Ray Chen and James Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

This weekend's San Francisco Symphony concerts were a mixed bag. It began with conductor James Gaffigan leading the orchestra in the 2016 Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by the talented 44-year-old American composer, Missy Mazzoli. This wondrous, ten-minute piece was making its SF Symphony debut, and it actually sounded like the cosmos spinning, no mean feat. I hope it becomes a concert opener staple.

This was followed by violin soloist Ray Chen playing the 1940 Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber. Even though it's an often-performed standard, I wasn't familiar with the work at all, so went to YouTube and listened to a performance featuring violinist Joshua Bell. "That music sure is dull," my spouse commented. "Let's try this version with Ray Chen, who we'll be seeing tonight," I replied. By the end, the jury agreed, "This is a gorgeous piece of music." (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

The performance on Thursday's opening night was hard-charging, which seemed at odds with the gentleness of the first two movements, but it was an interesting approach that made the piece sound more anguished than meditative. The problem was that Gaffigan had the orchestra playing too loudly, drowning out Chen at various climactic moments. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Chen's performance, however, was flawless, bringing out the pathos of the Andante movement, and reveling in the pyrotechnics of the final Presto movement.

Chen addressed the audience before playing an encore. Born in Taiwan, raised in Australia, and until recently living in Philadelphia, Chen announced that he had just moved to California, which prompted applause from the audience. "Unfortunately, I just settled in Los Angeles, and I'm in a state of shock right now" on account of the fires currently destroying the city. "This piece fits my mood right now," he continued, before playing Eugène Ysaÿe's Obsession from his Violin Sonata No. 2. Starting with a J.S. Bach quote, it's a wild, knotty piece that felt fitting.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, a triumphant 45-minute hymn to Mother Russia at the end of World War Two. After Gaffigan's "rather vigorous conducting" (as my London seatmate put it) of the Barber concerto, I was worried about Gaffigan's approach to the Prokofiev symphony, which already leans toward incoherent bombast, particularly its long first movement. The worry was fitting because the performance sounded like Gaffigan was trying to see how fast and how loud he could have the orchestra play, with hardly any modulation or quiet moments. Hearing the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony can be a great, exciting experience, but by the end of this concert I felt bludgeoned. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Sarah Cahill Plays James Cleghorn

Old First Concerts opened their 2025 season with a fascinating piano recital by Sarah Cahill, playing the music of a forgotten San Francisco composer, James Cleghorn (1913-1987).

Cahill was introduced by Matthew Wolka, who is not only the director of the Old First Concerts organization, but was working as the A/V tech and stage manager. He also mentioned that the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts program had unaccountably rejected their application for funds this year after supporting them for decades. The venerable church on the corner of Van Ness and Sacramento has hosted the concert series since 1970, and the wide range of musical performances by mostly local artists is unmatched anywhere else in San Francisco. If you would like to get in touch with SF Grants for the Arts to support Old First Concerts, you can write a letter to this address: 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 321, San Francisco, CA 94102. Or send them an email at gfta@sfgov.org.

James Cleghorn, pictured above with his first wife Fern, was born and raised in the Bay Area. According to Bill Alves, who co-wrote the great 2017 biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick, "What we knew of Jim Cleghorn was mostly through interviews with Lou and with John Dobson, who was also a roommate with them. Lou met Cleghorn in the SF State choir, where Lou sang bass and Cleghorn tenor. They were also both in the ancient music ensemble. Dobson remembered Cleghorn as a brilliant man (“an IQ of 170”) who exchanged poetry and music with Lou. Lou remembered him as plugged into the arts community in San Francisco, alerting Lou to things like Cowell’s performances and the New Music Society. At some point while they were living there, Dobson remembered Cleghorn coming downstairs and announcing that they needed to take him “to the booby hatch.” Dobson took him to a doctor. The doctor asked Cleghorn where he was born, and Cleghorn the intellectual replied with the original Indian language name for the area. The doctor took the answer for gibberish and agreed to recommend that he be committed to a sanitarium."

Alves continues: "After Lou Harrison moved away from San Francisco, they lost touch. We asked the reference desk at the SF public library, and they told us that Cleghorn was hired as a librarian in August 1946, became senior librarian in Feb. 1948, and was appointed principal librarian in Art, Music, and Recreation until his retirement in 1971. Lou and Cleghorn were back in touch by 1957, as there’s a letter from him in Lou’s archive. Cleghorn arranged to commission a fanfare from Lou for the opening of their new fine arts division. Lou composed Majestic Fanfare in 1963 while in residence at the East West Center in Hawaii. It was never performed as planned for the library but was performed in Hawaii."

That Art, Music, and Recreation department that Cleghorn developed in the old Main Branch of the SF Public Library was a marvel, with masses of musical scores, opera libretti, and LP recordings. Best of all, you could reserve a stereo and headphones to listen, which is how I did my homework in the 1970s before rushing across Civic Center Plaza to buy a $3 standing room ticket at the SF Opera in the years before Supertitles. I still have vivid memories of hearing Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes for the first time in that library. Sadly, most of the collection was thrown out along with hundreds of thousands of books when the new Main Branch opened next door in 1996, an indignity that author Nicholson Baker wrote about in The New Yorker magazine and a book called Double Fold.

Cahill's Cleghorn concert on Sunday afternoon was spurred by contact with his son, Peter Cleghorn, who brought her piles of unpublished scores in manuscript form.

Peter Cleghorn was in the audience and was invited by Sarah to offer some context to a few of the pieces, most of which were receiving their world premieres. One of my favorite works on the program was actually written for Peter on his seventh birthday, a brilliant, amusing riff on piano instructor John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play: A Book for the Earliest Beginner. The actual title of the 1945 Cleghorn piece is An Apotheosis of John Thompson: A Sonatina on Tunes from Teaching Tiny Fingers to Play (to Peter in his seventh year).

Though most of Cleghorn's music remains unpublished, Henry Cowell did print the 1937 How Do You Like This? Three Ironies for Piano in his groundbreaking New Music magazine. The performance by Cahill was wonderful, craggy and lyrical simultaneously.

Cahill performed 13 separate works on the program, many of them undated miscellaneous works in a series Cleghorn called Cyclus. There was also a Sonatina in memory of Bartok, a 1980 work called The Fear and The Trembling from Ludus Arbitralis, and a gorgeous, extremely sophisticated 1935 work, Six Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme. The entire concert was historical music excavation at its most rewarding.

Even better, the music is going to be recorded later this month by Cahill for the Other Minds music organization. In the photo above, Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian was congratulating Peter Cleghorn at the end of the concert for helping to rescue his father's music.

10 Favorite Musical Moments of 2024

The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra is one of the great unsung ensembles in the Bay Area and beyond. In a February program called British Icons they performed Mahler's dark, hour-long Das Lied von Erde for British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan's ballet The Song of the Earth. The orchestra was joined by mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag (above) and tenor Moisés Salazar, who were both wonderful.

Later in February, Taylor Mac brought his ongoing four-and-a-half hour, intermissionless, queer rock opera, Bark of Millions, to Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. The joyful surprise of the show was how good the music was, 55 original songs with lyrics by Taylor Mac and music by Matt Ray (above).

Scent cannons, lightshows, and a huge orchestra were all involved in the San Francisco Symphony's double bill of Scriabin's Prometheus: Poem of Fire and Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle. The March concert at Davies Hall was quite a trip.

SFMOMA presented a surprising, fascinating exhibit, The Art of Noise, which was part album covers and posters; part audio playback machines from the Victrola to Bang & Olufsen; and a high fidelity room where a DJ would play their favorite recordings.

The San Francisco Opera's summer season offered two knockout productions, starting with Kaija Saariaho's final opera, Innocence, centering on the fallout from a school shooting in Helsinki. A perfect cast in a perfect production made this one of the most memorable pieces of theater I have ever seen.

The second success was Handel's gender-bending comedy, Partenope with a cast that clicked together brilliantly, highlighted by soprano Julia Fuchs and countertenor Carlo Vistoli (seen above).

The American Bach Soloists had a short summer festival in July that included an utterly charming concert of Italian secular cantatas by Handel and Vivaldi at St. Marks Lutheran Church, with the excellent soprano vocal soloists Maya Kherani and Sarah Coit singing with a great original instrument chamber orchestra.

The highlight of the fall SF Opera season for me was the dark, distressing The Handmaid's Tale, a 1998 adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel by Danish composer Poul Ruders. The new co-production with the Danish National Opera and SF Opera was both stripped down and cinematic, and the entire large cast was flawless.

In November, the Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie brought an early music approach to an all-Mozart program with the San Francisco Symphony, highlighted by British soprano Lucy Crowe singing obscure concert arias by the composer. The entire concert was a joyful surprise.

In December, San Francisco Performances presented the Pacifica Quartet at Herbst Theater with the star clarinetist Anthony McGill joining them for a new clarinet quintet by Ben Shirley and Brahms' Quintet for Clarinet and Strings. I have always wanted to hear the Brahms piece live and the exquisite performance surpassed expectations.

The Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet

My Civic Center neighborhood turns into a Nutcracker factory during the month of December, with two performances a day of the Tchaikovsky ballet.

Every day dancers stream in and out of the San Francisco Ballet building on the corner of Fulton and Franklin...

...along with confused ballet patrons who don't realize that the show is actually across the street at the War Memorial Opera House.

We went to the Monday, December 23rd evening performance and had a wonderful time.

Though there were a few children in Monday's audience...

...who were being bought souvenir nutcrackers for Christmas...

...most of the crowd were adults...

...seemingly on date nights...

...with many dressed to the nines.

The cast changes for every performance and are only announced via signage in the lobby since injury, illness, and artistic discretion are all involved in who appears onstage in any particular performance.

In Swan Dive, a frank, funny and profane memoir or her career at New York City Ballet, the ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin wrote: "Although there are many who love dancing the Nutcracker, I have done it for the last twenty years because it's my job. The Nutcracker represents the tradition of paying your dues and proving how tough, how compliant, and how impervious to exhaustion you really are. Each new corps member and apprentice is expected to perform in every performance. Every. Single. One. The first Nutcracker season is the ultimate rite of passage for a new dancer, and only the strongest survive. Over the course of the season, the theater itself becomes a cesspool of injury and sickness. Our ties with friends and family are pushed to the limit--and our undying devotion to the ballet comes into question. This is why I affectiontely call it the NUTBUSTER."

I have no idea whether conditions are similar at the San Francisco ballet, but it is a grueling schedule and the peril of routine is ever-present. However, we got lucky on Monday night with a fabulous, committed cast and a great, enthusiastic audience. The guest conductor was Marc Taddei, above, and he led the SF Ballet Orchestra in a smooth, beautifully detailed rendering of Tchaikovsky's musical score.

The Helgi Tomasson production is 20 years old but it was looking spruced up a bit, along with some of the choreography, presumably by the new artistic director Tamara Rojo. What really elevated the performance beyond the ordinary was the dancing of Nikisha Fogo and Max Cauthorn, above. Fogo in particular was breathtaking and took the final Grand Pas de Deux to a zone of pure excitement.

You can catch one of the remaining eight performances from the 26th to 29th at the War Memorial Opera House, and they even seem to be offering a Post-Christmas sale on tickets at their website here.