Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: A Week of Classical Grooves Reviews of a few performances over the past week or so: Andras Schiff co-hosted by the SF Symphony and SF Performances; the first SF Opera production of Lohengrin in sixteen years; and the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Week Review In Classical Grooves A few reviews: Friday's Rite of Spring by the Bad Plus with SF Performances, Wednesday's Moby-Dick at SF Opera, András Schiff in a concert jointly hosted by the SF Symphony Project San Francisco,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: I Capuletti at SF Opera, Mahler at SF Symphony the Cypress String Quartet and Three reviews in this post. I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the SF Opera, Samuel Adams and Mahler at the SF Symphony, and the Cypress String Quartet at Old First Church. I Capuleti
Arts & Entertainment Picture Gallery: Last Week's SF Symphony Gala Because we took the pictures at the SF Symphony Gala with our cell phone, we must offer you a second, higher definition glimpse at the swells in their Gucci and De La Renta
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Rigoletto at SF Opera We missed opening night at the SF Opera because of reasons. But not to worry, the first offering of the Fall season, Rigoletto is served to us in Big Gulp format: you can
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: The SF Symphony 101st Season's Gala Take your pick of a party at Civic Center on Wednesday night: either the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining the Salesforce convention social event, or the SF Symphony Gala. From the balcony of
Arts & Entertainment SFist Previews the 2012-13 Classical Music Season The Fall classical music season, or as we call it, the soundtrack to the election campaign, opened last night with the San Francisco Symphony. It's an odd duck opening, as the Real Thing,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Review: the Merola Grand Finale To conclude the Merola program - this summer camp for talented young opera singers - they borrowed the SF Opera orchestra, the opera house with the Moby-Dick set on the stage, and they
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: La Finta Giardiniera and Postcard from Morocco We attend a Merola opera performances through the prism of: which singer will become a star. Some will. And when they do, we can be insufferable opera snobs and say we knew it
Arts & Entertainment Sfist Interviews: Multimedia Artist Nick Hillel Hungarian composer Béla Bartók does not shy away from controversy. As part of the 100th anniversary season of the SF Symphony, we heard the Miraculous Mandarin played in December by the visiting BSO,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Attila, The Magic Flute, And Ojai North Video enhancements are all the rage on staging nowadays, and of course opera isn't exempt of the fad. Case in point: both Attila and The Magic Flute at SF Opera, which we saw
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Nixon in China' Sung music enthusiasts, get ready for a massive binge of vocal events: the summer season of the SF Opera just started last Friday night with Nixon in China (more below); it goes on
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Holy Sisters' at the Berkeley Symphony Billed as a "Hungarian Excursion," the season finale of the Berkeley symphony was mostly for us a trek to the East Bay: we had meant to check out the orchestra since the relatively
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Finnish Conductor Susanna Malkki Susanna Mälkki broke the glass ceiling at La Scala, being the first woman to conduct an opera there, and we thought it must have happened in the seventies, eighties the latest. Sure, the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Stéphane Denève with the SF Symphony It's French week at Davies Symphony Hall, with a cheese-eating conductor (Stéph Denève), soloist (Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and composers (Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Roussel and Stravinsky during his Paris years). The orchestra in the pit is
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: the Cleveland Orchestra The Cleveland Orchestra, in a press conference known as The Decision, announced that they were taking their talents away from the Midwest. Their goal in leaving Cleveland wasn't to win six, seven or
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Baritone Eugene Brancoveanu A sure sign that the economy is turning around, besides IPOs raining gazillionaires on Noe Valley, the resurrection of the San Francisco Lyric Opera. We were sad when they suspended operations, we liked
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: American Mavericks We caught the second orchestral program of the American Mavericks Festival at the SF Symphony and what an eclectic, puzzling, and overall exhilarating show it was. (The third program repeats tonight through Saturday)
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Cellist Steven Isserlis You can measure the success of an artist by how much fame they have, how many records they sell. By these metrics, we'd argue that British cellist Steven Isserlis is only topped by
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: the American Mavericks Festival Countering your Tom Cruise, Mark Cuban and John McCain for the short list of American mavericks, MTT and the SF Symphony offer their own selection: Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, Charles Ives, in the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Charles Dutoit With The SF Symphony Almost a hundred years ago, Stravinsky defibrillated classical music. He shocked it back to life, saving it from the deathly grasp of romanticism. And in a more literal sense, he gave it back
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Riccardo Muti and Edo De Waart The Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Riccardo Muti was the third of the Big Six visiting orchestras in town for the 100th anniversary of the SF Symphony (on the tails of LA and
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interview: 'The Great Gatsby' Composer John Harbison The Great Gatsby takes an unsentimental glimpse into the conspicuous, arrogant life of the 1%, which makes it an unlikely subject for an opera. After all, that is the percentile that would be
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Charles Dutoit & Pinchas Zukerman The US Top 6 orchestras will visit Davies Symphony Hall for the SF Symphony 100th anniversary season, leaving Cal Performances at Zellerbach to import the foreign best ensembles. Case in point last Saturday:
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Palo Heras-Casado At The SF Symphony While we wish MTT to keep doing his SF Symphony gig for a long long time, he's the longest tenured music director here ever. He doesn't look it, but at 67, he's twice
