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 will get to hear the microphone between the tits! Anna Netrebko, who kicked off her career in the US here in '96 (in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila) will be back in La Traviata, the SF Opera announced today when unveiling their 2008-09 season. You'll want to see other, um, microphones too, as the darn sexy Angela Gheorghiu, who we were so smitten with in La Rondine, comes back for more Puccini with La Boheme. It's the 150th anniversary of the birth of Puccini this year, so you get two operas by him, Tosca being the other one. That's a bit lame, we say, since you typically get two operas by Puccini in any season. Say, La Rondine and Madama Butterfly, for instance. A true anniversary celebration would be to have all operas by Puccini, or even better, eleven different productions of Butterfly. That would rock....

Oh, those nifty New Yorkers; it's all about them. As usual. Why? Because David Gockley, General Director of the SF Opera, announced that the company will start producing HD broadcasts of performances for theaters all across the states. Lovely, right? But the NYT then turns it into some kind of pissing contest because they did it first. Hrumph. Dude, why can't we all just get along. It's not like people in Chico are saturated with......

Why, it's take-your-kid-to-the-symphony day on Sunday (Saturday in San Jose), featuring a performance of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. And here's a little claymation preview: It's so darling, isn't it? Hopefully it'll be as much a blast as the opera for families. More after the jump!...

Ragnar left Sweden to join the SF Symphony as Chorus director in March this year. And did we throw a welcome party for him? Did we ring his door with a cauliflower casserole and a bottle of wine to ease his arrival in the neighborhood? Nope. Nada. We must have been booked when he threw his housewarming or something, but so far, search for him here and you'll find only one single measly hit. Luckily......

The current run of Madama Butterfly had deja vu written all over it again: same set; same soprano; Patricia Racette in the role of Cio-cio-san, the Japanese wife betrayed by the American officer; same Suzuki (Zheng Cao), Cio-cio-san's maid. We had seen the show a year and a half ago, and the only thing missing in the current run was the simulcast on the Civic Center plaza. Practice makes perfect though: everything ran smoothly, and......

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......

Third opera in November, third reaction from the audience at curtain rise. After the enthusiastic applause for La Rondine's shiny marble sets after the bleak and silent shock of Macbeth's hole-in-the-wall sets, we got the giggles after catching sight of The Rake's Progress' opening oil field. The patrons were willing to entertain an oil well and a 1950s Americana re-setting that dramatically differs from Stravinsky's original 18th Century,even though they were a tad skeptical.......

We caught the symphony on Thursday for a really cool program: Mostly Ives, with a Mendelssohn violin concerto squeezed in between for good measure. Those quicker than us with their opinions found the concerto rather pedestrian. But it's such a delicious yet cloying confection that even under the the jurisdiction of a particularly uninspired interpretation, is still satisfying. And the soloist, 22yo Sergey Khachatryan, did spark some fireworks in the final movement. In the program......

So foul and poor a play we haven't seen. At least, not during this San Francisco Opera season. That is, until now: behold, the vile production that is Macbeth. It's easier to count the things that went right, because there were so few: Thomas Hampson (fan), the Adler fellows, and Raymond Aceto, who all more or less shine. The rest, sadly, was pretty awful. You know you're in for a long night when you're forced......

Angela Gheorghiu, the diva, made her SF Opera debut on Wednesday evening, in Puccini's La Rondine. That she made it onstage was somewhat of an accomplishment; she just had been fired from a production in Chicago for missing rehearsals. She was attending her husband, French tenor Roberto Alagna, concert at the Met, it seems. (Alagna's claim to fame has been walking off the stage at La Scala in the middle of Aida, after being booed.......

We were phoning Marielle Labeque, one half of the Labeque sisters piano duo virtuosos, and being our French selves. We said: “We can talk in French, if you are not afraid…” Right away she interrupted: “No, I am not afraid.” We meant: “if you’re not afraid we’ll screw up the translation” but the attitude was fitting: there’s a definitive fearlessness in the Labeque sisters. We can see it from the engaged way they perform, from......

We went to see The Magic Flute for Family on Saturday. Namely, we went to see Honey, I Shrunk the Opera. From 3h15, it got reduced to a lively 2 hours. And it got translated too, because there aren’t too many kids ages six and over who speak German around here. Looking for something to illustrate this post, we found this YouTube clip below: an excerpt of the current run of The Magic Flute. It’s......

We caught Phil Setzer, the violinist for the Emerson String Quartet, being driven down between performances in Santa Barbara and Orange County. We hope it was in a stretch limo, as these guys have won eight Grammy awards and critical acclaim everywhere they go. They are the only chamber music group to ever win a best classical album grammy, and they even got two. So they better travel like the rock stars they are. They'll......

Pierre-Laurent Aimard will play Beethoven's piano concerto No. 3 with the SF Symphony Thursday at Flint in Cupertino, and Friday and Saturday at Davies, led by 33yo Swiss conducting prodigy Philippe Jordan. The pair will go to New-York in December to perform the same piece with the NY Phil, and you can find a little video clip of Pierre-Laurent describing the concerto here. So you now can picture him and his delightful French accent when......

Kurt Masur proved why he is a conducting legend. We caught him leading the SF Symphony on Thursday night, and, even at 80, the man can conduct. Yep, eighty year old. He looks so not octogenarian we thought it was a typo in the program, until we found a list of celebrations for his big birthday this year. But who cares about his age: he is not working on the senior tour, he is still......

This past Wednesday was New-Yorker night in Civic Center: the classical music critic, Alex Ross was promoting his new book at Herbst theater, and we attended the production of the Magic Flute designed by Gerald Scarfe, who regularly illustrates the magazine. Scarfe toned down his usually acidic satirical pen (see the sample from his website that we put after the jump) to cook up sets that are humorous, and respectful of Mozart’s intent. The set,......

Ah, beautiful Diviz. Is there no boulevard more perfect, more blissful? When we think "nice places to take an afternoon constitutional," we are drawn instantly to its divine charm. It is, simply put, an Eden. To alter it would be to play God. But SOME PEOPLE want to change all that. The out-of-touch bureaucrats in City Hall think that the stretch from Haight to Geary needs to be improved. Strange terms like "greening" and......

More bad puns on Philip Glass’ name! Appomattox, which we rose our Glass to, was not the end of our wall-to-wall Glass coverage. The Glass is not full, we haven’t hit the Glass ceiling yet, ha. Take tonight. There’s a cool concert at Herbst Theater, presented by Other Minds, an organization devoted to new music: Dennis Russell Davies and his partner, Maki Namekawa, playing music for two pianos from Philip Glass, but also J.S Bach......

Who better to compose an opera on the repetitive forces which govern human nature than Philip Glass! There is no better match to write about the immutability of the human soul, as the theme begs for an insistent ostinato in a minor key, of course. His score is one of the strong points of Appomattox, which had its premiere on Friday night: it is distinctly Glass-ian, but integrates elements and influence contemporary to the civil......

Someone told us a story of a famous pianist who believed in bringing culture to the people, and went to a factory in Italy to give a lecture in front of a piano. He started to talk about Schoenberg, and after a few minutes, a voice rose from the audience: "Shut up, and play!" Ok, he said, and sat down at the piano, playing the Schoenberg piece. The voice rose again: "Rather, talk!" András......

We had an interview lined up, and were instructed to call his hotel at the agreed time, and ask to be transferred to Christopher Hampton. What? The guy won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay for Dangerous Liaisons, won a Tony award for the libretto of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, wrote the script for, and directed tons of movies involving Leonardo di Caprio, Richard Gere or Gérard Depardieu, and he......

As a prelude to the big event, the world premiere of Appomattox next Friday at the opera house, composer Philip Glass was hosting a night of chamber music at Herbst Theater last night. It was also the opening concert for SF Performances's 28th season (the official Dolce Vita-themed kick-off Gala happens October 12th). We are as excited as anyone about the upcoming opera, so we were pleased to see Glass not only introduce the......

MTT's conducting of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is so good, it should be recorded and kept for the posterity. But wait! It was! The series, which concludes tonight, will be taped and processed, and included in the Mahler recording cycle, the on-going endeavor to put all of Mahler's symphonic work onto a CD. MTT's take on Mahler, a forcefully engaged and expressive rendition, has been observed here quite a few times. We expect......

Last week's winner, the San Jose Metro. Alas! They haven't updated their site for this week yet, and we didn't manage to snag a hard copy of the paper, so they'll have to forfeit in the Weekly of the Week contest for the week. Next up, let's call it for the SF Weekly. Ephraim the Track Bike is back! And he mentions us! We love you, Ephraim the Track Bike! Did Ed Jew's people spearhead......

We got word that 27,000 people made a reservation to attend this Friday's Opera at the Ballpark. 27,000! And there are still tickets left! Tonight is the last day to see Barry at AT&T park, but plenty of other divas, plenty of other big guys with supernatural powers will be on stage in the stadium this Friday, as the SF Opera presents Samson and Delilah on a giant High Def video screen with a live......

The SF Symphony Gala last Wednesday night, is one of the poshest events of the year -- a must-attend for anyone who’s anyone who has the right to live, breathe, receive adequate healthcare in SF. We were lucky to tag along for the ride. The performance of its annual opening is an afterthought, and we were not sure if there wasn't some subtle subversion going on. We mentioned already the choice of the Fanfare for......

This settles it for now. Wagner's Tannhäuser, the first new production ordered by SF Opera general director David Gockley, opened last night, initially making us a bit nervous. Why? Well, Gockley had announced the end of the fedora, and the return of glamorous period productions. Since last year’s most compelling production was Iphigenie en Tauride, a timeless rendition in a naked black cell, we fretted: is this season going to be the return of kitsch?......

The SF Symphony returned from its trip to Europe and kicks off its 2007-08 season tonight, with a sold out opening night gala featuring MTT and Renée Fleming. We find it ironic that they will play Aaron Copland’s "Fanfare for the Common Man" -- a piece riddled with leftist political overtones -- to SF’s high society. Well then, it looks like the SF symphony is more subversive than we give them credit for this time.......

[Update: you can see a live simulcast of this opera for free at PacBell Stadium on Sept. 28. Information here!] While we expected a sense of deja vu at last Tuesday’s performance of Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah -- we had seen Olga Borodina in this very role, sung in that very set, on that very stage back in 2001 -- we didn't. Why? Because the set manages to be both impressive, and, well, forgettable. Sure,......