Margaret Halbin & Friends Perform in the Sky

On the 11th floor of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's new building on Van Ness Avenue, there is a gorgeous room with wraparound windows that was originally designed as a fundraising event space, but has accidentally morphed into a performance hall for chamber music concerts. Besides the spectacular view, the space is not ideal for concerts since there is no tiered seating so the sightlines are poor unless you're in the front row. Additionally, the acoustics are too bright, particularly for a piano which always sounds clangy when the volume crosses a certain decibel level, no matter who is the pianist. Still, there are amazing concerts to be heard for the price of a free online reservation

Late Sunday afternoon there was a Faculty Recital of pianist Margaret Halbig with three pieces of music I had never heard before. The opener was Zita, a five-minute arrangement for two pianists from the longer 1975 Suite Troileana by Astor Piazzolla. (Click here for a YouTube performance by the composer and his Octeto Electronico in Rome.) The duo of Halbig and Sharon Kim were delightful and so was the music.

I first encountered Margaret Halbig when she was a member of the new music group Wild Rumpus over a decade ago, and since then she has moved on to teaching at the SF Conservatory and anchoring another new music group called Ensemble for These Times. In other words, she is a specialist in collaboration, and this recital was a good example of that. The second work was the 2020 Little River Songs by Jennifer Higdon, written for piano, cello, and mezzo-soprano. The two songs are dark, folksy and captivating, and were given a heartfelt performance by Halbig, vocalist Melinda Becker and cellist Megan Chartier. (Click here for a YouTube performance with the composer at the piano.)

The major work on the program was Rachmaninoff's 1901 Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 19. Pianist Halbig and cellist Chartier obviously loved the complex, four-movement, 35-minute piece and kept the full house audience suspended in attentive silence. It was a lovely concert.

25th Annual SF Zine Fest

The 25th Annual San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday afternoon was a blast from the past in more ways than one.

First of all, it was being held at the 1892 Hibernia Bank building at Jones and McAllister...

...which was recently renovated as an event space after sitting vacant for decades.

Secondly, the free admission event was requiring all vendors and attendees to wear masks...

...which engendered immediate PTSD in those who were transported back to the bad old days of COVID's onset in 2020.

Security at the door, who were handing out snug black masks, explained that it was for the benefit of vendors who lived with disabilities and immunosuppression, but it felt strange and uncomfortable.

Though zine culture seems like vintage pre-internet, its current creators represent a physical corrective to our increasingly corporate, digital world.

In a side room I stumbled across one of the serious legends of alternative culture, V. Vale. I had no idea who the gentleman was until returning home and reading his bio at the RE/SEARCH website: "Possibly the ONLY surviving 70s punk publisher who never quit, V. Vale’s RE/Search continues to provide ‘Against-the-Status-Quo’ publications that stimulate the imagination and optimistic skepticism. Vale has been doing counterculture publishing since 1977, when he founded the Punk tabloid, Search & Destroy, San Francisco’s first. It was published at City Lights Bookstore, where V. Vale worked, and was funded by $100 each from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Then in 1980, V. Vale launched RE/SEARCH, which is best known for its impact on the total world of underground culture."

Also attending was another legendary publisher, Larry-Bob Roberts, who started the Holy Titclamps queer punk zine in Minnesota in 1989 and continued publishing it in San Francisco until 2003.

2026 Merola Grand Finale

Over the last couple of decades, I have written eight posts about the summer-ending Merola Grand Finale at the San Francisco Opera House. As Joshua Kosman notes in his short wrap-up of this year's concert of aspiring professional opera singers, "Good luck to any critic trying to write about it, though. There’s no story on offer aside from Here are the Merolini to give you one last glimpse of what they can do." (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Somebody once left a comment on one of my Merola posts to the effect that "you always say that this year had the best overall crop of singers ever," and they were probably right about the repetitive hyperbole. This year I am not making that claim, however, and if you can't say anything nice, refer to people who can. Steven Winn wrote an extensive, appreciative listing of his favorite moments at SFCV, Charlise Tiee at the Opera Tattler did the same, and educator Matthew Travisano offered a sweet-spirited account at Parterre Box.

Most of the operatic greatest hits selections were love duets, and one of my favorites was Ariana Maubach as Charlotte and Charles Styles as Werther, singing Il faut nous separer from Massenet's Werther. Styles's voice is too small to be singing this role in a large opera house at this point in his career, but it's a very pretty tenor, and his interaction with mezzo-soprano Maubach made me remember how lovable this opera can be.

Another duet was performed by mezzo-soprano Theo Claveles as Didon and Matthew Sink as Enee, singing Nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie from Berlioz's Les Troyens. It may be my favorite operatic love duet in the world, and the pair did it justice.

Near the end of the three-hour long concert, there was a huge bolt of energy from tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, singing the grotesque Aria of the Worm from Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles. The young singer has stage charisma to burn and it was a joy to see him light the place up. Johnson's evolving career should be be interesting to watch.

West Edge Opera 2026

West Edge Opera's summer festival this year at Oakland's Scottish Rite Temple has been a great success overall, with the only disappointment being the opener, Benjamin Britten's 1954 The Turn of the Screw. I was looking forward to the production because Britten is a favorite composer and the soprano Laura Bohn, heading a strong cast as the Governess, is one of my favorite singing actresses in the world. However, the show didn't work for me on any level. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The main problem is that over three-quarters of the live action takes place behind scrims on which videos are projected along with the two singing ghosts transmitted from a makeshift video room high in the hall. This creates a severe distancing effect for the audience, and half the time it's difficult to even discern whats going on or where each of the 16 scenes are supposed to be taking place.

Henry James's 1898 novella is famously ambiguous as to whether the erotically insinuating ghosts are real or are the invention of a sexually repressed young Governess, or both. The Britten version leans in the direction of the ghosts being real, and before their deaths having corrupted the abandoned children Miles and Flora. However, the director went with the hysterical young Governess interpretation, which didn't make much sense. The Freudian case study of an hysterical woman inventing sexual crimes feels like an outdated cliche, particularly in our Epstein saturated moment. Additionally, most of the sensual vocal music in the astringent score is between the boy soprano Miles and the ghost of Peter Quint, seen above in a strong, convincingly creepy performance by tenor Alex Boyer. Britten was also a bit of a tortured pedophile himself, and you can hear that anguish in his music in everything from Peter Grimes to Curlew River.

The second opera of the festival, Handel's 1711 Rinaldo, was a wildly colorful palate cleanser. The narrative about Christian Crusaders tangling with Muslim Saracens was updated to comic-book superheroes battling archvillains by director and choreographer Keturah Stickann in a marvelous production that worked splendidly. The production also featured six dancing supernumeraries playing Cops and Villains, and they were unexpectedly delightful, deserving their own shoutout: Ellis Broderick, Eden Magana, Elena Martins, Devon Martinez y McFarland, Christopher Nachtra, and Max van der Sterre.

The bottomlessly deep voice of contralto Sara Couden was perfect for the bumbling police chief Goffredo and countertenor Kyle Tingzon as our superhero Rinaldo proved that his star turn as Oberon in Pocket Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this year was no fluke. Best of all, the comic-book concept was played straight, without campy, wink-wink asides, even though there was plenty of humor involved, particularly in some of the colloquial supertitle translations ("This is freaking me out").

Villains usually have the juiciest roles in superhero tales, and baritone Efraín Solís as the evil Argante and soprano Nikki Einfeld as the sorceress Armida inhabited their parts with amusing style and vocal beauty.

The production was also helped immeasurably by the colorful, outrageous costumes of Bethany Deal (pictured above). A special acknowledgement also needs to go out to trumpeters Daniel Norris and Rob Wilkins in the orchestra who did a splendid job in some of Handel's most festive music.

The final opera of the festival, American Apollo, was a complex, emotionally resonant triumph that premiered in Des Moines in 2024. The libretto by Lila Palmer is unusually intelligent, giving every character their due, and it's singable as well without a lot of extraneous text. The score by Damian Geter is written in a conservative, tonal idiom that manages to stay compelling throughout, and at times lyrically beautiful. You could hear the audience breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't going to be a thorny musical afternoon in the theater. The narrative is fascinating, centering on Thomas McKeller, a young black man who was part of the Great Migration from Wilmington, North Carolina to Boston, Massachusetts at the beginning of the 20th century. While working as an elevator attendant at the upscale Hotel Vendome in Boston, McKeller was approached by the famous painter John Singer Sargent who asked if he would model for him.

Tenor John Bellemer did a fine job as Sargent, and soprano Marnie Breckenridge was reliably brilliant as the rich, eccentric patroness Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was building her Boston art museum, and was a close friend of the artist. In the opera, she watches with sympathetic interest the dynamic between Sargent while he was using McKeller as a body model for a series of murals commissioned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This involved erasing McKellar's face and black skin while having him pose as everyone from Achilles to Apollo.

Though Sargent has never been officially tagged as homosexual by historians, anecdotally among acquaintances it was well-known, and in this opera it is posited that the relationship between model and painter was an on-again, off-again love affair, interrupted by McKeller's fear of exploitation and then by World War One. When that war ended, Sargent reunited with McKeller and proposed that they travel through Europe together, but the young man turned him down, saying being a "kept man" would destroy him. Incidentally, a friend who saw the world premiere of this opera in Des Moines two years ago said, "This is a much gayer production than we saw in Iowa."

Markel Reed gave a magnificent performance as Thomas McKeller, and his baritone was one of the strongest voices to be heard in the entire festival. His final aria, as he discovered the nude portrait Sargent painted of him and kept hidden away in his private collection, was a fitting finale.

The new Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, Kedrick Armstrong, guided the 21-person orchestra expertly, and the scenic designer Nina Ball did an excellent job creating a unit set that could easily be everything from a hotel lobby to an artist's studio with the change of a few props and lighting. Finally, director Nataki Garrett created a sensitive, believable world onstage. Their contributions were a reminder that West Edge Opera is a serious local treasure, and you can still see all three operas in the festival's upcoming final weekend. Click here for tickets.