Coming to Town

The ancient Chinese Terracotta Warriors and their accoutrements are being unpacked and installed at the Asian Art Museum this week in anticipation of next week's opening.



The marketing of the exhibit has literally been all over the map and will include a donor's party on the 20th and a dance party on Thursday the 21st that features a tenuous tie-in to the cult 1979 Walter Hill New York gang movie The Warriors. (For a British website dedicated to the crazy film, click here.)



Also coming to town are new directors for the San Francisco Girls Chorus at Page and Market. It's going to a dual directorship, with the San Francisco raised, New York based singer/composer Lisa Bielawa above left as the new Artistic Director, and Valerie Sainte-Agathe above right from Montpellier, France taking over as the daily Music Director and Principal Conductor. The manner in which the organization got rid of their last artistic director, Susan McMane, was a clumsy fiasco (click here), so it's great news that Bielawa is joining the organization.



Continuing with the French invasion, Emmanuel Morlet above will be the new Artistic Director at Sonoma State's Green Music Center, with its beautiful new Weill Hall, leaving his position in New York as Director of the Music Office for the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Why can't I have I have a job like that, just for the job title alone?



Finally, a host of performances are coming up this week that are all special. The SFJAZZ Center is opening up its ground-floor, glass-enclosed Joe Henderson Lab above on Thursday, Valentine's Day with the SFJAZZ Hotplate Festival for four nights. Also this week is Philharmonia Baroque playing unfamiliar Haydn, Mozart and C.P. Bach symphonies around the Bay Area, the San Francisco Symphony has an interesting concert featuring Lindberg, Prokofiev, and the great pianist Stephen Hough playing Liszt, and Opera Parallele is presenting Ainamadar by Osvaldo Golijov at Yerba Buena this weekend. Though not ordinarily a fan of Golijov's music, I have been listening to the Dawn Upshaw recording on the one-act opera all week and the piece is really growing on me. It will be great to experience it live.