Georgia Rowe has been a Bay Area arts writer since 1986. She is Opera News’ chief San Francisco correspondent, and a frequent contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice, Musical America, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, and San Francisco Examiner. Her work has also appeared in Gramophone, San Francisco Magazine, and Songlines.
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. Here, the performance artist talks about her upcoming performance of Delusion, the mystery of how our minds work, her love of books and desire to write, and how "talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
Berkeley-born Gabriela Lena Frank is on a roll, with her compositions being performed widely, even as she serves the Berkeley Symphony as its creative advisor. Her upcoming first violin concerto, Hailli Lírico, is drawn from poem-prayers uttered by Inca kings.
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.
Second nights are notoriously difficult to pull off, whether they’re in the theater or the concert hall. But David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony blazed through the second of two programs Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall, sustaining the excitement they had generated on the previous evening and elevating even the most familiar repertoire to the level of the sublime.
Beethoven cast an enormous shadow over the composers of his era, as well as those who followed; Brahms, who was particularly intimidated by the master, despaired of ever writing a symphony.
For mastery of dynamics, unity of utterance, and sheer tonal beauty, aficionados would be hard-pressed to find a more accomplished a cappella ensemble than the Swedish Radio Choir.
Some guys have all the luck — or at least it seems that way with Joshua Bell. In the last decade, the American violinist has become one of the most successful artists in classical music history, selling millions of CDs and stacking up awards like so many Legos. With his boyish good looks, it would be easy to dismiss him as the industry’s most marketable commodity.
