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By David Littlejohn Mikhail Baryshnikov, the world's best-known male dancer, will make his eighth appearance in 12 years on the Berkeley campus, June 20 to 22. This will be the first time he has ever appeared in his own solo program, or in a space as compact as the 550-seat Zellerbach Playhouse. California dance fans have seized this rare chance to see their beloved Misha, at age 55, "up close and personal," before he hangs up his dancing shoes. Baryshnikov was persuaded to come to Berkeley in part by his good friend choreographer Mark Morris and in part by Morris's good friend Robert Cole, who is director of Cal Performances, the University's chief presenter of music, dance, and theater. Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project (1990-2002) performed more times in Zellerbach Auditorium than anywhere else in the country. To loosen up before performances, Baryshnikov sometimes plays golf with Cole. In its 2003-4 season, Cal Performances will also present ten internationally known dance troupes; the National Theatre of Greece (performing Euripides' Medea in the 100-year-old Greek Theatre); soloists like violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianists Emanuel Ax and Alfred Brendel, tenors Salvatore Licitra and Juan Diego Flórez, and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter; ten chamber music groups; a number of jazz stars; a Handel opera; and ten soloists or ensembles representing native cultures from Morocco to Cuba. Seasons like this have made Cal Performances the best-known, most written about American performing arts presenter outside of New York, which it has been ever since Robert Cole took the helm in 1986. In fact, a case could be made that Cole's programming for Cal Performances has been more adventurous than Lincoln Center's and broader in scope than that of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Eight years ago, Cole brashly told a local critic: "We have no interest in competing with San Francisco or San Jose. We are competing with New York, London, and Paris." When Cole arrived in Berkeley, he had already established an impressive record running East Coast performing arts centers, where he first got to know people like Mark Morris and Merce Cunningham, who have remained faithful to him. Both of these semi-legendary choreographers now settle in for a spell at Berkeley each year, bringing with them world premieres as thank-you gifts for their old friend Robert (calling this gentleman "Bob" would be like calling James Bond "Jim"). Dance fans on campus and in the region are delighted. Born in San Jose, Cole grew up playing jazz clarinet and saxophone, as well as violin. He worked his way through San Jose State doing gigs at local clubs. Back then, his idols included Wagner and Bach, but also Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. (Today, Cal Performances regularly presents jazz musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars. Last year, Cole married pianist Susan Muscarella, director of The Jazzschool in Berkeley.) After serving as a bandmaster in the Air Force, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill and earned an M.A. in music at USC, where he shifted toward a career as a conductor. When the demands of a new family forced him to drop out of school and find work, he directed church choirs, created the Tulare County Symphony Orchestra (which is still running strong), and taught music wherever he could--including North Hollywood High School, where one of his students was Michael Thomas (who later inserted "Tilson" into his name). Soon Cole and Thomas started their own pick-up orchestra in Los Angeles, playing mainly contemporary music. When Thomas, then just 24, was named assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony in 1969, he helped Cole to a spot in the Tanglewood summer program for conductors, where Cole studied under Leonard Bernstein. In 1973, two years after Thomas took over the Buffalo Philharmonic, he invited Cole to serve as his associate conductor. It was at Buffalo that Cole made the transition from conductor to impresario. Thomas had left him the job of dealing with the dance companies whose visits the symphony sponsored, which included Arthur Mitchell's new Dance Theater of Harlem. Mitchell convinced Cole to help him convert Shea's Buffalo--a decaying old vaudeville and movie house--into a proper dance venue, where in 1976 Cole presented the New York City Ballet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as well as the Dance Theater of Harlem. The Harlem company has performed for a week at Zellerbach every other year since 1987. Merce Cunningham now brings his dancers to Berkeley once a season. And when the New York City Ballet returned to the Bay Area in 1998 after a 12-year absence, it came to Zellerbach Hall. In the performing arts world at its best, artists remember and return favors. Now hooked on the half-personal, half-political business of organizing and presenting art, Cole took on jobs as artistic director at performing arts centers in Poughkeepsie and Brooklyn. Here he presented and got to know people like choreographer Twyla Tharp, ballet dancer Edward Villela, and soprano Kathleen Battle (all later Berkeley visitors), as well as chamber music groups and dance companies from around the country and the world. Even more important were events put on during those heady years by his fellow impresarios in New York, notably Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Christopher Hunt at the Pepsico Summerfare in Purchase, New York. It was here that Cole first saw and got to know Mark Morris and Peter Sellars, who were to become mainstays of his Berkeley seasons and creations. Lichtenstein's "Next Wave" festivals of the 1980s introduced Cole to a number of important, cutting-edge artists, many of whom he later presented in Berkeley. Robert Cole's first seasons at Cal Performances were built around the performers he had encountered and the ideas he had absorbed during his 13 years in the East. But, from Day One at Berkeley, he was determined to make Cal Performances an international creative center in its own right, worthy of equal standing with the top academic departments at the world's leading public university. Which he has done. Zellerbach Auditorium has become not only the premier dance venue in all of California, but one of the most important in the world. It doesn't hurt that the War Memorial Opera House is rarely available during the Cal Performances season (September to May) because of San Francisco's own expanding opera and ballet seasons, nor that the city doesn't have a decent 2,000-seat dance theater like Zellerbach. Says Cole: "Thank God! People have to come here." And so they do, if they want to see the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Stuttgart, or (next season) the Kirov and Frankfurt ballets. Less traditional dance troupes often feel more at home in Berkeley than anywhere else. "The audience in Berkeley is not afraid of the new," said the artistic director of the far-out Lyon Opera Ballet. "So we take more chances." Cal Performances' solo recital program has a remarkable record of offering stars-to-be their American or West Coast debuts. Those who trust Cole's instincts get to see singers like Cecilia Bartoli (who has sung here six times since her West Coast debut in 1991), Ian Bostridge, and Thomas Quasthoff, and instrumental virtuosi like Arcadi Volodos and Maxim Vengerov at the 700-seat Hertz Hall before they become famous and move on to Zellerbach. One of the more unusual categories of Cole's programming is its indigenous music and dance, performed by groups from around the world. More than 40 countries have been represented so far, including 16 from Asia, nine from Africa, and seven from Latin America. "Most of them sell out," Cole says. "There's nothing like it in the country." Who goes? "As often as not, the local community. A guy in New York who specializes in world music--and whom I trust--told me I had to take this group of Persian classical musicians I'd never heard of. He promised me they'd sell out. And they did. I think Budd Cheit and I were the only non-Persians there." Earl F. (Budd) Cheit, former dean of the Haas School of Business, and the first chair of Cal Performances' board of directors, remains one of Cole's good friends and strongest supporters. In the case of groups like the Persians, as well as new solo performers and smaller ensembles, Cole and his staff make decisions based on audio or video tapes or the recommendations of his global network of friends in the performing arts world. For larger events, he goes to see for himself. Last summer he traveled to Paris, Aix-en-Provence, New York, and Salzburg in search of new artists; this summer he'll go to Moscow and St. Petersburg. One of the major innovations of the Cole regime has been his decision to have Berkeley act as producer as well as presenter, by commissioning (or co-commissioning) new works that might never have been produced without front money from an adventurous impresario. So far, Cal Performances has helped to underwrite two exotic opera productions directed by Peter Sellars. Production grants have also gone to Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones, Pascal Rioult, Laurie Anderson, and the Kronos Quartet. In 1990, eager to build ties to Cal's top-ranked music department and to tap the growing Bay Area community of early music fans, Cole inaugurated the biennial Berkeley Festival and Exhibition. This two-week, multiple-event feast combines local and international soloists and ensembles, who perform medieval-through-baroque music all over town, with symposia, meetings, master classes, and displays of period instruments for sale. Centerpiece events have included resurrected operas by Niccolò Jommelli and Alessandro Scarlatti, as well as an extravagant Mark Morris reconception of Platée, Jean-Philippe Rameau's comic ballet of 1745. Joseph Kerman, professor emeritus of music (who wrote witty English supertitles for the Jommelli opera), is delighted at the public exposure the festival gives to his department. He remains impressed by Robert Cole's combination of diplomacy, connections, and hands-on attention to detail and finds it hard to imagine the festival surviving without him. Three years ago, assistant professor of music Kate van Orden half-jokingly suggested to Cole that Le Carrousel du Roi, an equestrian ballet of 1612 she had been researching, might be reconceived for the festival in 2000. Once she learned that there were 15 local "musical-dressage" riders (and their horses) who could pull it off, she had Cole totally committed. This unique, unforgettable event for intricately prancing, elaborately costumed horses and their riders (plus singers and musicians) sold out every performance at a riding arena in Walnut Creek in both 2000 and 2002. Cole, says van Orden, "is a real risk taker, incredibly ambitious in the best possible way. He never skimped; he was behind it all the way. He loves the University, and regards the music department as one of its treasures. He's a local boy too, and believes in California--although he also knows everything that's going on elsewhere." Despite his dedication and a full plate, recent conducting jobs have tempted Cole to reconsider the career he abandoned 25 years ago. In 1996, he had to fill in at the last minute as replacement conductor for The Hard Nut, Mark Morris's goofy, ever-popular version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. The Hard Nut will be back at Zellerbach for its seventh holiday round in December--with Cole, now as usual, waving baton. He has also conducted for Morris in New York. Cole says he's not interested in tying himself to a single orchestra, but he wouldn't mind conducting interesting special events or festival productions. Cole has a number of things he still wants to do for Cal Performances, like raising enough money to renovate Zellerbach Hall, and providing the organization with a decent endowment. Meanwhile, he continues to innovate. This month, Cole inaugurated a new summer festival, which he hopes to continue staging in odd-numbered years, between early music feasts. Called "Berkeley Edge Fest," it focuses on contemporary performance. The first round featured music--much of it never performed before--by California composers like Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and John Adams. Rapturous about this and other projects he has in hand, Cole shows no signs of slowing down. "I'm more psyched up now than I've ever been," he says. David Littlejohn '59, professor emeritus of journalism, is an arts critic for the Wall Street Journal. |
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