Hilary Hahn has been a celebrated violinist for so long, you'd forget she hasn't even turned 30! We (as in our favorite philistine) caught her last time around when she was playing the Korngold violin concerto, and loved her. She's back in a more familiar piece, the Tchaikovsky concerto in D major, starting tomorrow night. How's that for some perfectly festive holidays! We got the chance to phone Hilary, and well, that Tchaikovsky concerto, what's......

Sometimes, conducting modern music is like driving a car that was designed with 12 wheels, but such that only one can touch the ground at any time. Some kind of tricky balancing act, it gets you somewhere but tensely, with your muscles clenched. And then, the Dvorak New World Symphony is like stepping off that contraption into a mercedes convertible, lifting the top down, stepping on the pedal, and wham, there comes the acceleration pushing you into the plush leather, the wind blowing on your face and the rush of blood to your groin: just plain exhilaration. The snobs will sneer at the bourgeois pleasures, but they're so thoroughly enjoyable. The Summer Series of the SF Symphony is all about giving the audience such easy satisfaction. The program we attended, in addition to the New World Symphony, included a Beethoven piano concerto No. 5, and a Slavonic Dance, again by Dvorak. Easy pleasures don't mean it's dumbed down: those are famous pieces for sure, and no feather will be ruffled the wrong way by the program, but these are still important works, and highly difficult to perform....

Even though James Gaffigan's only 27 years old, he is running the SF Symphony Summer series. We wanted to know him better, and he granted us an interview:...