It's been ten years since The Bad Plus has been breaking barrier between musical genres. It's a piano (Ethan Iverson), bass (Reid Anderson) and drums (David King) combo, which screams jazz trio until you hear them playing music that steps over, and thoroughly tramples, all arbitrary boundaries. And hear them we did last Saturday night at Herbst, in a show hosted by SF Performances. more ›

Philip Glass tackled the challenge of re-inventing Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons in an American way with his violin concerto No. 2, "American seasons," presented last night at Herbst Theater by SF Performances with violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. Vivaldi succeeded beyond expectations in depicting a light airy spring, a forceful winter blizzard, storms thundering and birds chirping. But for the American version, which four seasons? An Arizona summer with a Maine fall and a Utah winter? Glass' answer to the riddle seemed to pick all four seasons from ... San Diego: where no one can tell spring from summer from fall because it's all the same, balmy and steady. more ›

Yuja Wang became an overnight sensation when piano legend Martha Argerich cancelled a performance with the Boston symphony and Yuja stepped in and was so electrifying she brilliantly saved the evening. The next step on the road to stardom is of course to be in the position to cancel, rather than waiting in the wings. Congratulations to Yuja then, who had to withdraw from her April SF Performances recital for physical reasons. more ›

The superlative British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote will give her first solo recital in San Francisco tonight at Herbst theater, for SF Performances 30th anniversary season. The theme of the evening: English art songs. She impressed everyone in her SF debut at SF Opera in Alcina, and returned to great acclaim in Idomeneo, where the worst one could tell about her was that she impersonated her male character so well, she looked like Nicolas Sarkozy. Did we write that? Oops. She'll be back in September as Charlotte in Massenet's opera, Werther. more ›

Nathan Gunn is hot. So sexy he has to take off his shirt regularly on the opera stage, to the delight of his audience. It got to the point that when he went on Stephen Colbert, the host asked him: "Do you perform with clothes on?" The excellent TSR even has a "Wall o'Nathan" for us to ogle at. He is, according to the LA Times, king of the barihunk hill, and even gives interviews on his work-out regimen. more ›

Mezzo-soprano diva Joyce DiDonato last seduced us here as Octavian in Strauss's Rosenkavalier and is returning on Monday night for her first ever San Francisco Performances recital, with pianist John Churchwell. Joyce made headlines over the summer when she fell during a performance of the Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, broke her leg and kept on singing. She set such a courageous example that soprano Sondra Radvanovsky got hurt during an attempted purse snatching at the Van Ness Walgreen's so she too could sing with a leg cast. Joyce is out of the cast by now, and well, others have asked her about it, so we know how she was able to finish that performance after the wipe out: "Midwestern work ethic". Good thing she is from Kansas, and not from somewhere with depraved values. more ›

The Fall music season has been launched in orbit with a glitzy gala at the Symphony. This week continues with classical music galore: the other heavy hitter, the SF Opera introduces his new music director, Nicola Luisotti, in Verdi's Il Trovatore, tonight. The all-star cast includes Dmitri Hvorostovksy, Sondra Radvanovsky and the comparatively simple to spell Stephanie Blythe in a story that makes Harry Potter look realistic. We don't go to the opera to watch reality tv, and the arias are sublime. You can check for yourself, for free, at a live simulcast of the War Memorial Opera House performance on a giant screen at the AT&T ballpark on Saturday, September 19th. Also, you can get the pupu platter sampler of the upcoming season, also for free, zilch, zero, nada, with the traditional Opera in the Park concert. Please arrive early, it gets really crowded on the Sharon Meadows lawn, and you don't want to miss SF Chronicle's editor-at-large Phil Bronstein's unintentionally hilarious attempts at a stand up comedy routine, if he's MCing again this year. more ›

Philip Glass's Music in Twelve Parts has never been performed live in SF, despite its iconic status as one of the milestones of contemporary music. We find it strange, considering the embracing welcome of Glass's latest performances here. Then again, it's four hours of music which is built on repeating some very primitive motives over long periods of time: it's rewarding if you go through, but pretty challenging nonetheless. We chatted with vocalist, composer and SF-native Lisa Bielawa, who has been part of the Philip Glass Ensemble for seventeen years, who recorded this piece shortly thereafter, and who will be part of the first performance ever on the West Coast this Monday. SF Performances is hosting the piece at Davies Symphony Hall, at 5pm, with two intermissions and a dinner break, thank goodness. Pace your psychotropics accordingly. more ›

We're lucky to welcome Christian Tetzlaff, the latest in a string of young-ish super-talented violinists to grace a SF stage. He'll be at Herbst theater tomorrow night, with SFist interviewee and ace pianist Leif-Ove Andsnes as part of SF Performances concert series, in a program of violin sonatas by Brahms, Schubert, Mozart and Janacek. more ›

Tomorrow night, under the auspices of SF Performances at Herbst Theater, the Guarneri Quartet will play its last concert in San Francisco: they're hanging up their instruments after fourty-five years of service. If that weren't reason enough to go see them one last time --they pretty much define string quartet-- they do present an exciting program. They may have one foot in retirement, but they'll still play the Mendelssohn Octet and the exciting Bay Area premiere of Derek Bermel's Passing Through. more ›

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 Atomic symphony). more ›

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 be up here on Sunday for a performance at Herbst Theater presented by SF Performances. They'll play the integral of Brahms string quartets, or, as we like to say, tunes from their latest CD. more ›

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!" more ›

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 music and chit-chat genially from the stage, but also perform some of his pieces. So he turned 70 and here comes this guy on the stage who looks like he's in his 50s, fit, spry. We want to be like that when we're that age. We read that he does pilates and we're so taking that up. more ›

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 music over the internets, where classical music share doubles what it is in the music stores. Classical music is modern and hip. more ›

Is it wrong that when we saw the movie Koyaanisqatsi, about not despoiling the earth, we left the theater thinking, "wow, San Francisco would be a great city to live in!" Well, San Francisco is a great city to live in, not the least of which being that we're hosting a live performance of the Qatsi Trilogy this weekend. SF Performances is screening all three Qatsi movies -- Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out Of Balance) tonight, Powaqatsi (Life In Transformation) on Saturday and Naqoyqatsi (Life As War) on Sunday -- with live accompaniment of the famous Philip Glass score by the eponymously-named Philip Glass Ensemble. Phillip Glass himself is also in town, and will be speaking on Saturday afternoon at Herbst Theater. The screenings all take place in Symphony Hall -- buy tickets here. Or save yourself some money and buy a Glass Pass, all three movies plus Glass speaking. Glass Pass, ha. more ›