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.

Tonight's performance featured guest conductor Ingo Metzmacher, who looked adorably like Schroeder from Peanuts, except instead of Beethoven, Metzmacher loves 20th century Eastern European composers, with Ligeti, the Bartok Piano Concerto no. 3, and the Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 on the program.

Ligeti wrote the San Francisco Polyphony in our fair city in 1973-74. The program notes reiterated several times that the listener should not expect this to be some kind of musical picture of SF, but we'll fall into that easy trap anyways and say that Ligeti must have written the piece in the summer, because it sounds kind of sunshine-y/foggy. Also -- we deeply enjoyed the section of the piece that sounded like Critical Mass. Our city rules.

So! You're probably still wondering why we have a picture of Christian's outfit from Wednesday's Project Runway up there, aren't you? We'll explain after the jump.