It has been documented, in Nature no less, that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. Only for spatial reasoning, though. Only for 15mn afterwards. And the results got disputed later. Damn. And even worst, the same effect was observed with music from, hold on one second while we regain our composure, Yanni. Yanni!

In our quest to make you smarter without listening to Yanni, we suggest you consider the Mid-Summer Mozart Festival. It’s wall-to-wall Mozart, and it starts tonight in San Jose, tomorrow at the Herbst Theater, then an outdoors performance on Saturday in Sonoma and Berkeley on Sunday. The Silicon Valley-SF-Sonoma-Berkeley loop repeats next week with a different all-Mozart program.

This week, you’ll listen to a piano concerto with Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska, a bassoon concerto with Rufus Olivier soloing (he’s the principal bassoonist for the SF Opera and the SF Ballet, and you might have heard him with the Stanford Wood Quintet), a symphony and a divertimento for oboe, horns and strings. Then you’ll have 15mn to use your boosted spatial intelligence to get you home in a way you never thought of before. Don't think you'll have an edge in the cab line: everybody will be as juiced as you.

Picture of Yanni from yanni.com.

If you are concerned about people growing old around you, just keep looking for fresh faces to hang out with. We got this bit of wisdom not from Gavin Newsom (who got it from Willie anyway), but from James Schwabacher. One of Schwabacher’s initiatives was to co-found the SF Opera Merola program, now in its 50th anniversary, a training program-slash-talent-search for opera singers that lasts all summer.

Schwabacher sadly passed away in the middle of last year’s edition, but the new kids (mostly in their 20s), they are all right. His legacy is safe and secure. We saw last week-end an excellent performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola (that’s Cinderella in Italian) at the Cowell Theater in Fort Mason. Before we dig into that, a few PSAs: there are three more opportunities to catch the Merolini, and the next one is for free in the Yerba Buena gardens (Sunday, July 29th, 2 p.m.). So go check what they are about, and if you like it, you can go back to either Cowell Theater for the world premiere of Hotel Casablanca, or the Gala that concludes the program in the War Memorial Opera House (last year’s note here).

Pictures by Kristen Loken. Above, first row from left to right Daveda Karanas, Sam Handley, Ani Maldjian, Paul La Rosa, Daniela Mack, Alek Shrader, and holding the apples: Tom Corbeil, Kenneth Kellogg. Below: mostly the same singers in different combinations and Padmé Amidala.

We are psyched to go see the SF Symphony open this Sunday its Summer Series with a concert at Stern Grove. Free music al fresco, can't beat that.

The Sunday concert features pianist Jeremy Denk in a Mozart piano concerto. Jeremy keeps an on-line diary, a blog as they call it, where he deconstructs the music, shining light on how the interpreter prepares for a piece. He can spend a week discussing one Bach Allemande, writing seven posts peppered with analysis of score excerpts and references to Don Quixote, Nabokov or Roland Barthes. It's like Being John Malkovich; we are total suckers for glimpses into the mind of the artist.

The conductor for Sunday is the second-in-command behind MTT at the Symphony, associate conductor James Gaffigan. Even though he's only 27 years old, he is running the Summer series, which he describes here (click on the audio link). We did not find his blog nor his myspace page. So to know him better, we went the old fashion way: we emailed him questions.

Hop after the jump for Maestro Gaffigan's answers!