Ask enough of your neighbors, and you’ll find one or two at least who are involved in a chorus somewhere. There are hundreds of local groups, if you count church choirs, and a goodly number even if you don’t. Bay Area choral aficionados have a lot to choose from, but the concerts listed here are hugely appealing, even if you don’t sing in the shower yourself.
Terry Riley, one of the most inspiring of the so-called minimalist composers will be playing piano at the Berkeley Art Museum, lighting up the museum's late night hours with an informal concert. At 75, this pioneer has still got plenty of gas left in the tank.
Superb violinist Ian Swensen may be more self-effacing than his better-known contemporaries, but that's all to the advantage of San Francisco Conservatory students, who will get to play with him in a rare performance of the French Romantic Ernst Chausson's Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet.
Michael Kaiser, artistic head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is one of the more respected artistic administrators in America, as well as an inspiring speaker who is bullish on the arts. The author of four books, most recently The Art of the Turnaround (2008), Kaiser made his bones turning around failing arts organizations.
San José-based Lyric Theater is taking a chance on a San Francisco venue: the Southside Theater at Fort Mason. They’re bringing a forgotten operetta, Leo Fall’s The Dollar Princess, which was a hit on Broadway in 1909 in an English revision, with a few interpolated songs by a young Jerome Kern. Barbara Reynolds and Jennifer Ashworth are the “dollar princesses” (old-time slang for an American heiress), and they are supported by a large capable cast. In the tradition of The Merry Widow, here’s another reason that the Viennese vintage survived on Broadway for so long.
New music collective sfSound comes to Old First Concerts this week with music by Mathias Spahlinger, a German composer of highly intense modernist music; Brian Ferneyhough; and Ferneyhough students Erik Ulman, an sfSound resident composer; and Matthew Shlomowitz, an Australian composer and student of Ferneyhough who, like his mentor, makes abstract, complexly-patterened music. For all you adventurers out there who like an intellectual challenge, this is the antidote to the easy listening summer pops season you’ve been waiting for.
Fremont Opera opens its La traviata next weekend. Local they may be, but they’ve scored with their Violetta: Danielle Talamantes, an up-and-comer slated to understudy at the Metropolitan Opera this season, who also won the Irene Dalis Vocal Competition in San José this past May.
For years now it’s been obvious that the classical orchestral concert is in need of some rethinking for modern audiences. And no one has been more out in front of this issue than the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, which began its popularizing mission by giving all its concerts away for free. Its current music director, Ben Simon, has gone the full monty, trying out a variety of new ideas, including the short, entertaining programs called “Classical at the Freight,” presented once a month for the past three years at the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley.
Composer and SFCV contributor Matthew Cmiel and his like-minded collaborator, director/ choreographer Wolfgang Thompson, have put together an evening of music and words that sounds exciting in its mix of different approaches. For the concert, titled "Musical Textual: Where Music and Text Combine," Thompson has put together a choreographic work using Anne Sexton’s poems as a score. Cmiel uses a Muriel Rukeyser poem as a focal point for a ritualistic piece celebrating the common elements in life.
There's a new choral group in town with a name that might make a PR consultant despair. The group is EUOUAE, which, as anybody boning up for the musicology master's exam will know, is a medieval shorthand for “saeculorum amen,” the last Latin words in the common doxology. (“Glory to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”)
Michael Lawrence's BACH & friends documentary created a big splash with the audience at the West Coast premiere that took place at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco last Wednesday evening. Presented by San Francisco Classical Voice as a fundraiser for the organization, the film about Lee and Graber and the Complete Beethoven Sonatas
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Preview
July 13, 2010
San Francisco native and Julliard grad Wayne Lee returns to his old stomping grounds to join pianist Miles Graber in a complete traversal of the Beethoven violin sonatas in three concerts, beginning on Friday July 19 at the Crowden School in Berkeley. Lee is an up-and-comer who performs with several ensembles in NYC, as well as the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Orpheus. His Manhattan Piano Trio competed for last year's Naumburg Foundation Chamber Music Award. When a young musician gives this much of himself, he deserves to be heard.
Jeffrey Thomas has the touch with Bach's B Minor Mass, a showcase piece combining all the facets of Bach's art into a gigantic musical fresco. It takes tremendous love and concentration to get down to the thousands of nitty-gritty details and work them out so that the performance becomes drama and not just an expertly-played, intimidating mass of sound.
Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. (And that shower scene – Herrmann had to plead with Hitchcock to use his cue for the scene, which the director had originally meant to be without music.)
If you want to jazz up a birthday party or anniversary, do something unexpected or plan a surprise. Pianist Daniel Glover is doing something like that with the otherwise dull-as-dishwater Frédéric Chopin commemorations this year, by pairing Chopin with Samuel Barber, another anniversary boy.
Filmmaker Michael Lawrence’s Bach and Friends has been making waves among classical listeners and audiences who might never have suspected they would have a connection to J.S. Bach’s music.
Back when Milton and Peggy Salkind teamed up as a piano duo in the early 1950s, there were just a handful of piano duo acts — Rosina and Josef Lhevinne, Gaby and Robert Casadesus, and a few others. The Salkinds helped to blaze the trail that others, most famously the Labeque sisters, have since trod. Many more duo-pianists are performing these days, though American music lovers are likely to have missed most of them. San Franciscans have a chance to remedy that lack on the weekend of July 8-10, at the Third Annual Milton and Peggy Salkind International Piano Duo Festival.
For some it will be an opportunity to hear bass John Relyea, and soprano Patricia Racette, who is one of the artists who could capture my attention even if she was only singing the phone book. But the July 4 concert at Stern Grove with the San Francisco Opera will also present a program of American operatic classics, which are rare on the world's stages.
San Francisco Classical Voice lost one of its finest writers and an even dearer friend when Heuwell Tircuit died last Monday. His body was discovered in his apartment by his longtime friend Hal Cruthirds on Wednesday. He was 78 years old.
Berkeley Art Museum, lighting up the museum's late night hours with an informal concert. At 75, this pioneer has still got plenty of gas left in the tank.
all to the advantage of San Francisco Conservatory students, who will get to play with him in a rare performance of the French Romantic Ernst Chausson's Concerto for Violin, Piano, and String Quartet.
Michael Kaiser, artistic head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is one of the more respected artistic administrators in America, as well as an inspiring speaker who is bullish on the arts. The author of four books, most recently The Art of the Turnaround (2008), Kaiser made his bones turning around failing arts organizations.
Violetta: Danielle Talamantes, an up-and-comer slated to understudy at the Metropolitan Opera this season, who also won the Irene Dalis Vocal Competition in San José this past May. 
Michael Lawrence's BACH & friends documentary created a big splash with the audience at the West Coast premiere that took place at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco last Wednesday evening. Presented by San Francisco Classical Voice as a fundraiser for the organization, the film about 
music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. (And that shower scene – Herrmann had to plead with Hitchcock to use his cue for the scene, which the director had originally meant to be without music.) 
If you want to jazz up a birthday party or anniversary, do something unexpected or plan a surprise. Pianist Daniel Glover is doing something like that with the otherwise dull-as-dishwater 
Filmmaker Michael Lawrence’s Bach and Friends has been making waves among classical listeners and audiences who might never have suspected they would have a connection to 
For some it will be an opportunity to hear bass John Relyea, and soprano Patricia Racette, who is one of the artists who could capture my attention even if she was only singing the phone book. But the July 4 concert at Stern Grove with the San Francisco Opera will also present a program of American operatic classics, which are rare on the world's stages. 
died last Monday. His body was discovered in his apartment by his longtime friend Hal Cruthirds on Wednesday. He was 78 years old.