What a busy last week-end, with Lisa Bielawa's Crissy Broadcast at Crissy Field, rising star cellist Joshua Roman with the SF Chamber Orchestra, former SF Symphony resident conductor Edwin Outwater's return at the helm of this ensemble, a massive Verdi Requiem with not one but two opera orchestras, and some notes on Stephanie Blythe's visit to Berkeley.

Lisa Bielawa: Crissy Broadcast tried to break down the traditional barriers between the orchestra and the audience: composer Lisa Bielawa (a San Francisco native who emigrated to NYC and has worked with Philip Glass and the Bang-on-a-Can collective among others) wrote up a score for some 600 hundred musicians and a decommissioned airport field. A spatial symphony, if you will, where the dimension of the space and the distance between the groups of musicians and their audience creates new musical landscapes. She tried out the idea in Berlin at the Tempelhof airport, when that city turned it into a park, and brought the concept on Saturday and Sunday to Crissy Field. We attended the Saturday morning performance, where in addition to musicians from all over the city (from high school orchestras to Golden Gate brass band to San Francisco Symphony Community of Music Makers to choruses to Chinese instruments group to the SF Contemporary Musicians), the fog horn of the Golden Gate Bridge joined in.