings we recommend (for a complete schedule, tickets and more information, www.unaff.org).
“Nice Girls Don’t Ask”: Palo Alto filmmaker Jan Krawitz’s inventive, darkly humorous and very pointed documentary strings together numerous black-and-white 1950s clips that illustrate how girls and women who sought to venture beyond cultural gender designations of the time harshly discovered it’s a man’s world. How has that changed? A closing comment suggests there are many hurdles still to clear. Don’t miss it.
Details: 6:15 p.m. Oct. 17; Palo Alto
“An Ordinary Insanity”: Berkeley director Judith Ehrlich’s world premiere is constructed around the late Daniel Ellsberg’s enduring, now posthumous pursuit to stop countries from pushing us to the brink of nuclear war. As the former Pentagon Papers whistleblower relates, all of us will be losers; sobering words that remain a catalyst for change.
Details: 6:30 p.m. Oct. 16; Palo Alto.
“A Little Fellow: The Legacy of A.P. Giannini”: Rich with Bay Area lore and early 20th-century imagery, director David Fiore’s winning retelling of how a child of Italian immigrants forever changed the direction of the banking world is a must watch and spotlights how an entrepreneur stuck to his principles while he expanded his own reach. Cinequest fans adored it when it had its world premiere.
Details: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22; Palo Alto
— Randy Myers, correspondent
Chi-town comedians hit Bay Area
Two Chicago-based comedians are headed Bay Area comic clubs this weekend.
Matteo Lane: The one-time opera aspirant has switched to stand-up comedy and acting, though he’s still known to incorporate music in his standup routine. He’s also an out performer known for hilariously casting an LGBTQ POV on a variety of topics. He’s also a foodie: he released “Your Pasta Sucks, a Cookbook” earlier this year.
Details: 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. Oct. 17 and 7 and 9:30 p.m. Oct. 18 (early shows are sold out but there is a waiting list); San Jose Improv; $35-$100 (plus handling fees); improv.com/sanjose.
DeRay Davis: Another Windy City comedian, Davis is known for his acting and versatile voicing talents, having contributed to Adult Swim’s animated shows “The Boondocks” and “Black Dynamite,” among others. He also appeared in the “Barbershop” films as well as “21 Jump Street” and is host of “Hip Hop Squares.”
Details: 7:30 and 10 p.m. Oct. 17; 7 and 9:45 p.m. Oct. 18, 7 p.m. Sunday; Tommy T’s comedy club, Pleasanton; $41-$51; tommyts.com.
— Randy McMullen, Staff
Freebie of the week
Fall is such a terrific time for festivals in the Bay Area. For one thing, the weather acts like it finally remembered what summer is. For another, there are just so many events to choose from. Perhaps the best-known of this weekend’s festivals is the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; hmbpumpkinfest.com) which is highlighted by the annual collection of ginormous gourds (a byproduct of the Grand Champion Pumpkin contest), at least one of which we guarantee will look a lot like Bill Clinton.
But another, lesser-know favorite is the annual Harvest Festival in Berkeley. The event features a large Kids Zone and Tot Zone (always a must) and an impressive array of food contests (best pickle, best cookies, best homegrown fruits and vegetables, best salsa and many more) as well as a full live-music lineup that includes the terrific Richmond-born “accordion soul” Creole musician Andre Thierry as well as the 10-member Latin rock/soul band Soucano.
Details: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 18 at Cedar Rose Park in Berkeley; free; berkeleyca.gov
Celebrating Festival of Lights: Diwali, one of the world’s oldest and most significant religious holidays, emerged in India in what is believed to be between the 7th and 10th centuries. In its most elemental forms, it celebrates the victory of good over evil, or light over dark, and thus it is known as the Festival of Lights. It arrives this week and there will be celebrations large and small, public and private throughout the Bay Area. The Lesher Center in Walnut Creek is marking the holiday with a variety of performances and events on Oct. 17-18. The doings on Oct. 17 include a performance by the popular comedian Hari Kondabolu, who discovered his taste for standup as a college student and got his big break performing at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, when an HBO rep saw his act and helped him get started in professional comedy. He is known for creating the documentary “The Problem With Apu,” a reference to the Indian character on “The Simpsons,” and regularly addresses Indian stereotypes in his standup routine. He performs at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Lesher Center ($56-$91). Also on Friday, the venue at Civic Drive and Locust Street hosts a free outdoor drone light show at 9 p.m. (probably just as Kondabolu’s show is getting out).
On Oct. 18, the Lesher Center hosts a street fair from noon to 4 p.m. featuring a variety of dance and music performers, storytellers, artisans and food vendors, as well as workshops on how to make a mandala, a geometric design associated with the holiday.
Details: Information on all these events is at www.lesherartscenter.org.
— Bay City News Foundation
Vienna Teng’s homecoming show
You get the feeling that whatever it is that Vienna Teng develops a passion for, she is going to get really good at it. It’s fortunate for the rest of us, then, that two of her biggest passions are music and saving the planet. Growing up in the South Bay, Teng took to music almost from the start and was playing classical compositions on the piano at age 5. She started recording her first album, “Waking Hour,” while a student at Stanford, and spent much of the early 2000s establishing herself as a talented singer-songwriter-pianist with a knack for literate and tuneful compositions that incorporated elements of chamber pop, folk and classical.
In 2012, Teng began devoting more time pursuing work in the clean/renewable energy field and relocated to the East Coast – although she would occasionally return home to visit and play the occasional gig at such venues at the Freight & Salvage. Now she is reportedly ready to devote more time to her music, and has an afternoon show on Oct. 19 at Stanford University. She’ll perform with the much-raved-about Viano Quartet in a program that includes Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 10 (aka, the Harp Quartet) as well several of Teng’s most popular songs.
Details: The concert begins at 2:30 p.m. at Bing Concert Hall; tickets are $16-$72.20; go to live.stanford.edu.
— Bay City News Foundation
Another new beginning for PB
The Bay Area’s prestigious purveyor of early music, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, opens its 2025-26 concert season at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16 in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre in the first of a series of concerts labelled “Fury and Heartbreak.” And that’s because the overarching theme of the program is the depiction of heroic women destroyed by love, and they are none too pleased about it. Václav Lutz conducts the performances, with celebrated soprano Maya Kherani taking the stage, first as “Ariadne Abandoned,” in the work by Benedetto Marcello devoted to the story of the Cretan princess done wrong by Theseus on the island of Naxos, and then as “Armida Abandoned,” in the Handel cantata featuring the Saracen sorceress who unwisely falls for the crusading Christian knight Rinaldo, whose purposes she is supposed to thwart. Grief and rage ensue in this “hell hath no fury”-themed program. Also in the lineup, which opens with Galuppi’s Concerto for Strings No. 4 in C minor, are Durante’s Concerto for Strings No. 2 in G minor and Vivaldi’s “In furore justissimae irae” (In the Fury of Most Righteous Wrath), which will bring things to a fitting conclusion. Other performances are scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Oct. 18 in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church and 2:30 p.m. Oct. 19 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Details: Visit philharmonia.org for tickets; $20-$125.
— Bay City News Foundation
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