Susanna Mälkki broke the glass ceiling at La Scala, being the first woman to conduct an opera there, and we thought it must have happened in the seventies, eighties the latest. Sure, the Milan opera is old and venerable; Rossini, Verdi, Puccini premiered their operas in that house. But since booing is a sport there, you'd assume they'd put in the best maestro in the pit regardless of gender. But Susanna was barely out of diapers in the seventies, and our jaw dropped to see it happened less than a year ago. Two lessons: La Scala is stodgier that we thought, and Susanna must be doing something good to earn this honor. more ›

The Cleveland Orchestra, in a press conference known as The Decision, announced that they were taking their talents away from the Midwest. Their goal in leaving Cleveland wasn't to win six, seven or eight titles. There is no world championship for orchestras, even though they'd be perennial contenders based on what we heard this week. The 94 year old Cleveland Orchestra only came in town to celebrate the SF Symphony 100th anniversary season, and just for two concerts Sunday and Monday night at Davies Symphony Hall. While Franz Welser-Möst's orchestra likes to get out on the road and take up residencies in New-York, Lucerne or, obviously, Miami, it isn't stabbing Cleveland in the back. And it does not falter in crunch time either: the Cleveland Orchestra has a marvelous, homogenous sound, and when the repertory turns to the romantic era, they can out-lush anybody. more ›

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 ›

Countering your Tom Cruise, Mark Cuban and John McCain for the short list of American mavericks, MTT and the SF Symphony offer their own selection: Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, Charles Ives, in the first concert of their festival dedicated to the trail blazers of American music. If that concert last night was any indication, go buy yourself a pass to the rest of the concerts, which includes world premieres by Mason Bates, John Adams, Meredith Monk performed by Jessye Norman, Emanuel Ax, Jeremy Denk or the St Lawrence string quartet: you're in for an ear opening experience. more ›

Almost a hundred years ago, Stravinsky defibrillated classical music. He shocked it back to life, saving it from the deathly grasp of romanticism. And in a more literal sense, he gave it back a strong pulse that shaped throbbing rhythmic patterns rather than melodic ones. Charles Dutoit, the legendary Swiss maestro who conducted the SF Symphony last night in a program that alternated on both sides of this defibrillation, favors a mellow approach. He won't impart a strong meter if it isn't there. This worked best in the 20th century pieces in his program: both Stravinsky's post-Rite-of-Spring Le chant du rossignol or Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra possess a more explicit rhythmic spine than the more lyrical Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. more ›

The US Top 6 orchestras will visit Davies Symphony Hall for the SF Symphony 100th anniversary season, leaving Cal Performances at Zellerbach to import the foreign best ensembles. Case in point last Saturday: the visit by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where Royal refers to the family of Wills and Kate. The Duke of York is listed on the program, most likely for the difficult task of being born in the right crib. The rest of the musicians got there through hard work and talent, as we witnessed first hand in a splendid performance. more ›

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Heras-Casado">Heras-Casado, who conducted the SF Symphony in an exciting series last week with an odd but endearing mix of Stravinsky, Ravel, Dallapiccola and De Falla. (You'll forgive us for making a mental note to add PHC to the short list of names to remember when succession time comes.) more ›

The Martyre de Saint Sebastien, a play by Gabriele D'Annunzio with music by Claude Debussy, was, according to its original producer, "bad." Says the program notes of the SF Symphony. The run which concluded last Sunday of a staged concert version with additional video projections, demonstrated that its music was exquisite, but yeah, the surrounding stuff could be a drag. more ›

At the San Francisco Symphony it's new year, new stuff. The 1992 Ligeti violin concerto will be heard live in San Francisco for the first time ever tomorrow through Sunday. You may recall Ligeti from the soundtrack of 2001, A Space Odyssey or from the San Francisco Polyphony, an early 70s commission of the SF Symphony he wrote shortly after a six month stint as Composer in Residence at the farm. Ligeti (1923-2006) may be another dead European composer, but unlike them Wolfgangs and Ludwigs, he took the trouble to visit and write stuff for us. more ›

The 100th anniversary of the SF Symphony is such a big deal, it's sucking the air out of some other impressive milestones. One of these: Alexander Barantschik's tenth year as concert master of the San Francisco symphony. Originally from Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sasha, as he's called, joined ten years ago from the London Symphony Orchestra, one of the best orchestras in the world where he held the same job. more ›

James Conlon conducted a superb Verdi requiem with the SF Symphony five years ago, so we were not particularly surprised he delivered again last night with the same score. Technically, without the score, as he led the proceedings from memory, mouthing every lyric, pirouetting around his quartet of singers to catch his musicians outside of the blind side, almost poking his tenor with his baton in the process. He was a replacement for Fabio Luisi, who is himself replacing James Levine at the Met. more ›

James Conlon, the LA Opera music director is in town for two weeks conducting the SF Symphony, the past week in the Pictures at an Exhibition and this week in the Verdi Requiem (which he conducted here not that long ago), with the fabulous soprano Sondra Radvanovsky. Conlon has a genial, self-deprecating, unassuming way of introducing the works, and his fast-paced, Queens-accented pep talks do go down easy on the audience. more ›

For its 100th birthday, the SF Symphony is offering itself new works to unwrap all season long. This week: Polaris: Voyage for Orchestra by British composer Tom Adès, one of the hottest commodities in the business today. It's only a west coast premiere, since the world premiere happened with the New World Symphony in Miami, an orchestra founded and led by SF Symphony music director Michael Tilson-Thomas. And this gift is a keeper. This is an Adès week-end, with the composer - a talented pianist in his own right- performing work of his and others at Cal Performances with the Calder Quartet in Berkeley, and Inon Barnatan playing Adès' Darkness Visible at Music@Menlo in Atherton. more ›

You might have seen the posters around town -- hey, print media does still work! The San Francisco Symphony is kicking off its 100th season with a free lunch-time concert in Civic Center Plaza on Thursday, September 8th. The performance will feature "musical surprises, celebratory treats, and activities." more ›

A few things to wrap up the 2010-11 classical music season: more ›

Joan Jeanrenaud was for twenty years the cellist of the Kronos Quartet. Kronos, of course, is the San Francisco based string quartet which specializes in contemporary music and has created and commissioned hundreds and hundreds of new pieces for the string quartet repertoire from such luminaries as Arvo Pärt, George Crumb, Henryk Górecki, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Osvaldo Golijov and anyone who is anyone in the contemporary composing world. In 1999, Joan left Kronos to start a solo career, first as a performer of modern music and now more and more as a composer. more ›

A grab bag of a few items about classical music in the bay: more ›

Israeli-born pianist David Greilsammer had his San Francisco debut yesterday, playing two early Mozart concertos with Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie. Those were early concertos, since they were performed at a 2pm matinee. But mostly because Mozart was a teenager when he wrote them. The rest of the run will occur tonight and tomorrow at 8pm at Davies. 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 ›

Lang-Lang is the antidote to recessions and deaths of classical music. There are only a few others than the Chinese piano superstar who can sell out Davies Symphony hall on a Tuesday evening for a solo recital of Beethoven, Albeniz and Prokofiev, as part of the SF Symphony Great performers series. more ›

The SF Symphony opens 2011 tomorrow with the San Francisco debut of the young and exciting Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits, and the return at the keys of French pianist Hélène Grimaud in the Schumann piano concerto. The orchestra will also play a local premiere by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. more ›

SFist Jay covered the theatrical aspects of the Berkeley Rep's The Composer is Dead. But since it originated as a classical music edutainment piece from the SF Symphony, we got to see it too. more ›

A bunch of classical music events happening over the weekend: more ›

A few performances we caught, before the Thanksgiving holidays distracted us from writing them up: Bryn Terfel at Cal Performances, Aida at SF Opera and Yefim Bronfman with the SF Symphony more ›

Richard Strauss Four Last Songs form a coda to the composer's career, who was over eighty when he wrote them, and selected texts of falling leaves, crepuscular vibe and mournful elegy. They're however a fitting start for the upcoming South African soprano Elza van den Heever, who heartrendingly sang them last night with MTT and the San Francisco Symphony. VDH made her first splash when, as an Adler fellow and the understudy for Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, the SF Opera dumped the originally planned soprano to give her the role. She kicked ass. And she did again last night. more ›

If Morpheus offers you the choice between taking the red score or the blue score, take the blue one. When maestro Michael Francis got on stage last night, he had the red one on his stand for Rufus Wainwright's Five Shakespeare Sonnets; but he needed the blue one, for Milhaud's La Création du Monde and went backstage to fetch it. I know you're impatient for Rufus, Francis joked, it won't be long, but let's do this first. Good thing he did, it ended up the high point of the evening. more ›

It's a rare bird -and a reminder of how good our local symphony can be- who can take widely different orchestral pieces, and deliver them all with crisp perfection. Pablo Heras-Casado, a thirty-three year old Spanish maestro in town to conduct the SF Symphony this week, drove home the point: the program stretched from Romantic to minimalist to Bolshevik bombastic bloat, and every time, Heras-Casado and the orchestra found the sweet spot. more ›

Joshua Bell must have in his attic a painting of himself looking old and playing out of tune. We were convinced the picture on his website were all softly lenses and careful airbrush. But no, we were five rows from him yesterday at Davies Symphony hall, and other than a deal with the devil, how else to explain his real youthful looks, his hair flowing just right, his footwear so pretty it had to be Italian, and his technical perfection with his Stradivarius? He first appeared with the symphony in 1991, he's forty three, he can't be a heartthrob for ever. more ›

Kirill Gerstein has been playing the piano with such fervor and talent that he received the Nobel prize equivalent for pianists, the Gilmore prize with a purse of $300,000. Unlike the Nobel prize, there are strings attached to the monies, though, he can only blow $50 grand of it on bling-bling, the rest has to go to "musical purpose." We'd hire a good lawyer. What's a rolex, if not a 60 bpm metronome? And there must be a musical purpose to a mood inducing bottle of Chateau Yquem before a performance. more ›

There's MTT the evangelist, advocating for rarely heard works and composers. And there's MTT the maestro, conducting old chestnuts with fresh vigor. Both were in full display last night, with a first half dedicated to modernists works from between the two world wars by composers rarely invited to Davies Symphony hall; and a second half with the ubiquitous Beethoven, in fine form. The program repeats tonight and tomorrow. more ›