Shostakovich and Brahms at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony presented two major works this weekend, conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The first half was Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto #1, composed in 1948 but unperformed until 1955 when Stalin was safely in a grave. Because my brain is a memory sieve these days, I couldn't remember if I had ever heard the piece before. Thanks to this blog's search engine it turns out that I had heard the awesome German violinist Christian Tetzlaff perform as soloist with Susanna Malkki conducting the SF Symphony in 2015. The forgotten review started with: "one of the most stupendous, virtuosic, soulful musical performances of my long concertgoing life."

Unfortunately, that was not the case with Saturday evening's performance where violinist Sayaka Shoji was the soloist. This was her debut with the orchestra, and for me it was disappointing. This is difficult, expressive music, and she seemed to play every note perfectly while missing the meaning throughout. (All onstage production photos, except for the final one, are by Stefan Cohen.)

The four-movement work starts with a long Nocturne, which should set a sad, meditative tone but instead felt like being stuck in a dull way station. Shoji handled the fast movements better, but completely missed the diabolical sarcasm of the second and the village fiddler joy in the fourth. The long, slow third-movement Passacaglia is the heart of the work, ending with an extended cadenza for the soloist which should make you want to stand up and cheer at the end, but that wasn't the case on Saturday.

I had been talking up the exciting violin concerto to Austin and James, above, and felt like a liar when they both came to intermission with a "meh" expression.

Shostakovich composed the concerto for the legendary Russian violinist David Oistrakh and there are a number of his great recordings of the work on YouTube. If you are interested, click here.

The second half of the program was devoted to Brahms' Symphony #4. After another blog search, I was reminded of a masterful rendition by Herbert Blomstedt and the SF Symphony in 2020, right before the pandemic. Salonen's Brahms was quite a different experience, but completely valid and interesting in its own way. He took the symphony at a much faster pace than I am used to, excepting the slow second movement, and it worked brilliantly.

The individual soloists in the orchestra were a continuous delight, from Eugene Izotov on oboe to Ed Stephan on tympani, who led the orchestra's muscular, driving rendition with ferocious energy.

Modern and Ancient Sanctuary at Davies Hall

It was In Search of the Sacred at Davies Hall last weekend, with the composer Missy Mazzoli curating the SoundBox nightclub in a program called Modern Sanctuary and conductor Herbert Blomstedt offering Beethoven and Brahms in the main hall with a performance that felt infused by the deities.

Missy Mazzoli is a 39-year-old East Coast composer who is writing some of the most interesting theatrical music in the world right now, capped by her three operas from the last decade, Songs from the Uproar, Breaking The Waves, and Proving Up. Four years ago I saw another show she curated at Le Poisson Rouge, the hipster basement speakeasy in Greenwich Village, where I thought, "I wish she had curated more of her own music and left the arias from Faust and Peter Grimes sung by overmatched young singers out of the program."

At her disposal in SoundBox were some of the best musicians in the world, such as principal SF Symphony Violist Jonathan Vinocour playing Mario Balter's mesmeric, extended technique Ut.

There was also soprano Marnie Breckenridge, looking and sounding exquisite, vocalising with composer Mario Diaz de Leon on his Sanctuary.

This was followed by Missy Mazzoli, Lorna Dune, and Marnie Breckenridge performing a piece from Mazzoli's Vespers for a New Dark Age, followed by Meredith Monk's Passage and What Does It Mean?.

The evening continued with the longer, minimalist Sacrament by Mario Diaz de Leon with Robin McKee, flute, Jacob Nissly, percussion, and Jerome Simas, clarinet. Another highlight was a Vespers piece for solo violin and electronics by Mazzoli, prefacing a somnolent, atmospheric piece by John Luther Adams, The Light Within, and finally Arvo Part's Silentium from Tabula Rasa.

It's fun to join interesting younger people who are stepping out to a nightclub atmosphere rather than going to a stuffy classical music concert, but this may be my last SoundBox. The experimental excitement and genuine hipness of the first few years have mostly fled with higher ticket prices and a few too many audience members attending only because they have heard it's the hot, happening ticket in town. By the end of the evening, I felt more sleepy than spiritually refreshed.

Two days later, at what I refer to as the old ladies' Sunday matinee, proved to be a holier experience.

Herbert Blomstedt, the SF Symphony's Music Director from 1985-1995, had returned for his annual two-week stint heading the orchestra, conducting the most boring of classical music staples, Beethoven and Brahms, with the assistance of the new young assistant concertmaster Wyatt Underhill.

It was wonderful seeing Underhill getting a chance to be concertmaster in such bread-and-butter fare as the Beethoven Second Symphony and the Brahms Fourth Symphony because he radiates the same kind of joy in musicmaking as cellist Peter Wyrick at his side. The Beethoven was alive and continuously interesting (and this is not a composer I love at all), while the Brahms Fourth was the best live performance of that work I have ever heard. Blomstedt managed to draw out such a clean sound that it didn't feel like an interpretation so much as a conjuring of how exciting and moving the music sounded at its composition, as if all kinds of time and barnacles had been scraped off.

Blomstedt is 92 years old and becoming more masterful each year. A Wikipedia article notes, "A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Blomstedt does not rehearse on Friday nights or Saturdays, the Sabbath in Seventh-day Adventism. He does, however, conduct concerts, since he considers actual performances to be an expression of his religious devotion rather than work." Listening to this Brahms Fourth, I could see heaven.

Synthesthesia at the SF Symphony

I enjoyed last week's San Francisco Symphony concert very much, though I didn't care for a lot of the music, which sounds absurd.

The number one reason for pleasure was the Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki, who has conducted some of the greatest performances I have heard with this orchestra, from Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto to Sibelius' Fifth Symphony to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

The first half of last week's program had Nikolaj Znaider playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. I heard his debut with the orchestra in 20018, playing Brahms with Blomstedt, and praised the lack of schmaltz in his performance, but the Tchaikovsky could have used a bit more of it. The ridicuously beautiful melodic lines were sort of thrown away while the orchestra under Mälkki was giving a fast, taut performance behind him.

The second half of the program featured the work of two famous composers with synesthesia (the gift/curse of seeing music in vivid colors), the contemporary Kaija Saariaho and the turn of the 19th/20th Century Russian mystic Scriabin. The Saariaho work, Laterna Magica from 2008, was a 25-minute exploration of light in sound, using Ingmar Berman's memoir as an inspiration. The piece begins and ends with variations on the same, austere sequence but in between it is all over the place and hard to pin down mentally. So I just relaxed and luxuriated in the sound, which was extraordinary. Scriabin's 1907 The Poem of Ecstasy sounds like Debussy at his most meandering until it picks up steam halfway and culminates in an orchestral climax that is equivalent to the opening of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. After the Saariaho, it sounded rather vulgar, but you have to love a visionary who intuits global warming a century early. Here's a quote: "According to renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz, Toward The Flame was inspired by Scriabin's eccentric conviction that a constant accumulation of heat would ultimately cause the destruction of the world."

Classical Music Top 10 for 2015

San Francisco boosters overuse the phrase "world-class," but the Bay Area's classical music scene deserves the description. This is true for most of its manifestations, high and low, from the San Francisco Opera to the Tenderloin storefront of the Center for New Music. So let's have a Top 10 List for 2015 (in sorta chronological order), even though I have cheated and put up multiple performances in one category because there was so much good music last year. (Pictured above at a March concert by Wild Rumpus at The Center for New Music, soprano Vanessa Langer vocalised and played digitally interactive metal sheets in Oakland composer David Coll's Position, Influence.)

1. New Music Gathering at the SF Conservatory of Music


Langer gave a bravura performance of the same David Coll composition in January at the first annual New Music Gathering. This was a long weekend organized by four Brooklyn friends (left to right above: Daniel Felsenfeld, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lainie Fefferman, and Matt Marks) at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, combining East Coast and West Coast performers and composers in a remarkable cross-pollination that included performances by everyone from the ICE flautist Claire Chase to pianist Sarah Cahill playing Terry Riley with the composer in attendance. The Gathering seemed to be more about artists meeting each other rather than putting on a show for an audience, but the concerts were still extraordinary. A second edition of the Gathering is scheduled for the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in a couple of weeks, and if you are in the area, check it out.

2. American Bach Soloists


The early music ensemble headed by Music Director Jeffrey Thomas gave a number of wonderful performances around the Bay Area in 2015. My favorite was Handel's pastoral oratorio, Acis and Galatea, with soloists Kyle Stegall and Nola Richardson as the doomed young lovers. Both singers were originally discovered/nurtured at the ABS Festival Academy in the summer for young professionals, which was particularly rich this year in performances from the French Baroque.

3. Berio's "Sinfonia" at UC Davis


Every two years the Music Department at UC Davis puts on a New Music Festival, and this year's edition included a rare performance of Luciano Berio's 1968 Sinfonia for large orchestra and eight amplified singers that was mind-blowingly good. The soloists were recruited from San Francisco's Volti chorus and the piece was conducted by Christian Baldini, posing in front of his soloists at a reception after the concert.

4. San Francisco Symphony


There are so many concerts over the course of a season at the San Francisco Symphony, ranging from dull to thrilling and everywhere in between, that it is tricky deciding which to attend. One nearly fail-proof strategy is to go to any concert featuring the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, under director Ragnar Bohlin, who can sing anything from Bach to John Adams superbly. My two favorite performances from them this year were in the Brahms German Requiem conducted by Herbert Blomstedt and Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass conducted by Andras Schiff, above right.



Another good bet at the SF Symphony is any music by 20th century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. A series of guest conductors and soloists have performed with the orchestra over the last decade with breathtaking musicianship and skill, and the latest examples were Vasily Petrenko (above left) conducting the Technicolor Symphony #12, The Year 1917 in March and violinist Christian Tetzlaff (above right) playing the Violin Concerto #1 in October with conductor Susanna Mälkki.

5. Left Coast Chamber Ensemble


The musicians at Left Coast Chamber Ensemble seem to play whatever amuses them, mixing up 19th century chamber works with modernist world premieres. 2015 was an ambitious, successful year, with concerts in Mill Valley and San Francisco, including the world premiere in March of violist/composer Kurt Rohde's first opera, Death With Interruptions, and a visit from composer Kaija Saariaho. (Pictured above are Daniel Cilli and Nikki Einfeld as Death, and cellist Leighton Fong with Saariaho before he played her Papillons.)

6. Soundbox


The San Francisco Symphony's new winter and spring nightclub in a large rehearsal space at the back of Davies Hall has been a serendipitous success, where everything works when it could have so easily gone wrong. The mixture of symphony players with great local musicians like pianist Sarah Cahill and composer Nathaniel Stookey (above left) and guest artists like Meow Meow (above right) has been invigorating for all. The programming of short pieces from the entire spectrum of classical music history has been inventive and adventurous. The Meyer sound system is a perfect fit for the acoustically dead space. The projections by Adam Larsen are consistently absorbing and unobtrusive, a tricky balancing act. Best of all, the audiences tend to be one of the quietest, most concentrated groups I've experienced at SF Symphony concerts. Plus, everyone gets to talk to each other during the frequent intermissions from their adjoining black divans while sipping cocktails. What's not to like? Congratulations to everyone involved, and a special shout-out to Symphony PR goddesses Louisa Spier and Amelisa Kusar who were part of the planning.

7. The Trojans at the San Francisco Opera


The grandest of French Grand Operas was finally given its full due at the San Francisco Opera in June. The casting, headed by Bryan Hymel and Susan Graham, was luxurious, and every role exquisitely sung. Donald Runnicles conducting the Opera Orchestra was some of the best Berlioz ever heard, and the chorus was outstanding in demanding stretches of music. The five hour Trojans felt shorter than many operas half that length, and it was exciting to realize how stageworthy this gargantuan piece can be. I stood in the balcony for four performances, joined by many of the hardcore music lovers of the Bay Area, including Charlise Tiee and Terence Shek above. This was one of the top ten productions I have experienced in five decades of attending the San Francisco Opera. Kudos to everyone involved. Now, will some enterprising musical group please program Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ next Christmas instead of another Messiah? I have still never heard the delicate Berlioz oratorio live.

8. West Edge Opera


The spunky, produced-on-a-shoestring, East Bay opera company newly branded as West Edge Opera produced an insanely ambitious season of three concert operas in the spring and three staged operas in a summer festival at various locations in Oakland that included a punk rock club and an abandoned train station. The result was an astonishing success. The concert operas, rare works by famous composers, had their highs and lows in terms of casting and chamber orchestra reduction, but hearing Rossini's Zelmira, Donizetti's Poliuto, and Verdi's I Due Foscari at low prices in odd venues (Rossmoor's new social hall and Berkeley's Freight & Salvage) was a treat.

I didn't see the universally lauded production of Berg's Lulu with the breakout performance by Emma Lynn McNairy because I was too busy playing half a dozen supernumerary characters in Laura Kaminsky's recent transgender opera, As One. This was given a sensitive, committed performance by Dan Kempson and Brenda Patterson as two sides of the same person, with exquisite musical accompaniment by the Friction String Quartet. I did make it to Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria staged in a large Burning Man warehouse space in West Oakland, and it was a delight in every way. It was led by conductor Gilbert Martinez and a beautiful original instruments orchestra, with witty staging by company director Mark Streshinsky of a uniformly strong cast.

9. More Monteverdi with Gardner and Stewart


In April, the venerable British early music pioneer John Eliot Gardner brought his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists to Davies Hall for an intermissionless, semi-staged concert of Monteverdi's first proto-opera, L'Orfeo, and it was enchanting in every way. In September at St. Mark's Lutheran Church, Berkeley-based Warren Stewart and his early music group Magnificat performed an all-Monteverdi madrigals concert that was just about perfect. Pictured above right are Christine Brandes and Jennifer Paulino.

10. Savitri and River of Light at Festival Opera


Festival Opera, which used to perform in Walnut Creek's downtown music center, has imploded like many other small opera companies, but there is a group trying to keep the organization alive. In November, they presented a double bill at the Asian Cultural Center in downtown Oakland of Gustav Holst's Hindu religious mythical one-act, Savitri, in a double bill with River of Light, Oakland composer Jack Perla's recent one-act opera about cultural alienation/assimilation after emigration to the U.S. The music in both operas was wondrous, and the performances by a small female chorus, Western and Indian instrumentalists, and a handful of vocal soloists was superb. Pictured above are Daniel Cilli and Maya Kherani as the mixed-race couple trying to figure it out in Oakland.

For all flesh is as grass

The Saturday evening performance at the San Francisco Symphony of Brahms' A German Requiem was stirring and beautiful. It's too bad that the concert started with a deadly dull rendition by organist Jonathan Dimmock of four Chorale Preludes by Brahms, followed by the same composer's acapella motet for chorus entitled Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Muhseligen (Why is light given to those in misery?).



I reassured a number of subscribers at intermission that things would pick up immensely in the second half, and they did. Soloists baritone Christian Gerhaher (above right) and soprano Ruth Ziesak (not pictured) were superb in their small roles, Herbert Blomstedt's conducting was magisterial, the orchestra was sharp, and the massive SF Symphony Chorus was stupendously good. The music is still vibrating in my brain and body two days later. Congratulations to everyone.

Why You Should Hear The Brahms Requiem This Weekend

Herbert Blomstedt (above) is in San Francisco for two weeks to conduct concerts at the San Francisco Symphony, his old orchestra where he was Music Director from 1985-1995. I heard him conducting the Sibelius Second Symphony last week in a precise yet smoothly controlled performance that was wonderful to experience. Blomstedt is 87 years old and only conducts a few orchestras where he has a long rapport in Germany and Scandinavia and San Francisco.



On Wednesday evening, the Friends of the SF Symphony were invited to an evening rehearsal of this weekend's program, the Brahms Requiem, and I asked a few of the attendees whether or not they were Blomstedt Fans.



Michele above was definitely one. "Blomstedt was the person who turned the San Francisco Symphony from what was, honestly, a so-so orchestra to a world class one. You could hear him elevating the sound from the time he arrived. He's also a very genial, gallant man. I used to sit in the Center Terrace a lot when he was Music Director and you could see that in his interactions with the orchestra."



The rehearsal was fascinating, as Blomstedt would play through each movement without pause, and then spend the next five to ten minutes singing and talking his way through what he REALLY wanted, and then entire sections would be replayed, and they always sounded better. The SF Symphony Chorus, with plenty of competition, is the eminent choral group in the Bay Area right now and they were sounding exquisite, particularly after Blomstedt would tell them that they must "accent it like so [singing] on these particular words like so [singing]." The performances should be very special.



I'm making this recommendation even though I can't abide requiems. George Bernard Shaw, the Pauline Kael of late 19th century London musical critics, put it better than I ever could: "I do not deny that the Brahm's Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker. But I object to requiems altogether. The Dead March in Saul is just as long as a soul in perfect health ought to meditate on the grave before turning lifewards again to a gay quickstep, as the soldiers do. A requiem overdoes it, even when there is an actual bereavement to be sympathized with; but in a concert room when there is nobody dead, it is the very wantonness of make-believe." (Pictured above is baritone Christian Gerhaher, who was sounding great in his short soloist role.)



In the short Wikipedia entry on Herbert Blomstedt, my favorite paragraph is this: "A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Blomstedt does not rehearse on Friday nights or Saturdays, the Sabbath in Seventh-day Adventism. He does, however, conduct concerts, since he considers actual performances to be an expression of his religious devotion rather than work." Even in rehearsal, you could tell he was completely energized by the music, and it required a functionary from backstage to tell him that he had to take a break after ninety minutes or many union rules were going to explode. In any case, you have been alerted that a possible religious experience is in store at Davies Hall this weekend. There are performances on Friday and Saturday, and you can get ticket info here.

SF Symphony Winter Suggestions

The San Francisco Symphony winter season in Davies Hall starts with a strange, remarkable looking concert where John Adams, Elvis Costello, and Malcom McDowell are finally together at last. In truth, composer Adams is conducting his 1982 Grand Pianola Music, a modern masterpiece for two pianos, chamber orchestra of brass and percussion and a trio of female singers intoning wordless music. The second half of the program is Stravinsky's chamber theater piece for seven instruments and three actors, L'Histoire du Soldat. Elvis Costello is the Narrator, Malcolm McDowell (of If... and O Lucky Man! and A Clockwork Orange and decades of Hollywood crap) is The Devil, and Tilson Thomas conducts. This is the concert you need to go to this winter, if no other, just to say that you were there. Performances are from January 16-18.



The ancient former SF Symphony music director Herbert Blomstedt arrives for two weeks, from February 12th to the 21st. The first week's program has Mozart's Piano Concerto #19 with Peter Serkin as the soloist and the Sibelius Second Symphony. Peter Serkin, like his father Rudolf, is a god in Mozart and should not be missed. I've heard the Sibelius one too many times live recently at the Symphony, but this music is a specialty of Blomstedt's and it should be wonderful to hear him conduct the orchestra in it. The second week he conducts Brahms' German Requiem, a piece I don't care for at all, but because he's conducting it and the baritone Christian Gerhaher is a soloist, the performance is another must-hear.



March 5-7 has the British composer Thomas Ades (above right) conducting short pieces by Ives, Milhaud, and Sibelius, followed by his own composition, In Seven Days, with soprano soloist Dawn Upshaw (above left). I'm not a big fan of Ades' music, which is probably my own limitation, but have long considered Dawn Upshaw a musical goddess who can do no wrong.



Finally, the omnivorous Jeremy Denk is touring with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra as conductor/pianist on March 15th and 16th, playing four Bach keyboard concertos over two evenings, along with music by Suk, Dvorak, and Stravinsky. It could be really good.

San Francisco Symphony Preview 2013

In a Santa Cruz forest way back in the 1970s, I was once the guest of an elderly ceramicist who puttered around naked from house to kiln to art studio, while he listened to mostly contemporary chamber music being broadcast from a turntable through a series of speakers spread across an acre of property. "Do you really listen to this stuff for pleasure?" I asked, because most of the music sounded so astringent and dissonant to my young, autodidact self who was just discovering Verdi and Mozart. "Oh yes, very much so," he replied. "As I've gotten older, my tastes have become more adventurous. A lot of the music I loved as a young man sounds stale now. Wait and see, it will probably happen to you too."

The above anecdote is a roundabout way of explaining that the San Francisco Symphony offers something for everyone, from beginner to sophisticate, in the second half of its 2012-13 season, and I have tried to offer a guide for both. Sitting at a symphonic concert means seriously concentrating on music, rather than just having it as background for work or drink or socializing. That means the same piece can be a revelation for newer ears and intensely boring for those who have heard it too many times. The elderly ceramicist turned out to be right.



Following are a few San Francisco Symphony concert suggestions for a relative beginner over the next six months:

1. Soprano Renee Fleming (above center, backstage at Lucrezia Borgia at the SF Opera) is singing a bunch of French songs this week, with Tilson Thomas conducting Debussy's La Mer. January 10-12.
2. Charles Dutoit conducting Ravel, Lalo, and Elgar's Enigma Variations. January 31-February 1.
3. Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, Yuja Wang on piano playing Beethoven (Piano Concerto #4) and Brahms (the First Symphony). March 6-8.
4. Herbert Blomstedt, getting even better as he becomes more ancient, conducting two weeks of Wagner (Tristan selections), Beethoven (Symphony #3 and the Violin Concerto) and Nielsen (Symphony #5). April 11-20.
5. Beethoven Project: Tilson Thomas leads a mini-festival of early Beethoven works. May 2-11.
6. Marek Janowski conducts Brahms (Double Concerto) and Schumann (Symphony #4) May 15-18.
7. David Roberts conducting and Mark-Andre Hamelin on piano, playing Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue) and Ravel (Left Hand Piano Concerto and La Valse), with a dollop of Elliott Carter to start things off (don't be afraid). May 22-25.
8. Juraj Valcuha conducting and Gautier Capucon on cello playing Dvorak (Cello Concerto and Symphony #9). June 1.
9. Bernstein's West Side Story in concert, which strikes me as a dubious proposition, since all my favorite live versions over the years have been high school student productions, where youthful energy was half the excitement. June 29-July 2.



And now, for concerts this jaded old character is excited about, let's start with the semi-staged, multi-media, Michael Tilson Thomas mashup of music written by three composers for Peer Gynt, Ibsen's five-hour poetry play from 1876. This will include selections from the original incidental music written by fellow Norwegian Edward Grieg in the first half of the program, followed by excerpts from a 1980s Peer Gynt ballet by Alfred Schnittke, and a world premiere by British composer Robin Holloway. The entire event could turn out to be a disaster, but at least it will be an ambitious one. The Symphony Chorus will be singing alongside a pair of actors and soprano soloist Joélle Harvey (seen above at Fort Mason when she was singing Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni with the Merola Opera program). January 17-19.



I have sworn off dreary Requiems for a while, but there's plenty of other bright liturgical music, including the beautiful, rarely heard pieces being conducted in early February by Charles Dutoit (above right). He pairs Poulenc's light-footed 1950 Stabat Mater for chorus and soprano with Berlioz's massive Te Deum for multiple choruses, orchestra, organ, and soloists (Erin Wall and Paul Grove). February 6-10.



Soon after, conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (above right) conducts a recent Magnus Lindberg work called EXPO, the extraordinary British/Australian pianist Stephen Hough (above left) plays Liszt's Second Piano Concerto, and the concert winds up with a wild, favorite Prokofiev symphony, the Fifth. February 14-17.



Though Davies Hall is usually too large a barn for successful Mozart and Handel performances, there are exceptions, especially when the great Symphony Chorus is involved. In April, Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie (above right, with chorus looming over him) will be conducting Mozart's Symphony #39 and a rare motet by the same composer, Ave Verum Corpus. The second half features Handel's paean to the power of music, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, with soloists Lydia Teuscher and Nicholas Phan. April 5-6.



In June, conductor Kirill Karabits above is conducting Honegger's Pacific 231, Britten's Double Concerto with Symphony principals Alexander Barantschik and Jonathan Vinocour (above left) as soloists, and the crowd-pleasing Sibelius Second Symphony. I will be going for the Britten, who is being shamefully ignored on his 100th birthday anniversary around San Francisco this year. Please, local arts programmers, I have a few requests, such as hearing Britten's marvelous Spring Symphony live at Davies Hall. And while we're at it, the SF Ballet and choreographer Mark Morris need to take on the full-length Prince of the Pagodas, while the SF Opera would be a perfect setting for Britten's Queen Elizabeth opera, Gloriana. And Opera Parallele, it's time to find a small San Francisco church venue, where you can perform the Church Parables and Noye's Fludde and Saint Nicholas, with a combination of students and professionals. June 6-9.



In late June, Tilson Thomas will lead a changing set of all-Stravinsky concerts. The most interesting look to be the ones featuring the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, joining the orchestra for Renard, Les Noces, and Russian folk songs, followed by The Rite of Spring. June 21-22. See you at the concert hall.