ArtsSF

Waves of applause greeted the appearance of beloved conductor emeritus Michael Tilson Thomas on stage, with patrons leaping to their feet willy-nilly in tribute. Great relief for the fans, who had little confidence to believe he’d ever return after his 2021 surgery for an aggressive form of brain cancer. The 78-year-old now walked slowly, traversing steps cautiously. But his leadership on the podium showed no frailty as he brought off a triumphant choral-orchestral finale to a largely French program of…

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Lost in the hurrahs of the San Francisco Symphony concerts this week was emergence of an even more significant course change this season: The unprecedented emphasis on creativity by women and minorities, front and center. Conductors like Xian Zhang, Elim Chan, C.M. Prieto, Masaaki Suzuki, Daniel Bartholomew-Peyser and Jose Hernandez; soloists like Leif-Aruhn-Solen, Conrad Tao, and Sterling Elliott; and composers like Gabriela Lena Frank, Gabriella Smith, Florence Price, Jose Gonzalez-Granero and Elizabeth Ogonek. It’s as if this one season were…

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A leader in symphonic innovation and imagination now for six decades, the Oakland Symphony launched its first full post-pandemic season this month with the first of its music-director candidates out front. And, of course, with an innovative program. Through countless setbacks, the ensemble  keeps emerging again and again like a phoenix from the ashes; its struggles remain a challenge for the future. Has any ensemble suffered greater adversity? It went bankrupt after the off-season death (accidental drowning) of its highly…

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Mahler’s “Resurrection” was a revelation, leaving us in the audience limp and giddy, as if, in a euphoric state of ecstasy, we had just been led through the Pearly Gates into the great beyond. And it was the finest hour yet for Maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen in the bows when the orchestra remained steadfastly seated, deflecting the cheers to the conductor himself. The audience too responded with an inordinate five-minute ovation for the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus et al for…

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SANTA CRUZ, CA—Resolute not to let Covid win for the third year in a row, the plucky Cabrillo Festival cobbled together a concert program with half an orchestra to prevent yet another cancellation. After the total washouts of 2020 and 2021, this week Cabrillo found no less than 16 orchestra members who were suddenly Covid positive, leaving it with only tatters of a woodwind and brass section. So with just percussion and a string orchestra intact, Music Director Christian Mãcelaru…

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One of the boldest S.F. Symphony programs featured three works of average age 42, the anchor being the stellar Sibelius Symphony 5. While most of the interest was focused on the popular septuagenarian Berkeley composer John Adams, the work that really blew me away was “Radical Light” by the late Steven Stucky. The fact that Stucky, a master of sonic delights, has been virtually unknown is directly related to his being, for many years,  the composer in residence of the…

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Composer Igor Stravinsky had created a model hybrid with his “Oedipus Rex.” So why not hybridize further with brainstorms of the mercurial Stage Director Peter Sellars? We thus ended up with a Stravinsky-Sellars double bill of “Oedipus” and that deft choral-orchestral companion “Symphony of Psalms”—Old Testament visionaries and Greeks in a strange choral-orchestral amalgam. By dramatizing the two neoclassical works in semi-staged fashion, Oedipus got to play in both ends, though mute in the second, which has no solo roles…

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Count on mezzo Julia Bullock to design a program quite unlike anything ever at the S.F. Symphony: a multimedia perusal of the history of black women in America, bravely breaking out of the mold, played before a largely white S.F. Symphony audience. By the end you were convinced you’d earned a credit toward a master’s degree in sociology. In the process a lot of long-gone readings by notable artists were brought back to life in a viable format. The only…

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Although never billed as such, the latest S.F. Symphony program unreeled a tribute to the creativity of women—as conductor, as soloist, as composer. And by the end, I found myself reaching for my seat belt during a brassy, rambunctious large-orchestra finale of modern music that, yes, even got a standing ovation May 13. Yes, that dissonant modernist Lutoslawski gets a standing ovation—imagine that! The woman composer in a more dulcet mode was Lili Boulanger, sister of the legendary composition professor…

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