Steven Winn
Steven Winn is a San Francisco freelance writer and critic and frequent City Arts & Lectures interviewer. His work has appeared in Art News, California, Humanities, and The San Francisco Chronicle, where he was the arts and culture critic from 2002 to 2008. His memoir, Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog, is published by Harper.
Articles by this Author
By the time Peter Pastreich reached the podium on the lower level of the Herbst
Theatre last Friday night, at a postconcert reception marking his retirement as executive director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, he’d heard himself praised in many ways.
It may have been only a coincidence that the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra
programmed Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony for its season-opening concert at Davies Symphony Hall Sunday afternoon, just two weeks after the Los Angeles Philharmonic played the same piece on the same stage. But it was impossible not to overlay the two performances.
There was only one thing to regret about the Mariinsky Orchestra’s spectacular
performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in Berkeley on Saturday night — the empty seats in Zellerbach Hall. This was SRO, you-had-to-be-there stuff, Bay Area music lovers. Where were the rest of you?
Sometimes you know it right away. The first few minutes of a performance, even the first
few measures, can signal that something remarkable is in store.
The big number on everybody’s mind at the San Francisco Symphony right now is 100. And, the announcement of some of the programming for the orchestra’s 2011-2012 centennial season promised a major musical birthday bash. [Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in 
Going in, the program for the San Francisco Symphony’s June 16-19 concerts at Davies Symphony Hall looked like an uneasy compromise.
Big parties can be a kick. The size of the room, the buzz of the crowd, and the eye-popping things people wear ramp up the heat. The collective urge to get louder and a little unruly, to say and do things you might not in a smaller setting, is hard to resist. Those hoping for quiet, intimate exchanges will have their work cut out for them.
Compare music to poetry, and eyes begin to roll — for good reason. We’ve all read (and some of us committed) the strained metaphors, misty-eyed rhapsodies, and moody nonsense that can reveal a whole lot more about a critic than they do about the music.
The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra closed its 2010-2011 season with a concert at Zellerbach Hall on Thursday that both segregated and showcased the ensemble’s considerable musical assets.
The Vienna Philharmonic left nothing behind in its final performance at Zellerbach Hall Sunday. Confronting head-on the scouring depths, seizing frenzies, aching tenderness, and long vaulted arcs of 
The great long arc of the San Francisco Symphony’s Mahler Project comes to a gentle, soft landing with Songs With Orchestra, the final CD of an unprecedented undertaking. The prevailing tenderness and intimacy of this concluding disc, which features baritone Thomas Hampson and mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in three song cycles, forms a meditative coda to a genuinely heroic effort.
Listeners unacquainted with Thomas Adès can embark on a powerful, short-course introduction to the magnificently gifted young British composer with this EMI disc. The emotional pull, drama, expressive complexity, wit, and allusive richness of Adès’ music are all in evidence.
