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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. more ›

You've still got the Berkeley World Music Festival today, and Indiefest's Hole in the Head fantasy/sci-fi/horror film fest is in full swing! Your other options include: more ›

Today's the opening day of the new SF Symphony season, with a Gala at Davies Symphony Hall and a performance of Stravinsky's violin concerto with Christian Tetzlaff soloing, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, with of course MTT at the helm. Then, the orchestra abandons us to woo the European crowds in the neutral countries of Luxembourg and Switzerland. They come back in time for a free noon-time concert in the Yerba Buena Gardens on Sept. 22nd, with a re-run of the gala program: Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila and some excerpts of Dvorak's 8th. If you work downtown, you must pack your lunch and eat it on the lawn while enjoying the sun and MTT and the orchestra and a Beard Papa puff for dessert. more ›

We saw MTT conduct Mahler's Symphony No. 8 on Saturday, and ran into him again the day after -- he was the composer of the music for the first half of Joe Goode's new show, and Sunday was the first night his schedule let him attend Stay Together, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. more ›

Mahler's Symphony No. 8 concludes with the Choir singing Goethe's words, amongst which: "All that is impermanent is merely a symbol. Here the unattainable becomes real. The indescribable - here it is done." Attempting to describe last Saturday's performance, the verses resonate with us even more: it was a visceral experience to attend the performance, one for which the words fail us. The indescribable, there it was done. The music, as impermanent a fleeting moment can be, haunted us long afterwards. more ›