ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE
Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge
Friday, March 1, 2024, 8pm
Saturday, March 2, 2024, 2pm and 8pm
Sunday, March 3, 2024, 2pm and 7pm
Zellerbach Playhouse
Leadership support for LGBTQ+ programming at Cal Performances is provided by Michael P. N. A. Hormel.
Cal Performances is committed to fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and safe environment for all—one that honors our venues as places of respite, openness, and respect. Please see the Community Agreements section on our Policies page for more information.
This program will be performed without intermission and last approximately 65 minutes.
From the Executive and Artistic Director
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
Dramaturgical Notes
With the exception of the final scene, the text of this production is taken verbatim from a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. at the Cambridge Union on February 18th, 1965. Text from the final scene is taken from several letters, interviews, and other writings of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry and compiled by Greig Sargeant and April Matthis, with additional text from Daphne Gaines and Stephanie Weeks.
The idea for Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge was born out of a dinner that Greig Sargeant and I had in 2019. Greig and I were hoping to work together on a different ERS production, but a perfect storm of frustrating outside factors was making that particular collaboration impossible. Greig is a longtime ERS ensemble member and someone whose creative input I treasure, so I wanted to find a way for us to work together. With the original plan in jeopardy, I asked Greig what he wanted to work on: did he have an idea that could be the start of a new ERS piece? His answer was that he wanted to play James Baldwin. From there, we began researching and watched the BBC film of this debate. Greig and I agreed that it sounded hauntingly like a conversation that could be happening right now.
—John Collins, director
The question of this debate—“Is The American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”—is just as relevant today as it was in 1965, just as it was 150 ago. For those who think much has changed for the better in the United States regarding attitudes and behavior about race, I am telling you that, from my perspective, nothing has fundamentally changed. Police killings, voter suppression, systemic racism, and the lack of opportunity for people of color in our society is proof enough. It deeply troubles me that, as a nation and as a society, we are moving backwards. The brilliant and insightful James Baldwin fearlessly confronted these injustices in his own time, injustices that continue today. I was deeply moved when I discovered this debate. Its relevance is undeniable. The time has come again, as Baldwin said, to “wake the children sleeping.” His words must be heard and the conversation must continue for our society to evolve.
—Greig Sargeant, conceiver/actor