Best Bets: Reich’s pioneering music, California Symphony highlights strings, Lisa Fischer and Ranky Tanky

The Bay Area is a hub of artistic expression, attracting artists, writers and musicians from around the globe to live, work and create. We highlight some of the offerings here.

Freebie of the week: As a producer and director, Jon Avnet has been behind some thoughtful movies (“Fried Green Tomatoes”) as well as films that have tackled intense topics (“The War,” “Black Swan”).  But arguably his most impactful film was a 2001 made-for-TV release titled “The Uprising,” which originally aired over two nights on NBC and depicted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. The uprising came four years after Germany invaded Poland and had forced Jewish inhabitants into a battered Warsaw, from where they were being transported to the Treblinka Nazi death camp. As Nazi soldiers entered the city for what they saw as the final roundup, some 700 young Jewish inhabitants mounted a rebellion that stretched out nearly a month before the Germans finally crushed it. The rebels harbored no illusions that they would change the course of history but figured the worst option would be to do nothing. Avnet’s film project was an ambitious one – his set included a massive, four-story re-creation of Warsaw, the length of three football fields, according to New York magazine. He garnered some 20,000 extras and assembled a 215-person cast that included such A-Listers as Hank Azaria, David Schwimmer, Leelee Sobieski, Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland and many others. Firmly rooted in history, “The Uprising” seems frighteningly more relevant these days, with right-wing movements and governments flexing their muscles throughout the globe. At 2 p.m. Sunday, you can catch a free screening of “The Uprising” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., San Francisco. A Q&A with Avnet, Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum and Steven Meed, son of Polish resistance fighter Vladka Meed, follows the film. The event is sponsored by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. To register, go to www.jewishpartisans.org/uprising2022. 

The revised Reich stuff: Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich, a pioneer of minimalism and electronic music, recently marked his 86th birthday and is the honoree at the center of Cal Performances’ “A Steve Reich Celebration” taking place at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. But those who are well-acquainted with his signature rhythm-driven style (for which he coined the word “pulse” as a musical term) will be surprised at the highlighted work on the program, the West Coast premiere of Reich’s 2020 “A Traveler’s Prayer,” performed by the Colin Currie Group instrumental ensemble in collaboration with Synergy Vocals. A setting of texts from three Old Testament books that invoke pleas for protection, it is a flowing, melodic work with interwoven voices, often in canon, that has been described as “an ancient meditation spun out of looping voices, sustained string chords and the low toll of the piano.” Listen to Reich himself describe how he came to this unusual departure from his style here: https://youtu.be/vJAErGnwemk. Also on the program are “Tehillim,” the 1980-81 work in which Reich first concentrated on his Jewish heritage, and his early, groundbreaking masterpiece, “Music for 18 Musicians.” Tickets, $58-$78, are available at 510-642-9988 and at calperformances.org.