Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Beethoven Recordings and Writings As the Fall season for classical music is upon us, you can bet on this: even though 2013 is an anniversary year for Verdi, Wagner, Britten or Lutowslavsky, you'll hear more Beethoven. Ludwig
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Merola Opera's Sheri Greenawald After a long lyric soprano career on the world's most famous stages, Sheri Greenawald hung her hat in San Francisco to become artistic director of the Merola program. She now auditions a bazillion
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Composer Mark Adamo Last week, Jesus was resurrected with the highly expected world premiere of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, written and composed by Mark Adamo. Under David Gockley, SF Opera's commissions often tackles ambitious material
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Cosi Fan Tutte' at SF Opera A light comedy with a ridiculous conceit where two guys, one blonde, one with brown hair, sweet talk their way in and out of outrageous situation? Nope, it's not The Internship but Cosi
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Ojai North At Cal Performances Has the Rite of Spring lost so much of its power to shock that it's not worth even trying anymore? When it opened in Paris a hundred years ago, spectators rioted. When Mark
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: French Soprano Natalie Dessay The SF Opera returned last week with a fantastic production of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. The opera's summer season a short coda to the meat-and-potatoes of the Fall, but it's going to be a
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Curious Flights at the SF Conservatory Youthful exuberance achieves stunning results, as the second concert of the Curious Flights season demonstrated Tuesday night at the San Francisco Conservatory. Both the composer (a young Benjamin Britten) and the performers (most
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Christopher O'Riley at Yoshi's. Technology really influences how we listen to music, we thought during Christopher O'Riley's performance at Yoshi's SF on Wednesday night, for the Artist Sessions hosted by Lara Downes. At the core of his
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Trouble In Tahiti' & 'Winterreise' Two one-act mini-operas staged in April by Ensemble Parallele (Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and Barber's Hand of Bridge) at Z Space showed couples wallowing in conjugal misery and midlife crisis. Yet, through
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Battle Hymns Composer David Lang We last heard David Lang's music when San Francisco Lyric Opera staged his Little Match Girl Passion at OCD Theater. That piece has brought Lang plenty of recognition. As he described it in
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Steven Stucky Steven Stucky is the composer-in-residence for the '12-'13 season of the Berkeley Symphony, and the orchestra will premiere his latest: The Stars and the Roses, a trio of poems by Czesław Miłosz set
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Adam Theis Of Jazz Mafia One of the coolest musical event of the year, the Switchboard Festival, was founded by Jeff Anderle, Jon Russell, and Ryan Brown in 2007. This marathon of unorthodox, modern, exciting, eclectic bands happened
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: The Secret Garden at SF Opera/Cal Performances Getting down and dirty brings happiness. Or so is the lesson from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, lifted wholesale from Voltaire's injunction to cultivate one's garden. The cherished 1911 book has now
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Kronos at YBCA San Francisco's most famous string quartet, Kronos, always push the boundaries of what should be the chamber music repertory. As founder and violinist David Harrinton waxed nostalgics during the concert closing their three
Arts & Entertainment SFist Previews: Donato Cabrera with the California Symphony The California Symphony found itself without a music director under some murky circumstances a couple years back. This season, they make lemonade with the situation, turning their concert series into an interviewing process
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Soprano Marnie Breckenridge Opera Parallele has been introducing new contemporary opera productions to the Bay Area. This weekend at the YBCA theater, Ainadamar by Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentinian Grammy-winning composer who now teaches in Boston, will
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Peer Gynt And Marnie Breckenridge Two reviews from shows last week, Peer Gynt at the SF Symphony, and a recital by soprano Marnie Breckenridge at the Conservatory. Peer Gynt started off as a collaboration between two 19th century
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: The Bing Concert Hall Opening The Bing opened with a bang. It's technically the Bing Concert Hall, on the campus of Stanford University, but ushers had been instructed to greet us with a "welcome to The Bing", which
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Mark Morris The Hard Nut currently running at Cal Performances has become a holiday tradition. Mark Morris created the show back in 1991 in Brussels and still performs in it, although he's mostly retired from
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: the Paul Dresher Ensemble The Paul Dresher Ensemble Electro-Acoustic Band is chamber music for the geeks: six or seven musicians on stage performing on an array of computerized instruments - and a couple good old analog ones
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Pandora at the SF Symphony A bunch of musicians of the SF Symphony fancy themselves as composers. Violinist Sarn Oliver, bassoonist Stephen Paulson, trumpeter Mark Inouye, even MTT have penned original classical, jazz or ballet music. But assistant
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Pianist Shai Wosner The Berkeley Symphony and its music director Joana Carneiro won't shy away from the unorthodox and the challenging. This is why Thursday night they're welcoming Shai Wosner to join them in György Ligeti's
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela The Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela propelled Gustavo Dudamel to rock star status when they toured the US a couple years ago. You could not check Facebook without catching a YouTube clip
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Tenor Brian Jagde As with Rigoletto earlier this season, the SF Opera is experimenting with a double header format for Tosca, which opened last night. Namely, two casts will alternate nightly for twelve performances of the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Einstein on the Beach Einstein on the Beach, the revival of the 1976 collaboration between stage director Robert Wilson, choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer Philip Glass hosted last week-end by Cal Performances, managed to sell out Zellerbach
