Arts & Entertainment The Philistine Misses SFist Ced: Weird Fish and Peter And The Wolf Before heading out to the SF Youth Orchestra's holiday concert this afternoon, we grabbed brunch at new trendy Mission bistro Weird Fish. Weird Fish is a combination seafood/vegan restaurant at 18th and
Arts & Entertainment The Philistine Goes To The Movies: Hilary Hahn Plays Symphony Hall It was a night of romantic movie themes and orchestral folk music (and one modern piece described in the program as "an aircraft revving for takeoff"), with violinist Hilary Hahn the main star.
Arts & Entertainment Upcoming Events -- Hilary Hahn The Korngold incorporates various movie themes from 1930s Hollywood, and the symphony will also be performing Aaron Copland's and a suite by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly. (We don't think the Kodaly has any
Arts & Entertainment Carmen and Manon: Girls Gone Wild Carmen wants to have her cake and eat it too: she finds Don Jose cute, and he is hopelessly in love with her. So she demands that he abandons his career as a
Arts & Entertainment Atlantic Crossing. was described to us in the program notes as a piece of extraordinary difficulty for the pianist, equal only to the Rachmaninoff piano No.3, that technical summit of the repertoire. Kevin Volans
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews Marc-André Hamelin MAH: Everything I do musically comes from my belief that the piano repertoire is a great deal larger than most people realize. From what is heard in piano recitals these days, it's easy
Arts & Entertainment Keeping Score: Stravinsky 1-SFist Eve 0. Tonight’s episode focuses on the Rite of Spring, which is described by members of the orchestra as "sexy," "rock’n’roll" and "raw." MTT would not be our first choice to tell
Arts & Entertainment MTT Scores Again. A few years back, we were flipping the channels, and we ended up on a program on PBS. We recognized Michael Tilson-Thomas and at first, we were thinking, hey, it’s our MTT,
Arts & Entertainment The Barber of Seville. The house is early 20th century, Mies Van der Rohe inspired, and black Le Corbusier leather chairs match the architecture of the time; but the costumes (by Yan Tax) vary between period and
Arts & Entertainment Thibaudet/Bychkov at the Symphony Bychkov opened with Last Round, a two movement piece by Osvaldo Golijov, a 45yo Argentinian composer who now lives in Massachussetts, the first time this piece was played in San Francisco. The piece
SF News Bomb Scare An alert gardener noticed a 3 foot by 1 foot yellow tub with a wire coming out of it, on top of a bottle and some liquid, and called the authorities. The police
Arts & Entertainment Mahler Symphony No. 5 Mahler's 5th Symphony is one of his most famous works: the 4th movement, Adagietto, became super popular as the soundtrack of Visconti's Death in Venice, and the whole piece has an epic, cinematic
Arts & Entertainment Spem in Alium: There is Hope in Our Soul. You had to stay in your squeaky pew last night, at the performance of the same 40 part motet by actual live human beings, the singers of the Schola Cantorum and of the
Arts & Entertainment Tristan and Isolde So it was no surprise that last night’s performance of Tristan and Isolde turned out as a magistral musical display: from the prelude to the final curtain drop, Runnicles coaxed a splendid
Arts & Entertainment Rigoletto: The Killer, The Jester, His Daughter, Her Lover. We were going to make a snarky comment about the crimson theme of the set: it is the only color, the rest is black and white; and the interiors are only red: walls,
Arts & Entertainment The Philistine Asks for More Ball Movement. The one good thing about missing the opening night Gala --and we'd have looked absolutely stunning in a tux-- is that we got to read the underwhelmed reports of the premiere of Verdi's
Arts & Entertainment Die Fledermaus: The Bat Swings Wildly But we at SFist can go where they can't, with their layers of editors and fear of sanctimonious letter writers: die Fledermaus means "the bat," a somewhat nonsensical title, but then again, the
Arts & Entertainment The Philistine Operates in the Park. --Friday was the Opera opening night at the opera house, and I was one of the penguins there, in that March of the Penguins. --I read in the paper there was a report
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: the Merola Grand Finale One would expect that the format, a sequence of arias not unlike that of Opera in the Park (Sept 10th, it's coming up), would become a bit predictable after a while. One would
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: Il Matriomonio Segreto We saw James Schwabacher once, at his debut recital series, which he endowed in perpetuity, and where he introduced the singers. He was 86 yo, but still had the quick wit of a
Arts & Entertainment The Philistine: Transformations Conrad Susa, who was in attendance and seemed quite pleased afterwards, wrote Transformations in 1975, on a commission of the Minnesota Opera, based on a libretto of Anne Sexton, itself based on her
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: Verdi's Requiem A shiny light was squarely placed on Verdi's score: all the details came out brightly, all the nuances were expertly underlined. That delicate, masterfully controlled introduction only lead to more of the same
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: the Marriage of Figaro Now, we all know where we are going with this: the last Figaro on the SF Opera stage was Nathan Gunn, in the Barber, a role he'll take again this Fall. Nathan is
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: Joan of Arc The ghost of former general director Pamela Rosenberg was hovering above when a man dressed in a gray business suit was the first to come on the stage. We feared for a second
Arts & Entertainment Philistine: Joe Goode Performance Group. The music he wrote is actually the opposite of the work he conducted the night before: it is pretty minimalist, with very simple melodic lines, underscored with a few bass notes here and
