Results tagged “sfsymphony”

As part of its family activities, the SF Symphony organizes a Dia de los Muertos celebration on Sunday, November 1st. There will be vivid, animated displays of spooky papier-mâché figures (you can already see some through the windows of Davies Symphony Hall as we speak), and tons of fun kids activities as a prelude for the concert. Writer Laura Esquivel (of Like water for chocolate fame) will narrate.

The music season on Wednesday night, with a sparkling opening night gala. The evening started with complimentary champagne in the hallways of Davies Symphony Hall, because nothing lubricates appreciation for music better than bubbly. Still, two women left the hall after the national anthem, because there is only so much orchestral music than one can put up with, even inebriated. The bemused look on Michael Tilsson Thomas' face as they left was priceless.

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.

The SF Symphony journey from Schubert to Berg is coming to an end this week, with a final program combining Berg's Violin Concerto with Schubert's Mass in E flat major. We believe that the whole exercise was only a pretext to make Berg more palatable to the San Francisco audience: by insisting on the roots of his music into a Viennese romanticism, Berg is much less challenging than as a twelve tone music proponent. The connection between both was elusive, but if a little fuzzy marketing is needed to spoon feed Berg's magnificent music to the audience, so be it, and enjoy!

The SF Symphony journey from Schubert to Berg continued on Wednesday with an intimate exploration of some lieder and chamber music, as well as the Lulu suite. The directions for the voyage (which continues tonight, tomorrow and next week) go like, start from Schubert, take a turn at Brahms, another at Wagner, when you reach Bruckner, go straight until Mahler, make a sharp left there, when you see Schoenberg, you'll have reached Berg. Not exactly a straight line, and not an obvious connection.

Jennifer Higdon's blue cathedral will make its first appearance tonight on the program of the SF Symphony (at Flint in Cupertino, tomorrow through Saturday at Davies Symphony hall, along with a Mozart piano concerto and Debussy's Iberia); which comes at a surprise to us since we heard about her so much, from chamber music, to concertos. Indeed, our own SF Opera commissioned an opera from her for 2013. So we jumped on this opportunity to phone her up.

We heard of Leila Josefowicz for the first time after she won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. "Out of blue, $500,000, no strings," declares the fellowship's page. But! Some strings were attached, because Leila received the prize for playing the violin. (Har.) Which she does play, with burning intensity. (Don't believe us? Check this out.)

You have to enjoy the irony of a composer whose most widely played piece is titled The Composer Is Dead. Indeed, it's so popular that it got turned into the cutest, funnest children's book, complete with an accompanying CD. Said composer? Our own Nathaniel Stookey, a San Francisco resident who collaborated here with Lemony Snicket for the witty text. Snicket, aka. Daniel Handler, is the author of a Series of Unfortunate Events, which sold over 50 millions copies. Talk about a local dream team.

The Sofia Gubaidulina residency with the SF Symphony continues tonight and tomorrow with the US premiere of her Violin Concerto No. 2, , with the magnificent Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist, for whom the piece was written.

We came to chat music with Sofia Gubaidulina, and ended up with a physics lesson. Sofia is the Phyllis Wattis Composer in Residence with the SF Symphony, which means she's around to see her works performed by the orchestra, talk to audiences and well, chat with us.

On a program featuring a McArthur genius/blogger and the promise of ecstasy, it's the unassuming Finnish symphonic tone poem which proved to be the wonderful surprise of the evening. David Robertson, aka. Mr Orli Shaham, returned to conduct the SF Symphony in Tchaikovsky second piano concerto (this program repeats tonight). The first piano concerto is a mainstay of the repertoire, while the second is the ugly little duckling. The reason why? It is long, and impossibly difficult. We tip our hat for Stephen Hough for tackling it for us. Unfortunately, they did not quite pull it off: Call us hard to please, but you could hear the sweat going into playing those harrowing technical passages, and Hough seemed stiff, never embracing the musicality of the more melodic moments. We hoped for a more cohesive interpretation, more grace, but we were let down in between the reckless cadenzas which punctuate the piece. Hough emphasizes the beat by accentuating the note which kicks off the bar, which should make him a pleasure to keep in sync with, but sounds a bit rigid in Tchaikovsky.

Considering the weather lately, maybe you want to do your Chinese New Year celebration, like, indoors. Always attentive to your needs, the SF Symphony is hosting a concert this Sunday at 4pm inside the warm confines of Davies Symphony Hall. How thoughtful. It's a festive family concert with the SFS orchestra, doing a violin concerto and some Tchaikovsky, but there will also be pieces for traditional Chinese instruments, a kids choir performing Jasmine Flower, by Bay Area composer Gang Situ, and some lion's dance. Happy New Year.

After reading Matt Smith's fantastic article (Nov. 18, "Business Conductor") on how much the San Francisco Symphony gets annually via taxpayers -- Michael Tilson Thomas alone is one of the highest-paid conductors in classical music, with a yearly salary of over $1.5 million -- Aaron Peskin decided to do something about it. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors President told Smith, "I'm cutting the symphony's budget ... starting with $1.8 million, and I'll end up with whatever I end up with." Next Tuesday, Peskin will introduce legislation "freezing out the symphony," making it one of the last acts he'll perform at President. While the majority of the symphony's annual budget is donation-based, Peskin's cuts will snip at the current subsidy city taxpayers contribute yearly. Read more about it, right here.

"'Classical' music does not need gimmicks OR marketers/managers," hrumphs an SFGate commenter.

Noted pianist Leon Fleisher wants you to vote No on 8, and he's an unlikely activist. At eighty-years-old the celebrated pianist could spare himself the trouble of political engagement. Yet, and it is a testament to both the worthiness of the cause and to his generosity, he will be doing a fundraiser for No on 8, playing trios with Alisa Weilerstein (cello) and Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin (violin). Those guys rule, so go if you can! The event will take place on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 8:00 PM.

Sometimes, conducting modern music is like driving a car that was designed with 12 wheels, but such that only one can touch the ground at any time. Some kind of tricky balancing act, it gets you somewhere but tensely, with your muscles clenched. And then, the Dvorak New World Symphony is like stepping off that contraption into a mercedes convertible, lifting the top down, stepping on the pedal, and wham, there comes the acceleration pushing you into the plush leather, the wind blowing on your face and the rush of blood to your groin: just plain exhilaration. The snobs will sneer at the bourgeois pleasures, but they're so thoroughly enjoyable. The Summer Series of the SF Symphony is all about giving the audience such easy satisfaction. The program we attended, in addition to the New World Symphony, included a Beethoven piano concerto No. 5, and a Slavonic Dance, again by Dvorak. Easy pleasures don't mean it's dumbed down: those are famous pieces for sure, and no feather will be ruffled the wrong way by the program, but these are still important works, and highly difficult to perform.

It feels like everyone here migrated from the Midwest or somewhere. But next time we run into that rare breed, the born-and-raised San Franciscan, we'll have to ask: did you, as a kid, attend Adventures in Music, aka. AIM, the outreach program from the San Francisco Symphony? AIM organizes (and pays for) performances by smaller ensembles in each of the schools of the SFUSD for 1st to 4th graders, and invite them all to special morning concerts at Davies Symphony Hall. Did the introduction leave you with a taste for music? Were you looking forward for these performances by diverse small ensembles playing for small-ish goups of kids coming to your school? Was it the high point of the week? Did you discover new sounds, new instruments, new music styles? Did you teacher tie up the program into the curriculum? Were you able to comprehend music differently, to see connections with physics, geography, architecture? The eduction program is blowing twenty candles this year, so a slew of kids who went through it (22,000 a year!) must be now SFist commenters. Teachers, feel free to give us your view too! We got questions, you got answers. Tell us how going to Davies Symphony Hall as a first grader was awesome, or exciting, or, goodness forbid, boring. Was it your first classical music experience? Your first time in a concert hall? Was your conductor at the time "kinda hot" (in the words of one of our commenters) like Benjamin Shwartz, who leads the orchestra for the AIM concerts nowadays? Did you notice kinda hot boys back then? Little perv, you were seven!

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.

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 in through the back door, stopped the bus smack dab on Mission Street, and announced that the cops were coming to bust all the fare jumpers when we got to Van Ness. Alas, we got to Davies Symphony Hall before we could see if he'd made good on the threat.

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 Kuan and we expect it'll be a sold out show.

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 for us, that one post heaps praise on Ragnar, otherwise we'd be accused of ignoring him.

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.)

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.

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 the bright colors they wear on stage, from the modern repertoire they advocate, from the risks they take with their production company, and obviously, from the difficult concerto they’ll perform tomorrow through Saturday with the SF Symphony. No, they aren’t afraid.

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 you read his words below.

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 in the major leagues.

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!"

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 Common Man (inspired by a left-leaning speech by Roosevelt’s ex-vice president Henry Wallace), but looking back, we see that, except for one short Gounod excerpt, all the pieces where from after 1900. That is provocative! Way to backhandedly smack the bourgeoisie attending your opening, MTT! It’s no wonder that a significant chunk of the patrons only came back from intermission after a few glasses of freely flowing champagne, missing some fine singing by Renée Fleming.

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. Good for them.

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.