Favorite Musical Moments 2025

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to one of the richest, most varied classical music scenes in the United States. I only attended a fraction of what was on offer this year, and here are some of my favorite moments, starting with the world premiere in January at the San Francisco Symphony of After The Fall, a new piano concerto by Bay Area composer John Adams. He wrote the concerto for Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson who gave an incredible performance with David Robinson conducting.

Also in January, the New Century Chamber Orchestra gave a wonderful concert at the Presidio Theatre, highlighted by a performance of the Shostakovich First Piano Concerto with pianist Inon Barnatan and trumpeter Brandon Ridenour as soloists.

The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale have been fairly rudderless since Nicholas McGegan stepped down as Music Director and his replacement didn't work out. In March, the 47-year-old Irishman Peter Whelan conducted a delightful performance of Handel's Alceste. Soon after, he was named the new Music Director, starting in the 2026-27 season.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts on almost every day of the week, and there are treasures abounding. In April, I went to an orchestral concert led by student conductors that featured a thrilling performance of John Adams's incredibly difficult Chamber Symphony, led by Chih-Yao Chang.

I've never been particularly moved by La Boheme, Puccini's sentimental weepie about young artists in mid-19th century Paris, but the San Francisco Opera production this summer actually moved me to tears with its fine ensemble cast and production.

The saddest artistic news of the year was the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior of the SF Symphony Board which managed to so alienate Esa-Pekka Salonen that he refused to renew his contract as Music Director. His final concert was a barn-burning performance of Mahler's huge Resurrection Symphony in June.

The happiest artistic news of the year was the literal last-minute rescue by a venture capital family foundation of The Oasis, a nightclub at 11th & Folsom Streets specializing in drag shows, performance art, cabaret and whatever catches the fancy of D'Arcy Drollinger, its hardworking genius impresario. I caught a sophisticated, filthy cabaret show there in June called Noctornal Omissions featuring John Coons and Jonah Wheeler.

Verdi's Requiem was scheduled to open the 2024-2025 season last year with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, but there was a walkout by the SF Symphony Chorus after serious mistreatment by the SF Symphony Board. Finally, an anonymous donor contributed a few million dollars so that the union choristers could continue to be paid, and at the very end of the season, the Requiem was finally performed with James Gaffigan conducting. Even though I'm a longtime Verdi worshiper, I had never warmed up to the massive choral work until this performance at the end of June, which was magnificent.

The Merola Opera Program for aspiring opera professionals put on an absolutely gorgeous production in August of a rarely performed Rossini opera, Le Comte Ory. This was the composer's penultimate opera, written right before his swan song William Tell, and the music is some of the best he ever composed. The young cast did it full justice.

In Oakland, West Edge Opera commissioned and nurtured Dolores, a new opera by Nicolás Lell Benavides about the California labor organizer Dolores Huerta. The titular heroine is still alive in her 90s and attended a number of the performances. Even better, Benavides's music for a small orchestra and voices was consistently brilliant.

The annual Other Minds Music Festival, headed for decades by founder Charles Amirkhanian, took place in October at the Brava Theater on 24th Street this year. One evening of the new music festival's programs was dedicated to composer Samuel Adams performed by a full roster of Bay Area musicians, including Sarah Cahill and the Friction Quartet. It was a perfectly joyful evening.

Also in October, the American Bach Soloists gave a wonderful early music concert called The Grand Tour at St. Mark's Church on Cathedral Hill. Featuring works by Handel, Vivaldi, and J.S. Bach, it was a reminder of why this group under Music Director Jeffrey Thomas is such a treasure.

The San Francisco Opera finished its shortened fall season with two productions that the company conceived and built themselves, and both were invigoratingly successful. First up was Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, with tenor Brandon Jovanovich giving a sensitive performance as the title character and a supporting cast that was pretty much flawless. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducted the four-hour-plus score beautifully.

Next up was the world premiere of The Monkey King, a new opera by composer Huang Ruo with a libretto by David Henry Hwang. Much of its sold-out success can be attributed to a fantastic production involving thousands of yards of silk, puppetry, dancing, flying, and ingenious staging by director Diane Paulus and puppeteer/designer Basil Twist. Plus, the tenor Kang Wang in the title role was sensationally good, heading up a strong cast and chorus playing gods, monks, undersea creatures, and monkeys. It exceeded everyone's expectations.

33 Hours Later: The Great SF Power Outage

The lights in our Civic Center apartment started flickering around 1:15 PM on Saturday afternoon. The power for our entire four-story building went out around 1:30 PM.

I walked through the neighborhood to see if it was only our building that was affected, but local businesses on Grove Street were without power too.

The Main Branch of the SF Public Library was busy clearing out patrons from their darkened building on Grove Street.

A touring production of the musical "Moulin Rouge" at the Orpheum Theater was shut down after the first act, with a promise of refunds.

For some reason, there was also a giddy looking group of firemen assisting patrons out of the theater.

To add to the mayhem, there was a rescue of some sort happening on Jones Street a block away...

...along with a barricaded shooter situation at the Palace Hotel which stopped all Muni bus traffic for a while.

At Fourth and Market, the Ross Dress for Less store was being evacuated.

One of the oddest details of the afternoon, besides the gentleman above in some kind of Christmas diaper fetish outfit, was how random and sporadic the outages were downtown.

The north side of Market Street towards Union Square was fully powered, including the Winter Wonderland event on a closed-off Stockton Street, where people were posing with Princess Peach from the Mario Brothers videogame...

...and volunteers were glueing seeds and flowers to little sections of a Rose Parade float sponsored by the City of San Francisco this year.

Night arrived early for the Winter Solstice and we tried to take a walk, but it was frankly terrifying because most of the traffic signal lights in the Civic Center neighborhood were out and crossing a street as a pedestrian felt perilous.

To add to the apocalyptic feel of the outage, Waymo robot taxis were having nervous breakdowns all over the city. They would stop at an intersection, confused there were no traffic signals, and just sit there blocking traffic for long periods of time. In the photo above, the police took quite a while to realize that the Waymo in front of them wasn't going to move, so it slowly went around the vehicle. However, the police car's flashing lights must have signaled something to the robot taxi, and it joined the police vehicle in crossing the intersection, but then started weaving like a drunk as it made its way up Franklin Street.

Sunday dawned without any restoration of power in the neighborhood, and those who seemed to have it worst were the luxury skyscraper inhabitants at 100 Van Ness, where they didn't even have running water because the plumbing system there is electronically controlled. Quite a few of them were waiting outside late Sunday afternoon to be driven to hotels. Around 10:45 PM the power was restored to our building, and for continuing excitement on Monday we now get to look forward to possible flooding from the Pineapple Express barreling in over the Pacific Ocean. Happy Winter Solstice.

Civic Center Christmas Tree Lighting

A large crowd assembled in Civic Center this evening across from City Hall for the annual Christmas Tree lighting.

Free presents were promised for the first 500 kids...

...and the line for the giveaway literally stretched around the block.

The San Francisco Boys' Chorus sang Christmas carols from the small stage set up in front of the tree...

...while a contingent of tap dancing Christmas trees from Alameda arrived to perform after them.

The many children in the audience were well-behaved, though some of their parents looked to be at wits' end.

There was an amusing magician who made snow appear out of nowhere along with a musical combo...

...and a comedian emcee who was delightful interacting with kiddie volunteers, including Justin from the SF Boys Chorus above.

He eventually introduced the new San Francisco Mayor, Daniel Lurie...

...who then invited about two dozen other local dignitaries to the stage, including California Assemblyman Matt Haney and SF Fire Department Chief Dean Crispen.

Finally, after a communal countdown, the huge tree was lit for the year and a merry time was had by all.

The Monkey King Phenomenon at SF Opera

The final work of the San Francisco Opera fall season was a world premiere that turned into a sold-out sensation. Composed by Chinese-American composer Huang Ruo with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, The Monkey King was a startling success in a sumptuously creative production. Considering that there are no romances or deaths or any of the melodramatic situations that propel most opera plots, it was a surprising triumph.

Before each performance, there was an unusually rich and insightful lecture by Sidney Chen. He started by explaining the genesis of the story, taken from an episodic 1592 Chinese novel Journey to the West, and how the character of the Monkey King has been used over the centuries in Peking operas, plays, animated television series, modern videogames, and now a Western style opera. "This opera, by the way, only covers the first seven chapters of Journey to the West, which is 100 chapters long."

After a contemplative opening chorus singing the Buddhist Diamond Sutra in Mandarin, the language turns to English when the Monkey King is born out of a rock in the first of a host of amazing theatrical effects. The title character is played interchangeably by a puppet, the dancer Huiwang Zhang, and the tenor Kang Wang who was extraordinary throughout. I hope the company brings him back to sing any role he desires because his voice and physicality felt boundless. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The real major character of the opera was the chorus, who played a monkey tribe given safe haven by its new king, along with decadent courtiers in Heaven...

...and Buddhist disciples of Master Subhuti, sung beautifully by bass-baritone Jusung Gabriel Park.

After being kicked out of the religious group by his Buddhist master, who has given him the name Sun Wukong, the Monkey King goes under the sea to steal a powerful weapon from the Dragon King Ao Guang, sung authoritatively by baritone Joo Woo Kang,

The stars of the opera, however, were the production team in one of the most spectacular physical shows ever seen at the opera house. Directed by Diane Paulus, this swiftly moving production is an elaborate, monumental work created by set designer and master of puppetry Basil Twist. I had seen a couple of his small shows at the HERE Center in Manhattan over the years, but even the impressive work he did on the San Francisco Ballet's production of Prokofiev's Cinderella didn't quite prepare me for the sheer grandeur of this creation. He was aided by Sara C. Walsh as an associate set designer, Anita Yavich as costume designer, Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa as lighting designer, and Hana S. Kim as the projection designer.

They all created genuine magic, flying us from mountaintops to the bottom of the ocean to a familiarly corrupt heaven where the Monkey King is insulted once again by human royalty treating him contemptuously. The character is a trickster, however, and in one of the most exquisite moments of stagecraft, he sets the Heavenly Horses free to roam the skies, an effect created by a small army of puppeteers.

The music by composer Huang Ruo is a complex grab-bag of styles, from minimalism to hints of other 20th century composers and even Broadway style propulsion. My only criticism is that many of the vocal lines were difficult and unwieldy for most of the singers, who all still managed to give impressive performances. It was a blessed relief when the Monkey King was finally given a lyrical aria near the finale in The Land of Bliss, and we could hear the sheer beauty of Kang Wang's voice.

The libretto by David Henry Hwang is well structured with its flashback device of the Monkey King, imprisoned under a mountain for 500 years, looking back at his life and adventures so far. These included defeating the avenging legions of Heaven, with chorister Jonathan Smucker as King of the East amusingly performing an air guitar/pipa duel with the Monkey King.

My only problem with the libretto is how flat and unpoetic much of the English is in a medium that almost demands real poetry. My friend James Parr, who is bilingual in Mandarin and English, noted that the Chinese surtitles were much more beautifully poetic than the English surtitles in both Hwang's The Monkey King and his earlier libretto for 2016's Dream of the Red Chamber.

Throughout this hectic, episodic tale, there are calm intervals where Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion guides The Monkey King on the road away from ego and arrogance to compassionate enlightenment. Sung gorgeously by soprano Mei Gui Zhang while floating all over the stage, she is finally joined by Buddha who grants The Monkey King freedom from his 500-year-old mountain tomb so he can begin his Journey to the West. Congratulations to everyone involved in this ambitious success.