One of the most effervescent, most joyously infectious things we heard last year, was Ian Bostridge and Kate Royal in a duet from Handel's Acis and Galatea, Happy We (excerpt here). We streamed it on-line from the BBC-Proms coverage, and it made us so fuzzy inside, that if it were legal, we totally would have installed a streaming audio capture software to make a copy on our computer (that and, oh say, John Adams' Dr......

We hadn’t really opened last year’s Christmas gift yet: when David Gockley became general director of the San Francisco opera a year ago, we did not really know what was in the box. The second half of the 2006 season, and the 2006-2007 season operas were already booked by his predecessor. He was not the one who chose this rather uninspired selection of yet another Carmen, yet another Barber of Seville, yet another Rigoletto. ...

The death of classical music is dead. We see evidence of it right here in the challenging, modern programing of the SF Symphony which fills Davies nightly. MTT opens yet another world premiere next month with Robin Holloway's Fourth Concerto for Orchestra and we are getting ready for the US premiere of John Adams A Flowering Tree, his follow-up opera to the hugely successful Dr Atomic. We see proof of it in the downloads of......

We went to the opera yesterday for the introduction of new SF Opera general director David Gockley, who officially succeeded Pamela Rosenberg on January 1st. Pamela Rosenberg was the director for the last five years, commissioned Dr Atomic and generally tried to shake things up a bit, so we were curious to see were Gockley stands. Gone is the modern -- tacky, screamed the purists -- feel from the brochures and the web site:......

Commissioning a new opera remains a relatively rare thing nowadays: audiences have acquired familiarity with a given repertoire and they do not necessarily like to be pushed towards modern and unknown musics. Yet companies try to introduce fresh air in their program now and then, as the SF Opera did earlier this year with Dr. Atomic, and as the Metropolitan Opera in NY did last week with an American Tragedy. We saw the Met's new......