Benjamin Shwartz will conduct the SF Youth Symphony on Sunday at Davies Symphony hall, in a program by Prokofiev, Bartok and Haydn. The orchestra musicians range from 12 to 20yo, and none of them was old enough to attend Benjamin's previous venture: Mercury Soul, a blend of classical music by 20th and 21st century composers with techno beats, performed, of all places, in a club, Mezzanine. ...

Okay, before you ask, this is not the much-beloved Our Locals On Reality TV Project Runway recap, this is the SFist Symphony review -- we'll explain later in the post. We had a little San Francisco Polyphony of our own on our way to the SF Symphony concert yesterday night to see Gyorgy Ligeti's shimmerily-dissonant orchestral piece of the same name -- the driver of our MUNI bus finally got fed up with people sneaking......

Wow, it feels like just yesterday that we posted something about the Symphony's Chinese New Year's concert for last year's Year of the Pig! Well, it's now the Year of the Rat, and the orchestra's raring to go! Last year's 14 year old solo pianist, Peng Peng, is now 15 and this year, he'll be playing a Mozart piano duet with 13-year-old up and comer Conrad Tao. The orchestra will again be helmed by Carolyn......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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.......

What does SF Opera music director Donald Runnicles do when he's not conducting Wagner at the War Memorial Opera House? He's conducting Wagner in London. What does SF Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas do when he's not conducting Mahler at Davies Symphony Hall? You guessed it: he's conducting Mahler in London. We knew that addicts to Mahler or Wagner existed. But to think that they live in our own backyard? Well, that's just spooky.......

The Mahler cycle must go on. Expanded from the original scope of recording the symphonies to include, well, pretty much any orchestral work by Mahler, the cycle now welcomes the addition of das klagende Lied, released today. Technically speaking, it is not a new recording: it’s a remastering of the 1997 recording, re-issued under the SF Symphony label. The cover art has been updated, from a MTT in a black turtleneck with wavy hair to,......

What's better than picking up a Beard Papa cream puff across from the Metreon over your lunch break? Eating that Beard Papa cream puff while catching the free symphony concert at Yerba Buena Gardens tomorrow! The performance starts tomorrow at noon, and the orchestra's scheduled to perform some Shostakovitch, selections from Strauss's Salome (with a soprano in tow), and the Tchaikovsky symphony that the orchestra will be performing in Scotland next week. Bring a......

We were so relieved when we ran into SFist Jim yesterday at the SF Symphony Dolores Park concert, because we knew his pictures would be so much better than ours! (His gorgeous shot is above; all we had on our camera were some blurry pictures of dog butts.) It was a gorgeous day and the section of Dolores Park in the nook by 20th Street was comfortably filled with sweet toddlers, well-behaved dogs, and......

Who ya got? The cowboy or the samurai? That's the question posed by the Asian-American Theater Company's Cowboy v. Samurai, a story about two Asian-American cowboys in Montana who fall in love with the same Korean-American new girl in town. Our Gothamist cousins liked it when it played in New York. 2 p.m. at the Thick House (1695 18th Street, x Arkansas), $20. Other events: --The workers united -- have a whole month to celebrate!......

Even though James Gaffigan's only 27 years old, he is running the SF Symphony Summer series. We wanted to know him better, and he granted us an interview:...

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is a showpiece for a virtuoso of the keyboard, one with enough guts to tackle its challenges, and enough confidence to laugh at its difficult twists. Yefim Bronfman displayed more than guts and confidence, he showed some serious chutzpah. He impressed us last year in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and renewed our awe Thursday night at Davies Symphony Hall with as solid a performance. He even got an extra brownie point for tongue-in-cheek creativity. ...

Thursday, the SF Symphony opens a two week Prokofiev festival. They even have a fancy title: Russian firebrand, Russian virtuoso: the music of Prokofiev. We think they're trying to say that Prokofiev was Russian. He wrote five Russian piano Russian concertos which will all be performed by four Russian soloists: Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Ilya Yakushev (he'll do two), and Mikhail Rudy. That's a pretty rare opportunity to hear all these concertos performed in......

We're (sort of) proud to admit we used to play in a youth orchestra ourselves, in our misbegotten youth. Oh, the drama! The miserable attempts to rise in the ranks of the seating chart, the sinking realization that you're two pages behind the rest of the string section in the music, the haughty unfriendliness of the principal trumpet player and his bevy of giggling flautists..... oh, it takes us back. Well, we can't speak for......

Droll NPR commentator (who was previously fired for cursing) Sandra Tsing Loh brings her one-woman show, "Mother On Fire," to the Women's Building tonight! For a 9 night run! The show's about her travails trying to find an appropriate school for her kindergarten age daughter in the California school system and ran for 7 months in LA. Here's the one-liner. "I looked at public schools, private schools, parochial schools -- even Baptist school. It turns......

Let’s spend a few graphs on Hans Graf. He is music director at the Houston Symphony, and guest conducting the SF Symphony this week, Thursday till Saturday. Now whatever you may say about Texas, consider that he earlier had the same job at the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra, and all of a sudden, Houston sounds much more, well, inviting (truth be told, it was in pre-Saddam Baghdad in 1975-76, when it was actually a nicer......

If you're still recovering from the comment war over the Western-calendar New Year dance party with the Falun Gong, we've got a nice non-sectarian Chinese New Year musical performance with the SF Symphony to soothe your spirits! The SF Symphony rings in the Year of the Pig with their annual East-meets-West lunar new year afternoon concert on Saturday, Feb. 24 -- this year's performances feature works by local Asian-American composer Gang Situ, a traditional "gong......

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......

Since SFist Ced's taking a little break from concerts, we're now on classical music duty around these parts. And we're very excited to say that our first Philistine classical concert review's going to be for violinist (and friend of Nicolas Cage) Hilary Hahn, who'll be performing the Korngold concerto this upcoming Wednesday through Friday with the SF Symphony. The Korngold incorporates various movie themes from 1930s Hollywood, and the symphony will also be performing Aaron......

We had high expectations for Atlantic Crossing, the new piano concerto from Kevin Volans which the SF Symphony premiered last night. And it turned out that a masterfully executed Shostakovich symphony ended up stealing the show. ...

For a while, we could not write a post about modern music without quoting the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Eve, then our dear editor, even made fun of us. Tonight, we will be vindicated. Not to ruin the suspense, but today’s episode of Keeping Score, the SF Symphony award winning behind-the-scene program, will highlight Stravinsky as a revolutionary. If MTT says so, we can keep mentioning Igor every time we want, he must have been influential. ...

Think you'd rather see a movie than go hear Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the SF Symphony (opening tomorrow through Sunday in the Saint-Saëens Piano concerto, conducted by Simon Bychkov)? Why choose, when SFist is here to give away a copy of Thibaudet's The Movie Album, where you'll hear music from A League of Their Own (no vocals from Madonna, thank goodness, it's only a piano solo album), The Piano (of course), The Pianist (ibid.), the Royal Tenenbaums, and all time San Francisco favorite, Spartacus, by composers like Debussy, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Gershwin and Duke Ellington. Just fill in the form below and a lucky winner will be notified by e-mail tomorrow. ...

Last year, we sat through the recording of an episode of the Mahler Project, the recording of all the Mahler symphonies by the SF Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. We were wondering what the outcome of the taping would sound like. We have now a measuring stick, with the release of the 5th Symphony, which was recorded last season as well. Mahler's 5th Symphony is one of his most famous works: the 4th movement,......