Kids Around the Bay

About Town

March 7. Thursday. (Tonight). 8 p.m., Freight and Salvage Coffee House, Berkeley. Jewish Music Festival. The always terrific, the legendary Theodore Bikel, along with Bosnian accordionist Merima Kljuco and, from Amsterdam, singer of Yiddish, Shura Lipovsky. Journeys through Yiddish and Bosnian/Sephardic cultures. Is this for kids? Older kids to be sure, and it depends on the child. But for those young teens that have an interest in Jewish culture, who are curious about identity and the past — and music — and who are perhaps sophisticated beyond their years, this is a door to new worlds. Call first. Advance tickets are sold-out but you may be able to get something if you get there early, say at 6-6:30 p.m. and wait in a line for cancellations. The box office told us, “We want to get as many people in as we can to see this.” Tickets are $28 to $30. There is an alternative: concertwindow.com. Webcast tickets are $5. Live, at 8 p.m. PST. In HD, but one camera only; no commercials.

March 9 and 10. Saturday and Sunday. 7:30 p.m., Sunday matinee at 3 p.m. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. CalPerformances present The Secret Garden, the story of Mary Lennox, the consummate little rich girl at the turn of the last century, whose wealthy self-obsessed parents die in India, leaving Mary to go live with her uncle in England. You might think of this as a girl’s version of Kipling’s Captains Courageous, although no hard knocks. And so Mary encounters children her own age and together they discover a secret garden, where all bad things come to an end and beauty springs eternal. Here’s a trailer for the 1993 film version, which starred Maggie Smith. This version is in collaboration with the San Francisco Opera; Directed by Jose Maria Condemi. Tickets are $30 to $80. Highly recommend.

March 9. Saturday, 4 p.m., All Saints Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. Kids Can Groove Family Music Series presents Gustafer Yellowgold’s “Rock Melon Tour.” This is a multimedia show for the whole family; a mix of rock concert and cartoon movie. Featuring the debut of a new hand-drawn animated video/song, Rock Melon, about Slim, an eel who works himself into a frenzy whenever he comes into contract with a cantaloupe. Free admission; go to gustaferyellowgold.com for more information.

March 9. Saturday, 11 a.m., The Bay Area Discovery Museum presents Ballet Afsaneh. This is one of the Bay Area’s less-known treasures. Dance critic Alan Ulrich puts them “in the top tier of Bay Area world dance.” Repertoire includes dances representing Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Turkey, Chinese Turkistan, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Northern India. “Ballet Afsaneh brings to light the history, poetry, iconography, and spiritual heart of these enduring cultures.” The troupe includes 15 core dancers, poets, and musicians who are themselves from Central Asian families. A majority are women. Tickets: members, $7; General admission $17. For more information call (415) 339-3900. The museum is in Sausalito.

March 10. Sunday, Ashenaz Music and Dance Community Center in Berkeley. Melita Doostan’s Octopretzel. “Fantastically folksy, magically musical, dreamily danceable, and singably sweet.” For kids of all ages, including those on Medicare. Show includes handmade puppets, bubbles, hulahooping, kiddie mosh pits and five musicians playing mandolin, marimba, and a Middle Eastern tambourine. Ms. Doostan, a music specialist for kids, is joined by David Doostan; Sarita Pockell; Jen Miriam Kantor; and David Rosenfeld. 3:00-4:30 pm. Tickets are $6 adults, $4 kids. More info and advance tix: www.ashkenaz.com, (510) 525-5054. If your kids haven’t seen this, we highly recommend.

Composer of the Week: Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel, composer of the Bolero, and many other less famous but more wonderful musical works, wears the birthday hat this week.

Although you'll often hear him lumped with Debussy as an "impressionist," few composers were less fuzzy and more definite than Ravel. "I tore my work out of me, drop by drop," goes the most famous quotation from this musician.

He was one of the master orchestrators, as you can tell from his arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He was also short (5' 4") and a very private man — and modest.

Find out more about Ravel, listen to his music, watch videos and dig up fun facts on the SFCV composer biography page for Ravel. Ravel might have been born 138 years ago today, but this video is still fresh. Here's his most famous piece performed by the Vienna Philharmonic and the (slightly younger) conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

A Sound Experience

In San Francisco, on Bush St., there stands Audium Theatre with 49 seats where listeners are surrounded by speakers in sloping walls, a floating floor, and a suspended ceiling. The room is completely dark. It is the Sound-Sculptured Space where compositions are performed live at each program by a tape performer who directs the sounds through a custom console to any combination of the 176 speakers.

“I have always been possessed by the evocative qualities all sounds seem to have, whether natural or electronic, says composer Stan Shaff. "Sounds touch deeper levels of our inner life, layers that lie just beneath the visual world. All sounds are communicative — sound as birth, life and death; sound as time and space; sound as object, environment, or event. Audiences should feel sound as it bumps up against them, caresses, travels through, covers and enfolds them.”

Ongoing; Friday and Saturday nights at 8:30. Audium: Sound-Sculpted Space. No children under 12. Tickets: $20. For more information: www.audium.org.

Video Made the Classical Star?

Online education has become not only relevant, practical, and popular, but gradually more respected. At the same time, for music students the encounter has been mostly a one-way conversation in which students study videos showing a particular technique. Now, there’s an effort to create a dialogue.

One company that offers this “video exchange” is the ArtistWorks Classical Campus (artistswork.com). It not only offers videos by  prominent teachers, along with sheet music, lessons, and a variety of resources, but also an exchange in which you send in a video of yourself playing — using a smart phone or video camera — and in return you receive a video offering personal instruction. Here’s an example.

Your exchange is kept in the Cloud so that other students can view them as well. There are classes in classical guitar, piano, clarinet, violin, French horn, flute, and trumpet. There are different plans that range from about $20 to $30 a month. Might be worth checking out.