Michael Tilson-Thomas, the music director for the SF Symphony, has just announced today that he will step down from his post after the 2019-20 season.

That season will be the 25th in this role, and he will then turn 75 himself. MTT has definitely left a mark on the orchestra, with a string of impressive innovations, including an in-house label to release the orchestra's award-winning recordings (they just released a set of Schumann symphonies); the soundbox nightclub experiment for avant-garde programming, where the audience's openess to new music is heightened with a couple stiff drinks; the American Mavericks festivals with the focus on Ives, Cage, Harrison, and so many other influential composers, informed by his own friendship with guys like Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland; the Keeping Score educational project, etc, etc.

MTT discussed his departure with the NY Times, probably because he already chatted with
SFist once before. Fear not, he will still lead the band as "music director laureate" for four weeks a year. What starts now, though, is totally unsubstantiated and idle speculation on who will replace him. Drink a shot every time someone mentions the dazzling Krzysztof Urbanski, who conducted two weeks of program from memory to rave reviews earlier this month.

Related: SF Symphony Celebrates Oktoberfest With Resident Conductor Christian Reif

The SF Symphony Gala kicked off the orchestra's season on Thursday night, later in September than usual as MTT was on tour with the Vienna Symphony orchestra. Often enough, classical music is a background to the festivities — he audience is there to be seen and enjoy some bubbly and hors d'oeuvres, while raising funds for the Symphony's free education programs. The orchestra would typically serenade us with Bonnie Raitt or Broadway showtunes under the garish flower displays on the dress circle balcony courtesy of Dede Wilsey. This year: no flowers! If not for the over-the-top outfits, the concert hall would have been bare (no worries, the tent on Grove Street for the after-party was lushly decorated).

Musically, there were crowd-pleasing elements: a boisterous Candide overture as a wink to this year's theme, Leonard Bernstein's 100th birthday. Lenny and MTT were buddies, and it will be a red thread throughout the season, starting next week-end. The entire Candide musical will be performed in January in a concert version. Also crowd-pleasing: Ravel's Bolero, a popular hit whose success surprised even the composer. The Gala's version doubled as a welcome back to the musicians, as most section principals have a solo turn with the hauntingly repeated melody, which they each took standing up with a spotlight upon them. It was a nice way to get re-acquainted with the individuals within orchestra, and it was further enhanced by some lighting effects. The mood starts with a slightly bluesy melody and ends up with a red hot fanfare. Can you guess the lighting scheme? Indeed.

Despite the progression in the special effects, MTT kept it at a very steady pace (as Ravel intended), and it felt a bit drab. We have to tip our hat to Jacob Nissly, who went ta-tatata-ta-tatata-ta-ta-ta-tatata-ta-tatatatatatatatata on the snare drums for roughly 170 measures. We were slightly humored by Edward Stephan at the timpani. The first 326 bars are all C major. When he played during these, he would only bounce between C and G. Then comes eight bars of E. After all this slow, relentless build up, that one change in harmony is a magical relief, a powerful release of energy. (Insert your own metaphor). It then goes back for a short coda in C, where Stephan really sounded angry and fed up with the darn Cs and Gs. That timpani was screaming: enough with this key! Tim Day got the first turn at the flute, and warmly welcomed us into the piece. Each instrument showed off its own idiosyncratic language despite the exact same melody, Tim Higgins sliding his trombone or the sax player jazzing it up. The celesta sounded cringingly out of tune.

MTT with Opening night gala chair Priscilla Geeslin

Talking about cringing: MTT sung Happy Birthday to Bernie Osher, who recently turned 90, over some string accompaniment MTT wrote in the style of 1600s Venice. What a waste of Yo-Yo Ma's and the symphony strings' talent to have them noodle around while MTT hesitantly quavered through the tune.

Sabrina Buell and Marissa Mayer

The main draw was Yo-Yo Ma in a Saint-Saens concerto and some Rococo variations by Tchaikovsky. Both pieces put the cello firmly up front, and Yo-Yo is a big star who deserves no less. He had the corresponding showmanship, either emoting with eagerness or acting with a very casual cool, jumping into his entrance without any warning. I just discovered he was born in Paris. French anchor baby! Yet, despite that French connection, the concerto sounded like a somewhat empty display of virtuosity. You could admire the warm tone, the booming resonating sound of his cello's low string, or the fluttering butterfly trills, light and heavenly even. But the whole piece felt meandering and purposeless. Blame it on Saint-Saens, maybe. The Rococo Variations' theme had a cute ear-wormy quality. It was fresh and light and perfect for a Gala opening night.

Lotfi Mansouri, when he ran SF Opera, had persistently tried to convince MTT to conduct an opera there. It never happened. To hear MTT leading vocal works in SF, we had to settle for semi-staged versions on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall, and those left us with a tinge of disappointment: amazing orchestral and vocal displays, but why settle for semi-done things? Why not go full throttle with the real thing, and hop in that darn pit? Last night, MTT took a different tack, and prefixed that "semi" to something that was never meant to be staged in the first place, Mahler's das klagende Lied. From a composer who, despite having led the Vienna State Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, never wrote a full opera.

Das klagende Lied is an hour-long cantata with four soloists, chorus and full scale orchestra and it does tell a rather dark story, but without assigning specific roles to any of the singer on stages. The story goes: two brothers go in the forest to find a red flower that will win them the beautiful queen in marriage. One finds it, the other kills him and takes the flower; later, a minstrel finds a white bone in the forest, carves a flute out of it, which when played, sings the tale of the slayed kid, and reveals to the queen that her now-king betrayed her and killed her promised. There is no: tenor is good brother, baritone is bad, soprano is the queen; they all take turns telling the tale, with interjections from the chorus throughout. The staging added a quartet of dancers to therefore take turns inhabiting the protagonists, and highlighting the twist and turns in the music. Projections on a wall on the back of the stage provided some minimally invasive context, here some tree shadows for the forest, here's some marble for the queen's hall. That wall was opened horizontally in the middle so the chorus could be seen and heard.

Searching whether MTT had ever conducted an opera (he has, just not in SF), we found some remarks of his on the difference between conducting in an opera house versus the symphony hall: "music [speaks] in a wordless language which seemed to fill in all the levels of expression between the words...There is a tremendous joy about the wonderful dialogue between the meaning of the word and the meaning of the music, and the way they can be used to amplify one another’s meanings - or sometimes contradict one another’s meanings in very wonderful and deliciously confusing ways. There is the situation of the opera where you can have not only the words, but you have a rather specific situation which is presented. In any work of art, as you make something more and more specific, you run the danger of making it less and less universal and perhaps more and more - dare one say? - trivial."

Did he make that lied more trivial? Most definitely, the action on the stage did distract from the music, which turned into a soundtrack rather than the backbone. Yet, MTT has a way of defibrillating Mahler's music that just would not let it recede in the background. You could still hear the wondrous textures and colors, the delightful ornamentation. You could still be fascinated by the myriad ways the string would attack a note. At some point, the blend of the basses and bass horns was so intimate we wondered if there was an organ on stage. And both music and projections succeeded in enhancing each other, as in the way the music bloomed as a blur of a red flower grew on the screen.

The rest of the program comprised other early works of Mahler that showed how accomplished he was in his late teens, early twenties. Blumine, a symphonic movement describing by its composer as a "love episode" and a "youthfull folly" opened the evening. We didn't hear much youthfulness in MTT's approach, it was pretty slow and slightly depressing, until a little waltzy turn temporarily perked things up. It evoked more the timeless tender love of an aging couple, rather than anything frolicky. Blumine was originally part of some setting of The Trumpeter of Saeckingen, and opens appropriately then with a meandering trumpet melody, by Mark Inouye. Or so we assume based on the quality of the sound. We could not really see, as the orchestra was set up flat on the stage instead of the usual raisers, to make room for the platform for das klagende Lied. But only Inouye could take his trumpet sound to the dry cleaner, get it ironed and pressed, and bring it back still wrapped in its plastic sheeting to have it so kinkless and shiny. He held a progressively fading note for so long, we worried about his lungs. Did he have three or four?

The last piece, Songs of the Wayfarer, also featured Sasha Cooke, who gave a technically perfect account that seemed a tad emotionally restrained. She could have gone deeper into it. Her character in this short song cycle is an abandoned lover, but Cooke seemed to decorate the pits of despair with scented candles, patterned tablecloth, and a vase of flowers. We felt more pain from the orchestra's throbbing lament than from her voice. But that's not a knock on her, rather an acknowledgment of the orchestra's sound and MTT's breathtaking conducting last night.

First, a few classical music items: After 38 years of companionship, SF Symphony musical director and most famous acronym MTT has tied the knot with his partner Joshua Robison. Congratulations, Michael! It looks like the honeymoon will take them to hotbeds of romance like Cleveland and Kansas City: it's where the orchestra is going on tour next week, as well as New-York, Boston, Ann Arbor or Miami. Joining them on tour, violinist Gil Shaham, whom we talked with on Tuesday. Gil and the SF Opera tune up for their journey with bon voyage concerts this week at Davies Symphony Hall. Finally, SF Opera's season continued with Partenope and Tosca. Next in the batter's box: Rossini's Cinderella.

Gil Shaham burst onto the classical music scene when in 1989, just eighteen year old, he replaced Itzahk Perlman on short notice for a series of concert with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by none other than Michael Tilson Thomas. The relationship has continued over the years. He made his SFS debut in 1999 at Isaac Stern’s 70th birthday celebration in 1999 in Stern Grove, and he’s been a guest artist with the symphony almost every season since. Together, they perform this week at Davies Symphony Hall the two programs they will take on the road for a seven cities US tour: Mozart's violin concerto No. 5 in A Major, and Prokofiev's 2nd violin concerto.

The second concerto falls into a project Gil has been working on for a few years, about the violin concertos of the 30s. That decade saw a flourish of violin concertos by a list of all the major composers of the period: Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Alban Berg, Sergei Prokofiev, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith, Karol Szymanowski, Darius Milhaud… and Shaham has been exploring those relentlessly.
We talked with him about his concerts with the symphony and the benefits of touring while sleeping in his own bed, as the SF Symphony performs in NYC where Gil lives.

You and MTT go back a long way. How is it to work with him?
Gil Shaham: It's always such a thrill to be with the orchestra. I'm always thrilled to be with Michael Tilson-Thomas. He's a brilliant mind and a brilliant musician. There's an aura and an excitement and a love of music that inspires everybody around it, on stage and off stage. When I first started working with him in 1989, that's 25 years ago, it became clear to me very quickly that he knows the violin repertoire better than I do. He's a conductor and I'm a violinist. Now, 25 years later, I suspect it might still be true. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and tremendous experience with music making. I always learn. For example, I remember learning the William Schuman violin concerto. Basically, Michael taught it to me. I didn't know the piece before, I remember spending a long time discussing the piece with him. It's true that there is an excitement about music that he brings everywhere he goes.

This week and on tour, you will play violin concertos by Mozart and Prokofiev. Can you contrast those?
There are both similar in that they both ended up being the final concerto for violin of the composer. I remember hearing that Prokofiev had plans to write a concerto #3 but he never did. The story with Mozart's concerto is that he was prepared to write a folio of six, which was common practice at the time to publish music in group of six. When he was ready to compose number five, he was ready to scrap the whole project and throw away these five great treasures that we still have.

The pieces are very different. Mozart is basically a funny piece in A Major. The first movement has an unusual marking of allegro aperto (open), it has an even sunnier affect than the other concertos. In general, you'd be very hard pressed to see Mozart marking anything aperto. The piece is mostly in the major mode. It has a sublime 2nd movement and rondo-dance 3rd movement. And it may be most famous for the minor mode interlude in the last movement, where Mozart uses Turkish vernacular, he turned to the folk music of the Turks that he heard at the time in Austria, and then he comes back to the Major. It's a culmination of his study of the violin concerto genre. Of the five concertos, this is the longest and grandest in scale, and maybe the most experimental. The first movement stops in the middle and the violin comes in with an adagio aria just in the middle, and then comes back as if to say, "now, to the real meaning of the music." It's perfectly written of course, the technique of it is beautiful. He writes this aria to start with a violin arpeggiation. It takes the audience by surprise. It seems unrelated, this A-C#-E arpeggio. The violin finishes this cadence, a very beautiful, very refined cadence, but it still leaves you questioning where we are. It comes back to the allegro we heard before, except this time, the allegro has a counter point in the violin solo. That counterpoint comes from the A arpeggio. And in fact you realize: this is the melody. What you heard in the beginning was the counterpoint to this melody. It's an incredible effect, and very experimental. There isn't anything like that before. People think of other forms as being strict, but in the hand of great masters, they can take great liberty with it. There are all sorts of effects. In the last movement, the cellos play con legno, with the wood of the bow. It was a special effect, an experimental sound.

By contrast, I think of the Prokofiev as a much darker piece, even more than I thought before. The other connection between the two concertos: Prokofiev also uses this vernacular of folk music. In this concerto, you hear imitations of balalaika, and of bayan (the Ukrainian accordion) and there are certainly some melodies that sound like Russian folk melodies. Actually, in the last movement, he uses castanets, probably for the purpose of the premiere of the piece, which was in Madrid in Spain. It was commissioned by Robert Sutton, a French man, and premiered in Madrid, and Prokofiev incorporated these castanets. These days, I wonder if there was, between the lines of the music, some other message. Besides these beautiful melodies and references to folk traditions, there is also a counterpart, this machinist vein in the music. In fact, it ends with this machinist vein. I wonder if Prokofiev had some darker message about the Russian soul. The opening melody is in the minor mode. It sounds like a traditional old Russian folk song, and it transforms during the piece into this very short, kinda grotesque, ghostly variations, with somewhat dissonant machinist passages in the violin and the orchestra.

You started your own label after your contract with DG was not renewed. You mentioned you would keep recording as long as each release could fund the next. How have the economics of the music business changed with services like Spotify?

You know the truth is, I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough to answer this. My understanding is that it is a difficult period of transition for the entire music industry. There is so much free content out there. Even in the pop world, or the traditional part of the music business, we're still not quite at the model where we know how musicians can make a profit. I feel very lucky with our label.When we started, we said: if there is enough demand to make another one, we'll make another one. We started with a recording of Gabriel Faure chamber music. I was very proud that we were on the billboard charts, it was a best seller and we made some more. We expanded a little bit, my wife Adele Anthony released a recording of concertos by Sibelius and Ross Edwards, an Australian composer. My sister Orli Shaham has released a new piece by Steve Mackey and this year, I will release the solos sonatas and partitas of Bach. We enjoy it and so long as there is demand for it, we're happy to make recording.

Every time we see you, we note that you move a lot and seem to almost dance with the music. Do others comment to you about it?

I wish I was more in control of my body. I suppose I should take some posture lessons and it couldn't hurt for all of us to dance the minuet and any of these dances that we all play. When I see myself, it's so embarrassing. I wish I didn't move the way I do. Often people comment and try to help. I must say, I have gotten better. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I used to practice the violin walking up and down at home. And I remember going on stage once and I was walking and getting off stage. And I'll never forget the pianist I was playing with, Sandy Rivers [ed: Sandra Rivers], she was like: "where are you?" and I'm off the stage!

It sounds silly, and a lot of of the story is just a pretext for lovely music, but the staging here manages to put everything into a somewhat coherent vision, an exploration of love which turns into an examination of physical desire. Basically, it's taking the appropriate 18th century facade for the charade it is, and just making explicit the very sexual tension between the characters. There is also a gender confusion to add onto this tension: Rosmira cross-dresses of course, but both Arsace and Armindo are sung by counter-tenors, with rather feminine voices. As an aside: it is somewhat sad that opera lost the inventiveness which makes Handel write a score for these registers. Sure, the "evil baritone-dashing tenor-loving soprano combo" has some of the most amazing music ever written, but when again will we see two dueling counter-tenors?

David Daniels as a lost in his thoughts Ascarce

The sexy Danielle DeNiese was a perfect fit for both the vocal score and the wacky staging. Her perky voice is light and fluttery, thin in the bottom and sharp at the top, but fun, appropriate, and full of sparkles. Her cabaret sequence was downright raunchy, but her sweetness in the butterfly aria was innocently charming. David Daniels manages to emanate the manly attractiveness which draws both Rosmira and Partenope while singing high notes with both volume and lyricism. He never feels strained and stays colorful.

The staging makes some incredible demands on Anthony Roth Costanzo (Armindo) and Alek Shrader (Emilio). The former belts while doing pull-ups hanging from stairs, a feat that would result in a complaint filed with the performer's union by a lesser singer. We can't do pull-up without catching our breath, let alone sing throughout. Shrader outdoes him by singing hanging out of the window atop a bathroom's door, or pulling a yoga routine in the last act. Yoga, like singing, involves breath control, but they are supposed to be incompatible with each other, not funny as hell together. Here's a side story to the performance: Daniella Mack and Alek Shrader met as Merola attendees in 2007 and later got married.

The orchestra sounded fantastic, led by Julian Wachner in his SF Opera debut, especially the valveless period horns and the oboes given great lines by Handel.

Lianna Haroutounian lit up the stage in Tosca

Sure, Jagde was pretty good last time around. An Adler fellow with the SF Opera, he had floored us in one of our first encounters with him in Puccini, that seems to be his territory. He's still growing into the role, finding more confidence and more heft in his voice. And the familiarity of the cast with the staging ensured that all flowed smoothly, with none of the slight hesitations you may encounter on opening night.

We still recall the caution in last year's soprano Angela Ghorgiu's blocking last year. She seemed a bit restrained and not fully engaged with the staging (to her credit, she wasn't feeling well and had to leave at the first intermission to be replaced by Melody Moore). And while it was her first show on this set -on this stage, even- Lianna Haroutounian had no hesitation. She fearlessly hurled herself into the performance, just like she hurled herself off the roof of the Palazzo Farnese to end the night: fully committed to give her all.

Her Vissi d'art suspended time in the opera house, so sad, tender and lyrical. Her "Qual'occhio" duet with Jagde in the first Act gave us chills up and down the spine, one of these moments of transcendent emotion being communicated through music that makes opera so wonderful. The 6'2" Jagde and the diminutive Haroutounian formed an unlikely couple, but heavenly matched in that duet. There is one more performance on Tosca on Friday, do yourself a favor and check Haroutounian out. She'll blow you away.

The SF Symphony Gala happened two weeks ago, but that won't stop us from going all Us Weekly on you with pictures of the well-heeled at the glamorous party. These patrons dropped up to $10,000 for a dinner seat and a concert, but it's for a good cause: all proceeds benefit the SF Symphony's education programs, which annually reach over 75,000 Bay Area children. The pretty outfits probably cost at least as much, but only benefit the children of Salvatore Ferragamo.

There was a concert as well with the orchestra backing up Yuja Wang joyous romp through the "Rhapsody in Blue." Singer Bonnie Raitt came up for three songs and got all emotional on a tune from a father, but the rest of her set, including a delightful "That's my weakness now" with witty orchestral quotes from Mozart or Stravinsky, provided plenty of good hearted fun. It was almost cruel to keep the high society from hobnobbing through a rather long program that also included Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture and more scenes from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. MTT's 20th season as music director was off and running. All pictures courtesy of Moanalani Jeffrey Photography for SF Symphony.

If the opera is named after your character, you better be up for the task. Stuart Skelton delivered big time as Peter Grimes. A search on this website for Stuart Skelton yields a single post with a horribly punny title -- Mahler Lied, No One Died> -- and a pithy comment: The tenor did not impress us as much. So why was Stu tearing it up on Friday evening in a semi-staged production with the San Francisco Symphony. We probably caught him on an off night a couple years back, he's the real deal, in turn tender and dreamy, then defiant and violent.

His voice can fill up the big Davies Symphony hall, that's no problem. But he can color it in so many ways. At one point, he recalls how his first apprentice -- he keeps accidentally destroying them maliciously -- asked for water before passing away, and Stuart goes from a soft head voice to a full chest voice, transitioning from one to the other effortlessly and seamlessly. The voice goes from the angelic tones that you hear for the entrance of Lohengrin to the guttural throaty sounds of a rude drunk lout all in the same aria.

The New Voices project, a collaboration of the New World Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony (both MTT-led) and the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes to get young composers to write for large orchestra, had its first commissionee, 28yo Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri's Lineage performed last week by the SF Symphony. Zosha's own lineage comes from spectral music, this '70s movement which puts the emphasis on the color of a note. Di Castri's piece plays with colors for roughly ten minutes, producing glittering textures, and slowly evolving sonic atmospheres. She anchors the piece around a melodic motif that hovers in between the notes (using microtones, that is the spaces in between the scale notes), but the piece drifts away from this "melody" and back, reaching intriguing timbres and wonderful colors and textures along the way. We had no idea slapping the mouthpiece of a tuba with your hand would generate such wheezy sound. It is a piece that needs full attention, so full it is of details and minute inventions.

We expect a good time from an opening gala at the SF Symphony. After all, there's an open bar, fancy (or "fancy," in some cases) attire, and everyone rejoices over the new musical season. Last night, beat our expectations as the musical performance, featuring Audra McDonald, topped our expectations. The pieces, joined together by an all-American theme, were fun, focused, and fantastic.

The program opened with Antheil's jazz symphony, a piece introduced by MTT as a mix of jazz and Stravinsky, but we really heard the influence of French composer Darius Milhaud's Boeuf sur le toit. As Le Boeuf, the piece is built in a loose Rondo form, with a jazzy feel alternating with some playful variations. After the introduction of the orchestral theme, Robin Sutherland at the piano played his own motif in a deliberately different tempo. It all worked, contrasting hard and soft edges, percussive and meditative tempi. Mark Inouye played a solo so wonderful that, for the first time ever at Davies, we heard the audience applaud in the middle of the piece.

Inouye, with an assist from flutist Tim Day and percussion principal Jacob Nissly at the xylophone (leaving a noteworthy mark with his first SF concert), also delivered with Gershwin's "American in Paris."

In between the two orchestral pieces, Audra McDonald sang from the Broadway songbook. Ms McDonald had no trouble getting the limelight on her, and with good reason. With five Tony Awards under her belt (in both drama and musical categories, ahe can create a different character for each song. She put forth a motherly voice in the "Build My House"/"Take Care of This House" combo from the Bernstein's songbook. She was vulnerable in West Side Story's "Somewhere," and a sexy kitten in "A Little Bit of Love" from Bernstein's Wonderful Town. (Her extended "mmmmmmmmm" felt like being gingerly bit on the nape of the neck.) Her rendition of "He Plays the Violin" form Edwards' 1776 made her interaction with Sasha Barantshik's violin downright dirty. And she got a mellow torch mood -- where Sutherland's smooth piano intros made us think (for a second only!) he should be a lounge player in some swanky hotel -- with Jule Styne's "The Music That Makes Me Dance." And finally, when she asked the audience to help sing along to "I Could Have Danced All Night," which she now begrudgingly performs as it's such a Broadway standard, the audience was all-too eager to please her. It was, in a word, glorious.

Boy, are we glad to hear the San Francisco Symphony again.

Tomorrow: SFist Editor Brock Keeling has pics and details from the pre- and after-parties. And more.

Take your pick of a party at Civic Center on Wednesday night: either the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining the Salesforce convention social event, or the SF Symphony Gala. From the balcony of Davies Symphony Hall which overhangs over Grove st, you could actually enjoy both simultaneously. We only were invited to the Gala, but could not shake the feeling that quite a few of the attendees at our event did not really care which party they went to. As long that there was an open bar, that is. A sizable chunk of the audience left the auditorium after the orchestra completed the first of two pieces before intermission. Maybe they were in the wrong place; or maybe the free flowing bubbly was more attractive than fidgeting in their seats for another ten minutes. A couple all gussied up in the back row behind the orchestra did not even wait that long, making a very conspicuous exit five minutes into the concert.

We can hardly blame them, as the concert opened with a rather dreadful suite from Romeo and Juliet from Hector Berlioz. MTT, back from his European tour which delayed the Gala from its usual post-Labor day slot, attempted to build some interest by highlighting some noteworthy elements of the score. His efforts were doomed when the first thing he pointed out was the contribution of the viola section. As the joke goes, some of the violists expressed surprised that the conductor knew they existed. He then went on to the Garden Scene, a fragrant ruffle of leaves where nothing happens and that's what we should pay attention to. Ok then. Despite MTT's valiant proselytizing, we found the piece flat and tedious, but mostly it's Berlioz's fault.

The Gala traditionally invites some celebrated performer to join in the festivities, and violin superstar Joshua Bell delivered. The Poème for Violin and Orchestra will not sweep anyone off their feet, but Bell's sensually phrased the long melodies and serenely meshed the two voices Chausson wrote for the soloist. Bell is the musical equivalent of this actor who could read the phone book and make it interesting.

The second half brought him back in Saint-Saëns's Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, a livelier affair with a more humorous vigor. Bell was able to display a more virtuosic angle, with the same aplomb, and always the rich quality of his phrasing.

Ravel's Bolero fits the Gala bill to a dot, as it reacquaints us with the musicians section by section, each playing the familiar melody before joining the orchestration. Ravel does orchestrate some funky pairings, our ears still ring from that of the celesta with the piccolo. The violins holds their instrument like the Gypsy Kings for most of the piece, and the snare drums deserve kudos for persistently repeating the same pattern all throughout without flubs. MTT built up the continuous crescendo, incrementing each return of the theme just enough to progress forward and never run out of steam at the end. Well done.

As a treat/encore, he served us a joyous Arlesienne of Bizet while carrying a voluminous flower bouquet (he nonchalantly dropped it when it got too much in the way), involving the audience into some hand clapping which drowned the music but provided the drunken audience with the calisthenics it obviously craved.

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók does not shy away from controversy. As part of the 100th anniversary season of the SF Symphony, we heard the Miraculous Mandarin played in December by the visiting BSO, which tells the story of a priapic Chinese man who can't be killed by a prostitute's accomplices unless she gives him a happy ending first.

Then this week, MTT and the SF Symphony will present Bartók's short opera Bluebeard's Castle in a staged version with a set and video projections by multimedia artist Nick Hillel. Bluebeard reinvents the old tale by Charles Perrault where a young bride finds out her husband is a serial killer who hides in his castle's basement the corpses of his previous wives. Grimy.

Perrault's morality is that curiosity only brings regrets, she shouldn't have gone snooping in the hidden chamber. Bartók takes on a different tack, at least in the version you'll see this week. British video artist and film maker Nick Hillel views the story as a metaphorical exploration of the relationship between Judith (the wife, sung by Michelle DeYoung) and Bluebeard (sung by Alan Held). Nick is the creator of Yeast Culture, a digital media boutique outfit that has done VJing and projections for Brian Eno and the Beastie Boys. Nick's first forays into classical music came from collaborations with the Philharmonia Orchestra and its musical director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, first with RE-RITE based upon Stravinksy's Rite of Spring, and then with the production of Bluebeard that the Philharmonia took on a European tour before MTT borrowed it, first with his New World Symphony in Miami in April, and now here. We called Nick to his house in London to discuss the production.

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.

John Cage's most famous piece is of course his 4'33" where a pianist comes up on stage, sits at the piano, opens the lid of the keyboard, and then stays there for the duration of the title before taking a bow. Song Books requires more musicians, scores and stage directions, but it's related. It's a cross of performance art with reflection on the meaning of music. Some of it is overtly plain non-sense, or rather homage to dadaists and surrealists. Marcel Duchamp, he of the Fountain objet trouvé, is quoted by a musician spelling out his name with giant letter cards projected on a screen. Ready-made art, art found in common objects, it's all included in the piece.