Camino

This week we went to a dinner at Camino featuring dishes from Paula Wolfert's new cookbook Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking. She was there as well, signing cookbooks and generally brightening the evening. We shared a table with three other couples - all intelligent and interesting strangers.

The menu is shown above. Camino did a superb job of preparing all this using clay pots, a wood burning oven, and a charcoal fire.

(Click on the menu to enlarge it to readable size.)

Takacs String Quartet

(The second "a" in Takacs should have an accent, but I can not figure out how to do that in this blog. So, pretend that it is there.)

We attended a performance at UC Berkeley yesterday. They played Haydn's String Quartet in B-flat major Op. 71, Shostakovich's String Quartet in F minor Op. 122, and Schumann's String Quartet in A Minor Op. 41. All string quartets sound good to me, but Takaccs is my favorite. They did not disappoint. The Shostakovich was partiularly moving.

(Photo from the Cal Performances web site.)

Il Trovatore

This has been opera week. On Sunday we saw A House in Bali at UC Zellerbach Hall. On Wednesday we saw American Idiot at Berkeley Rep. Tonight we attended the San Francisco Opera production of Verdi's Il Trovatore.

It was a very strong production. Sondra Radvanovsky was Leonora. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was Count di Luna. Marco Berti was Manrico. Malgorzata Walewska was Azucena. (No. You read it right the first time. This was not a production of Boris Goudinov. And they all sang in fluent Italian.)

All of these singers have all sung major roles in the world's leading opera houses. Each received enthusiastic applause. During the third act, Sondra Radvanovsky brought down the house and stopped the opera for applause for longer that I can ever remember. We have been to many productions of Il Trovatore, but this is the best that we can remember. We are blessed to live in the San Francisco Bay area.

This was an interesting contrast to the punk rock opera American Idiot in many respects. But the one that occurred to me during the performance is that all the singers in American Idiot wore microphones and their voice was amplified to fill the quite small Roda Theater. All of these singers were easily able to project to the farthest reaches of the San Francisco Opera House without amplification.