Cal Performances plans online season
Cal Performances plans to present an online series of 15 fulllength musical and theater performances for its fall arts programming, with new offerings unveiled weekly Oct. 1 through Jan. 14, the organization announced Tuesday, Aug. 25.
“Cal Performances at Home” will include jazz, chamber and solo classical concerts as well as two theatrical presentations by the Chicago arts collective Manual Cinema. Several performances will be recorded in advance.
Among those on the lineup are cellist YoYo Ma, keyboardist Matthew Whitaker, violinist Tessa Lark, soprano Julia Bullock, the Tetzlaff and Dover quartets, and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society.
“The idea was to reproduce the eclecticism and adventurousness of a Cal Performances season, even if we were recording it remotely,” Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen told The Chronicle during a phone interview.
Most of the performers are among those who were scheduled to appear live in Berkeley during the fall, before the COVID19 pandemic forced the cancellation of those events. But Geffen said the new format also allowed him to circumvent the usual long lead time of artistic planning and add such artists as Nathalie Joachim and Spektral Quartet to the roster.
“This pandemic has taken so much out of the artistic community,” he said. “Our first obligation was to the artists we’d planned to bring, and to help bring those performances to light.”
Tickets for athome viewing are priced at $15 for a single viewer, $30 for two and $60 for a household, with a $5 tier for UC Berkeley students. Each presentation will be available for three months following its premiere, and each opening night will include a digital “watch party” for subscribers that features the ability to participate in a live chat.
In addition, Cal Performances will offer two free channels, one devoted to supplemental content — behindthescenes footage, artist interviews and so on — and another with educational content for students of different ages.
“This has been a great experience for our organization in learning how to be nimble,” Geffen said. “This is a big pivot, and although we anticipate there will be bugs to work out along the way, we’re excited to be able to bring the joy of live performance, even prerecorded, to our audience members.”
Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman