Arts & Entertainment SF Opera's Ring des Nibelungen The Ring has arrived: Richard Wagner's four-operas-in-a-week cycle kicked off last night and you could see in the audience that this was not the regular season anymore, it's playoff time. You could feel
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Marc O'Connor & Edgar Meyer Edgar Meyer and Marc O'Connor collaborated a decade ago for Appalachia waltz and Appalachian Journey, a genre blending classical-meets-bluegrass string trio (Meyer plays the bass, O'Connor the fiddle, and Yo-Yo Ma completed the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Volti Artistic Director Robert Geary Volti invests in young composers like Kleiner-Perkins in fledgling entrepreneurs and with the same success: years after years this 20 person a capella choir keep unearthing new musical voices. Midwifing and nurturing new
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud Joan Jeanrenaud was for twenty years the cellist of the Kronos Quartet. Kronos, of course, is the San Francisco based string quartet which specializes in contemporary music and has created and commissioned hundreds
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Cirque du Soleil at the Cow Palace Can you have circus without the tent? Cirque du Soleil answered heck yeah to the question with the awe-inspiring premiere of its Quidam revival last night at the Cow Palace. We're not that
Arts & Entertainment The Switchboard and Castelton Music Festivals Tomorrow, the Brava Theater will host the fourth Switchboard music festival, an eight hour marathon of modern and eclectic music. Eight hour seems crazy long, or even masochistic, but you can actually go
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Soprano Melody Moore Melody Moore has been growing as a singer under our eyes, here in the Bay Area, we can claim her as ours. She came here from Cincinnati to attend the SF Opera Merola
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Kurt Masur at the Symphony A grab bag of a few items about classical music in the bay: Kurt Masur with the SF Symphony Zheng Cao with the Philharmonia Baroque Tanya Tomkins performs Bach Cello Suites Magnificat Baroque's
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Hahn/Lisitsa, Hope/Kahane at SF Performances. In an SF Performances recital on Saturday night, violinist Hilary Hahn and her accompanist Valentina Lisitsa put together a set of pieces that had nothing in common, except for the mastery of the
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Pianist David Greilsammer Israeli-born pianist David Greilsammer had his San Francisco debut yesterday, playing two early Mozart concertos with Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie. Those were early concertos, since they were performed at a 2pm matinee. But
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Hot Air at the Conservatory, Janowski with the Symphony Hot Air at the Conservatory: the Conservatory hosted on Sunday its second Hot Air festival, dedicated to the music of the last 50 years. The whole thing lasted from 2pm to 10pm, and
Arts & Entertainment This Week in Classical Music: Juho Pohjonen, Avner Dorman This week in Classical: Juho Pohjonen with SF Performances, Avner Dorman's Uriah with the SF Symphony, and accounting for the SF Opera For SF Performances's piano recital last night, Juho Pohjonen accepted at
Arts & Entertainment Weekend In Classical Music: Early Music In the Bay we shun obsolete technologies: it's dead to us if it's post-IPO. It wouldn't cross anyone's mind to, say, write with ink and quill, unless they're under undue Harry Potter influence.
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Lang-Lang at Davies Symphony Hall. Lang-Lang is the antidote to recessions and deaths of classical music. There are only a few others than the Chinese piano superstar who can sell out Davies Symphony hall on a Tuesday evening
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Pianist Hélène Grimaud The SF Symphony opens 2011 tomorrow with the San Francisco debut of the young and exciting Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits, and the return at the keys of French pianist Hélène Grimaud in the
Arts & Entertainment The Composer Is Dead SFist Jay covered the theatrical aspects of the Berkeley Rep's The Composer is Dead. But since it originated as a classical music edutainment piece from the SF Symphony, we got to see it
Arts & Entertainment This Weekend in Classical Music A bunch of classical music events happening over the weekend: The San Francisco Early Music Society presents Ciaramella tonight in Palo Alto, tomorrow in Berkeley and Sunday in San Francisco. Ciaramella is Italian
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: The Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson It's been ten years since The Bad Plus has been breaking barrier between musical genres. It's a piano (Ethan Iverson), bass (Reid Anderson) and drums (David King) combo, which screams jazz trio until
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews: Composer John Adams Berkeley composer John Adams's oratorio El Niño had its US premiere at Davies Symphony Hall ten years ago next month. The reviews were unanimously enthusiastic. El Niño, like Handel's Messiah, is a musical
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Terfel, Aida, Bronfman A few performances we caught, before the Thanksgiving holidays distracted us from writing them up: Bryn Terfel at Cal Performances, Aida at SF Opera and Yefim Bronfman with the SF Symphony Few performers
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews Stage Director Olivier Tambosi The Makropulos Case has been the most exciting opera this season, with a convergence of superlative singing, lively conducting, a memorable set and a stage direction that pushes the envelope but makes sense.
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Elza van den Heever at the SF Symphony Richard Strauss Four Last Songs form a coda to the composer's career, who was over eighty when he wrote them, and selected texts of falling leaves, crepuscular vibe and mournful elegy. They're however
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: The Makropulos Case at SF Opera It's a shame that an opera about a soprano who stays literally hundreds of years in the limelight is so often confined to the dusty back shelves of the repertoire. The last production
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Rufus Wainwright at the SF Symphony If Morpheus offers you the choice between taking the red score or the blue score, take the blue one. When maestro Michael Francis got on stage last night, he had the red one
misc Have Fun Bringing Computers to Public Schools. It's either quixotic or ironic to use the very technologies which built the digital divide in the first place to bridge that same divide. Kinda like drinking booze as a cure for hangover.
