Georgia Rowe is a Bay Area arts writer. Her work has appeared in Opera News,Gramophone, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Contra Costa Times.
Over the last decade, baritone Richard Paul Fink has become closely associated with the role of Alberich, the malevolent dwarf in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. He’s sung the role in San Francisco, in New York, and, most recently, in three complete Ring cycles at Los Angeles Opera.
Every year around this time, something remarkable happens in Santa Cruz: The annual Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music convenes, and this sunny beach town best known for its boardwalk becomes a thriving new-music laboratory. Under Music Director Marin Alsop, the two-week festival attracts an impressive array of top composers, musicians, and aficionados eager for a total immersion in the music of our time.
The Midsummer Mozart Festival has never been about the kind of easy-listening, check-your-brain-at-the-door fare that plagues many summer concerts. Music Director George Cleve wasted no time making that point Friday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as he and the orchestra got the annual Mozart bash off to a characteristically vibrant start.
Since her years in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists’ Program, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke has been on the fast track to stardom. In a field already crowded with mezzos, the graduate of Rice University and the Juilliard School has distinguished herself in a wide variety of concert, opera, and recital repertoire.
It only took the better part of two decades, but Thursday evening at Davies Symphony Hall, Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence finally received its first San Francisco Symphony performance. Holloway’s original Clarissa Sequence, that is, the one for soprano and orchestra.
Erin Wall, who made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2004, has become something of a Bay Area favorite since then. The Canadian soprano, who began her career singing Mozart and Strauss roles, has joined Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra in a variety of concert works and appears on the orchestra’s 2010 Grammy Award–winning recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8. Starting this week, she returns for two S.F. Symphony programs.
Matías Tarnopolsky is understandably pleased. Less than a year after being appointed director of Cal Performances, he’s unveiled the first season entirely of his own programming, and it’s a knockout.
There’s no one quite like Laurie Anderson. Equally adept as a writer, director, vocalist, songwriter, visual artist, and performer, the New York–based artist has published seven books, made numerous films, and created art installations in major museums around the world.
For many composers, the challenge of getting new music performed can be the work of a lifetime. Gabriela Lena Frank seems exempt from that struggle. In recent years, Frank’s music has been played in concert halls across the country; this season alone, her works have been performed by Chanticleer, the King’s Singers, the Del Sol Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and the Berkeley Symphony, which last year named her to the post of creative advisor.
Are opera lovers reevaluating La Rondine? Puccini’s 1917 lyric comedy has always been dismissed as something of a trifle, a one-hit wonder with a single great soprano aria (“Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” or “Doretta’s Waltz”) and not much else to recommend it.
Over the last decade, baritone Richard Paul Fink has become closely associated with the role of Alberich, the malevolent dwarf in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. He’s sung the role in San Francisco, in New York, and, most recently, in three complete Ring cycles at Los Angeles Opera.
Since her years in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artists’ Program, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke has been on the fast track to stardom. In a field already crowded with mezzos, the graduate of Rice University and the Juilliard School has distinguished herself in a wide variety of concert, opera, and recital repertoire.
Erin Wall, who made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2004, has become something of a Bay Area favorite since then. The Canadian soprano, who began her career singing Mozart and Strauss roles, has joined Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra in a variety of concert works and appears on the orchestra’s 2010 Grammy Award–winning recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8. Starting this week, she returns for two S.F. Symphony programs.
There’s no one quite like Laurie Anderson. Equally adept as a writer, director, vocalist, songwriter, visual artist, and performer, the New York–based artist has published seven books, made numerous films, and created art installations in major museums around the world.