We caught the second orchestral program of the American Mavericks Festival at the SF Symphony and what an eclectic, puzzling, and overall exhilarating show it was. (The third program repeats tonight through Saturday). Chronologically, it was rather straightforward: from the most recent Cage Song Books (1970) back towards Carl Ruggles 1931 Sun-treader. In terms of dynamics, it was progressively ordered from very soft to very loud. But any other classification attempt fails, as each of the four pieces had a very strong, very idiosyncratic personality. more ›

Hot Air at the Conservatory: the Conservatory hosted on Sunday its second Hot Air festival, dedicated to the music of the last 50 years. The whole thing lasted from 2pm to 10pm, and had multiple concurrent performances, so we did not catch it all. Also: Superbowl, for which a live streaming was projected on a big screen in a basement room. The conservatory must have forgotten to pay its cable bill, the game was broadcast from bootlegged internet streams that kept being terminated for copyright violations. That is, until they found a stable and oddly appropriate German broadcast. But what glimpses we got of the performances in between quarters and during time-outs was darn impressive. more ›

If the greatness of an orchestra is measured by its commission program, the Dresdner Staatskapelle is hitting it out of the park. It plays so well that composers such as Vivaldi, Schumann, Liszt have wanted the orchestra to premiere their stuff. It gave the opening of Tannhauser, The Flying Dutchman, Salome or Der Rosenkavalier. Wagner was the music director for a while. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Berlioz, Stravinsky collaborated with the orchestra. That's big shoes to fill and quite a legacy to perpetuate: the performance Sunday night at Davies of the Staatskapelle was fine, but not as impressive as the resume. more ›

It's the bane of Jeremy Denk's existence that his terrific credentials as a pianist are most often accompanied by references to his blog. Google lists 63,000 pages under his name, of which 47,000 results still show up if you add 'blog' to the search. Add one with this post, since we're falling to the trope. Again. In a way, that's his fault for writing such a compelling blog, full both of musical insights and of hilarious, deadpan commentary. We've learned a lot about how an artist approaches a piece of music. And the endearing quirkiness is the jam that makes us eagerly swallow the pill of musical structure and theory. more ›

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: more ›