Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.
The second mainstay opera of SFO’s season to feature equally strong alternating casts, this Tosca, thanks to the company’s shrewd General Director David Gockley, gives us the dueling divas Angela Gheorghiu and Patricia Racette.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer/conductor who until recent years led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brings to the Pacific shore the same Philharmonia Orchestra whose many recordings with some of the greatest conductors of the latter 20th century have achieved legendary status.
The current revival tour, which began this year in France, heads to Italy, London, Toronto, and Brooklyn before reaching Berkeley. Catch this radical work while you can — you may not get another chance.
Given the fabulous reviews that composer Jake Heggie’s and librettist Gene Scheer’s latest opera has received in Dallas and San Diego, why wouldn’t you want to see the SFO premiere of this heralded work by our local-boy-made-good?
The great Cecilia Bartoli breathes new life into arias by a nearly unknown 17th-century Italian composer, Agostino Steffani, and triumphs in the process.
Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin has made her mark in two contrasting art forms: Baroque repertoire, in which she excels in rapid-fire coloratura, and song, in which her gift for lyric expression comes to the fore.
In their concert British tenor Mark Padmore and American pianist Jonathan Biss fused words and music in a supreme partnership that conveyed emotions with transcendent, eye-opening profundity.
