Entries from SFist tagged with 'johnadams'
January 22, 2008
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......
Continue Reading "Ian Bostridge at Herbst Theater Tonight. "
December 5, 2007
We made much about Philip Glass turning 70, and not of a single peep when John Adams turned 60 this past February. Aw. We feel bad, since the contemporary composer lives in Berkeley, and he is ours, so to speak. (Gothamist can claim Glass. If they want.) Actually, back then, Adams conducted the SF Symphony in the US premiere of his Flowering Tree to celebrate his big six-oh.Sadly, we were out of town, then. But......
Continue Reading "Son of the Return of John Adams. "April 19, 2007
On time this week! Last week's winner: the East Bay Express. All pro-Wiccan letters except for one, which says witchcraft is not a religion. That's right -- it's a sandwich store! The mayors of Alameda and Oakland suck. Skating in the East Bay. Cover article: a local Burning Man DJ is popular, wants to get into hip-hop. That new movie by the Shawn of the Dead guys is pretty funny. Is payola coming back for......
Continue Reading "We Read The Weeklies"January 11, 2007
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......
Continue Reading "SFist Interviews Jennifer Koh."March 2, 2006
This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, and obviously, everyone loves some Mozart. Don't get us started on the unrequited obsession of the only classical radio station in the bay area who drools over --and cannot think of anyone else but-- Mozart like a teenage girl over Ashton Kushner. So it is a relief to see that, while Mozart will be deservedly honored, the symphony 2006-07 season will cover some new......
Continue Reading "SF Symphony: Dr. Atomic Strikes Back."December 10, 2005
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......
Continue Reading "SFist Goes to the Opera: an American Tragedy"October 24, 2005
The SF Opera schedule makes it look like as if, when Dr Atomic reaches the pantheon of the opera repertoire, it will be greeted at the gate by Norma. Bellini's most famous opera opened yesterday at the War Memorial Opera House, bringing back the comfort of familiarity after the more adventurous world premiere of John Adams' composition, and we absolutely loved it.
Norma is the ultimate bel canto opera, this beautiful singing style which places the emphasis on the lyricism and vocal agility of the singer. It is also an extremely powerful story, and yesterday's performance was so gut wrenching it would squeeze tears out of a rock. Norma is a high Druidess in Gaul who has been conducting a secret affair with Pollione, the proconsul for the Roman invaders. Unbeknownst to the other Gauls, they have had two kids, which says something about the value of togas for maternity wear. As the opera starts, Pollione, in a bout of mid-life crisis, has decided to leave Norma for a younger priestess, Adalgisa.
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October 3, 2005
Writing an opera on the subject of the atomic bomb is a risky endeavour. For the sheer difficulty of the task, of course, but also because it unleashes the easy metaphors: will it be a dud, a fizzle, or a bang? We will say: a big bang -- but while we were blown away by the music, our appreciation is relativized by some other wrong decisions with the set direction.
The opera focuses on the last days leading to the explosion of the first atomic test bomb, in June and July 1945. It is centered about J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the scientific director of the Manhattan project, and the founder of the Los Alamos research lab. Let's get some local pride going: Oppie was a member of the Berkeley faculty, as many of the top scientists at Los Alamos (the UC still runs that lab in New Mexico). He lived in the same east bay hills as John Adams, the composer of the opera. We hear that the UC is now considering adding Opera spots to the Nobel parking lot, in case another member gets the honor.
Photos by Terrence McCarthy- SF Opera...
September 15, 2005
The San Francisco Opera opened its season last Saturday and picked up right where it left off last time we visited. The Italian Girl in Algiers, just like Cosi fan Tutti, is another joyful and energetic opera, another fun comedy of an opera, which should reach to a wide audience. The continuity is musical as well: Rossini was inspired by the language of Mozart. He actually composed The Italian In Algiers in 1813, a mere 22 years after Amadeus’ last opera. He was 21 years old and composed the opera in 18 days. 18 days! Maybe John Adams will start writing Dr. Atomic soon. To put this in perspective, when we were 21, our main achievement was not to miss dollar pint night for a whole semester. One could hear Mozart’s influence in general, but in particular the piccolo in the overture reminded us of the Magic Flute, as well as the choice of Papatachi as a title for one of the characters echoed Mozart’s wit with Papageno.
Again, as for Cosi last season, the performance is displaced in time. However, there start the differences. Cosi was a farce too, but grounded in some seriousness by its setting in the ominous background of WWI. One does wild things indeed when the apocalypse is near. The Italian in Algiers, on the other hand, is costumed for the 1930s, happens in a land of fantasy, and is light all the way. ...
September 8, 2005
Put a brimful of Asha on your iPod ride! The Asha Bhosle who's name-checked by the Brit band Cornershop and is renown as the voice of Bollywood, has released a CD with San Francisco's best arbiters of new music tastes, the Kronos Quartet.
Kronos has always sought to redefine classical chamber music from Viennese ladies doing the minuet to encompass all types of sonic sensation -- from contemporary pieces by Philip Glass and John Adams to Hendrix covers, Latin jazz, Argentinean tangoes, and African world music. Their latest record, You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood, features string quartet arrangements of songs from Bollywood films.
Bollywood films are famous for their extended musical numbers, many of which were written by Asha Bhosle's late husband, R.D. Burman and performed by Ms. Bhosle, to be lip-synched by famous actresses in the actual movie. Burman and Bhosle are said to have sold more records than Elvis and the Beatles combined. And the album's a lot of fun! It's basically a Burman/Bhosle greatest hits collection -- Kronos and their posse of world musicians basically fade into the background and Bhosle lets it fly (check out the audio samples).
The tunes are insanely catchy and -- well, we don't approve of listening to world music to feel exotic, but we did find ourselves hankering for something cardamom-flavored as we listened through. Kronos will be performing with Asha Bhosle on September 22 and 23 at the Yerba Buena Center. We hope they'll synch up some movies with the songs! ...
April 26, 2005
You probably remember that brief brouhaha about the CD price-fixing antitrust case, where that judge was going to give everyone who'd ever bought a CD from 1995 to 2002 $14.99 if they sent in their name and address, right? Well, as part and parcel of that settlement, all the CD companies agreed to send free CDs to public libraries across the land. Well, hey -- our beloved San Francisco public library just got its Columbia Record Club shipment, and received: 91 copies of Ricky Martin's Sound Loaded, 81 copies of Jessica Simpson's Irresistible, and 68 copies of Celine Dion's greatest hits. We're going to reserve ours online right now!
Jaundiced athenaea-nauts are grumbling that the record companies appear to be dumping poorly-selling records on libraries (Irresistible, for instance, is the second Jessica Simpson album, the one that came out before Newlyweds), but cheerier librarians are storing, say, their 106 copies of Lenny to give away as prizes for summer reading contests.
Check out what everyone else in California is getting. (For instance, San Francisco Unified (.pdf) is getting 51 copies of Whitney Houston's "Star Spangled Banner," 7 copies of "Carmen: A Hip Hop-era," 5 copies (clean) of The Wu Tang, and a smattering of Kronos Quartet and John Adams CDs, among many, many others)....