There seem to be fewer COVID-related cancellations & postponements these days, but as we head into the colder months that may change. As usual observe all sensible precautions & check current masking/vaccination requirements before you buy tickets. Stay healthy, everyone!
Theatrical
TheatreFIRST, along with 3GT, presents The Music of Mothers, written & directed by Victoria Evans Erville, exploring the sometimes fraught friendship between two women, one black & one white, as they raise their sons, & that's at the Live Oak Theater in Berkeley from 7 to 23 October.
Golden Thread Productions presents the US premiere of The Language of Wild Berries by Naghmeh Samini, translated and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian, in which a married couple on a wedding anniversary trip to the sea realize a mysterious young man is shadowing them; that's at the Potrero Stage from 14 October to 6 November.
Cutting Ball Theater presents Sylvan Oswald's Pony, directed by Kieran Beccia, from 15 October to 13 November; their website currently doesn't give much information beyond that, but the playwright's website tells us that "[s]et near the location of the famous murder scene in Woyzeck, Pony is a tale of shifting gender roles and the dangers of obsessive love: the characters are '2 femme women, 1 butch woman, 1 gender nonconforming person (assigned female, passing as male), and 1 trans man'".
From 14 to 23 October, the EXIT Theater presents Waking Sam Beckett, written by & featuring Marc Gabriel as well as Christina Augello with directorial support from Patricia Hume; the show is "a Godot inspired reverie[;] Imagine Samuel Beckett’s characters burying their creator and questioning what does this mean? - do they have to keep waiting?"
If you understandably want more Beckett, you can go to the source with On Beckett, conceived & performed by Bill Irwin, at ACT's Geary Theater (now renamed the Toni Rembe Theater) from 19 to 23 October.
New Conservatory Theater Center presents the world premiere of A Picture of Two Boys by Nick Malakhow, directed by Richard Mosqueda, about two boys trying to escape their rural Pennsylvania town & then re-uniting ten years later; the show runs 21 October through 27 November.
The Oakland Theater Project presents the world premiere of Book of Sand (A Fairytale) by Lisa Ramirez, directed by Susannah Martin, based on a short story by Borges; you can experience it from 28 October through 20 November.
Operatic
At the San Francisco Opera, both the world premiere run of John Adams's Antony & Cleopatra & a revival of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin continue into this month (respectively on 2 & 5 October & on 1, 6, 9, 11, & 14 October); Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, which SFO gave the American premiere of in 1957, joins the rotation on 15 October and continues on 18, 21, 26, & 30 October. There will also be a Community Open House on 23 October, for a back-stage look at the Opera House (you must register in advance for the Open House).
The Great Star Theater in Chinatown is bringing in "two new traditional Chinese opera groups" on 9 & 21 - 23 October, but their website currently has no other details, like the names of the operas or the performers, but this theater is where Lou Harrison used to go to hear Chinese Opera so that might be all the information you really need.
We are fortunate to have Ars Minerva in our midst, & their latest revival of an unjustly ignored work of the baroque is Leonardo Vinci's Astianatte, based on the story of the post-Fall of Troy Andromache; company Founder & Executive Artistic Director Céline Ricci will stage the piece & Matthew Dirst will conduct from the harpsichord, & you can experience it on 21, 22, & 23 October at the ODC Theater in San Francisco.
Vocalists
On 2 October, Lieder Alive presents soprano Heidi Moss Erickson & pianist John Parr performing works by Richard Strauss, Nadia Boulanger, Anton Webern, & Kurt Erickson, along with settings of Emily Dickinson from Aaron Copland, George Walker, & Lori Laitman, & the world premiere of Tarik O’Regan's Seen and Unseen.
Ranchera music performer Aida Cuevas, with Mariachi Aztlán & special guests, will perform at the SF Jazz Center from 6 to 9 October.
Fado Singer Mariza will sing at the SF Jazz Center from 13 to 16 October.
On 23 October at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, American Bach Soloists presents bass-baritone Christian Pursell & pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg in Bachtoberfest, a celebration of German song & beer; the "song" portion of the afternoon will include pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, & Wolf,
Orchestral
One Found Sound opens its season on 8 October at Heron Arts in San Francisco with Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks concerto, Hannah Kendall's Vera, Bartók's Divertimento for Strings, & Eleanor Alberga's Sun Warrior.
On 16 October, the San Francisco Symphony presents the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, led by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, playing Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Elgar's Cello Concerto (with soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason), Adès's The Exterminating Angel Symphony, & Debussy's La Mer.
Under the auspices of Cal Performances, Esa-Pekka Salonen & the San Francisco Symphony cross the bay on 21 October to Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley with a spooky-season concert featuring Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Liszt's Totentanz (with piano soloist Bertrand Chamayou), & the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique; at first I thought this cross-bay visit was odd, as Salonen & the Symphony are readily accessible to East Bay residents, but I've come to realize how many people are reluctant to cross over from one side of the bay to the other, & besides, it's not as if either hall (Davies or Zellerbach) is much better than the other.
Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen is very busy at Davies Hall with his San Francisco Symphony: on 29 September & 1 - 2 October, they're performing the world premiere of Trevor Weston's Push along with the Mahler 2 (with soloists Golda Schultz (soprano) & Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano)); on 7 - 9 October, you can hear the American premiere of a Symphony commission, Sun Poem by Daniel Kidane, followed by Sibelius's Luonnotar (with soprano soloist Golda Schultz), & Stravinsky's complete score for The Firebird; on 13 - 15 October, there's Nielsen's Helios Overture, the world premiere of a Symphony-commissioned work for piano & orchestra by Magnus Lindberg (with soloist Yuja Wang), & Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra; on 20 & 22 October, you can hear the Mussorgsky / Liszt / Berlioz program listed above under Cal Performances; & you can close out the month in the Halloween spirit on 27 - 29 October with HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! (with baritone soloist Christopher Purves), Bernard Herrmann's Suite from Psycho, & Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin.
The Oakland Symphony kicks off its season on 14 October at the Paramount with Ankush Kumar Bahl leading Carlos Simon's Fate Now Conquers, Chen Yi's Golden Flute (with soloist Demarre McGill), & the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique.
The Berkeley Symphony opens its season on 16 October in Zellerbach Hall as Music Director Joseph Young conducts the world premiere of Upon Daybreak by Brian Raphael Nabors, Florence Price's Violin Concerto #2 (with soloist Rachel Barton Pine), & the Tchaikovsky 5.
Music Director Ben Simon opens his final season with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra with Copland's Appalachian Spring, Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 (with soprano soloist Ann Moss), & Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (as arranged for chamber orchestra by the SFCO’s Incredible Shrinking Orchestra Project), & you can hear all this on 21 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 22 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, & 23 October at First Presbyterian in Berkeley.
On 22 October, Edwin Outwater leads the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in the world premiere of Lukas Janata's Catch (winner of the Conservatory's Highsmith competition), Fauré's Pelléas et Mélisande Suite (this piece will be conducted by David Baker), & the Brahms 4.
Music Director Dawn Harms opens the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony season on 29 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Verdi's Triumphal March from Aida, Italian arias sung by soprano Melody Moore in centennial tribute to Renata Tebaldi, Jessie Montgomery's Strum, & the Dvořák 6.
Chamber Music
On 2 October at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Symphony offers some chamber works by composers featured in its 16 October season opener: 7 Dances for Flute, Clarinet, Cello by Brian Raphael Nabors, Five Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet by Florence Price, & Tchaikovsky's String Quartet #1.
San Francisco Performances opens its new season on 7 October at Herbst Theater with pianist Garrick Ohlsson & the Apollon Musagète Quartet performing works by Bach, Dvořák, & Shostakovich.
San Francisco Performances will resume its Saturday morning lecture/performance series in Herbst Theater, featuring musicologist Robert Greenberg & the Alexander String Quartet; this year's theme is the political & social & musical upheavals of the early 20th century, & two of the five presentations will be this month: on 8 October the theme is France & the music the string quartets of Debussy & Ravel, & on 22 October the theme is Scandinavia & the music the Nielsen String Quartet 1 in G Minor & the Sibelius Voces Intimae.
On 23 September, the San Francisco Symphony presents a chamber music concert in that unchamber-like cavern, Davies Hall, featuring the Piano Trio #1 in D minor by Anton Arensky, Lera Auerbach's Piano Trio #2, Triptych: This Mirror Has Three Faces, & Mozart's Ein musikalischer Spass / A Musical Joke.
San Francisco Performances presents the Danish String Quartet performing music by Mozart, Britten, & Schumann, on 26 October in Herbst Theater.
Instrumentalists
On 2 October at Old First Concerts, pianist Jason Chiu will perform works by Bach-Busoni, Maria Szymanowska, Fanny Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade, Ravel, & Beethoven.
San Francisco Performances presents pianist András Schiff in Herbst Theater on 14 October, performing works by Mozart, Beethoven, & Schubert.
Cal Performances presents violinist Maxim Vengerov & pianist Polina Osetinskaya on 14 October in Zellerbach Hall, where they will perform pieces by Bach, Beethoven (the Kreutzer Sonata), Shostakovich (as arranged by Dreznin), & Tchaikovsky.
On 23 October at Old First Concerts, pianist Stephen Porter examines Beethoven and Buddhism: The Final Piano Sonatas, in a performance of the Sonatas 30, 31, & 32, interspersed with entries from the composer's diary, expressing his interest in Indian religion & philosophy.
On 30 October, Cal Performances presents Kristian Bezuidenhout in Hertz Hall, where he will play, on harpsichord & fortepiano. music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Clara Schumann, & Mendelssohn (there will also be a post-performance Q&A).
Early / Baroque Music
Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in Plaisirs Baroques, featuring choral works by Charpentier, Mondonville, & Telemann, with performances on 14 October at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 15 October at Saint Mark's Episcopal in Palo Alto, & 16 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.
Richard Egarr leads Philharmonia Baroque in Theodora, Handel's great oratorio of Christian martyrdom, on 20 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 21 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, & 22 - 23 October at First Church in Berkeley.
Baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, along with cellist Coleman Itzkoff & harpsichordist David Belkovski, come to Cal Performances & Hertz Hall on 23 October with The Grand Tour, as expressed in music by Biber, Bach, Veracini, Tartini, Royer, Leclair, & Corelli.
Modern / Contemporary Music
At Old First Concerts on 7 October, you can enjoy Story and Song, a program featuring soprano Winnie Nieh, mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz, & bass-baritone Sidney Chen, along with Doug Machiz on cello & Monica Chew & Chesley Mok on piano, in an all-world-premiere set of short operatic/vocal works by Davide Verotta, Monica Chew, & SA S. A. Workman.
On 7 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Nicole Paiement leads the SFCM New Music Ensemble in Rongron Chen's X Morceaux Mystérieux, David Conte's Sinfonietta, Kenji Oh's 3^(1+1) - Tsunami, & Jacques Desjardins's Songes d’une nuit d’hiver.
On 9 October at Old First Concerts, the Wooden Fish Ensemble will perform two works by Hyo-shin Na, including the world premiere of Quadrangle of Light for violin, viola, cello, and piano, along with Morton Feldman's final work, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello.
On 9 October at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, as part of the Full series programmed by Sean Carson & in conjunction with their current retrospective exhibit by Alison Knowles, UC Berkeley students from the course Creativity in Practice will perform several of Fluxus artist Knowles's event scores.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players notes that "[t]his season, we embrace the Contemporary Players’ roots as a performing presence in the museums and gallery spaces of San Francisco, by highlighting the individual artistry of our musicians in a space surrounded by contemporary visual art" & I am very happy they're doing this – I've long wondered why SFMOMA, our local flagship for the new in arts, so resolutely ignores almost all modern music – so SFCMP is leading the way on 10 October at The Lab on 16th Street in San Francisco with Image & Memory, featuring Susan Freier on violin & Stephen Harrison on cello, & including music by August Read Thomas, Gabriela Lena Frank, Sofia Gubaidulina, Libby Larsen, Julia Adolphe, & Erwin Schulhoff.
The Center for New Music schedule is more extensive for October than it has been, which I take as a sign of recovery from the pandemic, & it kicks off 1 October with a celebration of their 10th anniversary (& many happy returns!); followed on 8 October with performances & memories celebrating the life of Tom Nunn; on 9 October we have Surround Sound Salon Series #7, featuring electronic music; on 13 October Thomas Dimuzio, Scot Jenerik, & Scott Arford do their thing at Noise by Noise West 2022; on 15 October, we have Jeonghyeon Joo's The Art of Bowing, featuring Ben Sabey, featuring Joo's works for haegeum with some electronic additions from Sabey; the Nathan Clevenger Trio along with Kasey Knudsen & Crystal Pascucci perform on 22 October; & pianist Thomas Schultz closes out the month on 30 October, performing works by Bach/Busoni, Rzewski, Galina Ustvolskaya, & Hyo-shin Na.
The Other Minds Festival will be held this year on 13 - 15 October at The Great Star Theater in San Francisco; the first evening will feature performances by Raven Chacon with Guillermo Galindo, an electroacoustic violin performance by Mari Kimura, & music for voice and cello by Theresa Wong; the second evening features bassist Joëlle Léandre with vocalist Lauren Newton & sound artist Hanna Hartman, concluding with the American premiere of Other Minds Executive & Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian’s Rachet Attach It for ten percussionists & altered recordings of player piano rolls (performed by Rex Lawson); the final evening will include the world premiere of a work by Lars Petter Hagen for the piano duo of Kate Stenberg & Sarah Cahill as well as a piece for moving marimbas by Kui Dong, concluding with the American premiere of Dominic Murcott’s The Harmonic Canon, performed by the arx duo on a half-ton bell designed specifically for this work.
Strobe, the only dedicated oboe quartet in the United States, will perform Double Fantasy, a program featuring music by Britten, Ernest John Moeran, Vincent Russo, & Neal Desby, on 16 October at Old First Concerts.
Earplay will celebrate Andrew Imbrie's centennial on 17 October at Old First Concerts with his Dream Sequence, along with works by Hyo-shin Na, Tyshawn Sorey, & Fred Lerdahl.
On 21 October at Old First Concerts, Ensemble for These Times performs CelesTrios, a celebration of music for three instruments, that will include works by Elena Ruehr, Jonathan Bailey, Martinů, Yaz Lancaster, Arthur Gottschalk, Tina Davidson, & David Garner.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continues its season with Sounds Divine, an exploration of spiritual experiences through music by Eric Nathan, Ravel, TJ Anderson, Arvo Pärt, Errollyn Wallen, & Messiaen, & that's on 23 October at the Berkeley Piano Club & 24 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Jazz
The SF Jazz Center has a Thelonious Monk Festival from 5 to 10 October (the latter date is Monk's birthday): on 5 October there is a Thelonious Monk Listening Party with Robin DG Kelley (whose excellent biography of Monk I recommend highly), in conversation with SF Jazz Founder & Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline; on 6 October, students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Roots, Jazz, & American Music (RJAM) program will perform; on 7 October, Gregory Lewis plays Monk for solo organ; on 8 October, Miles Okazaki will perform Monk for solo guitar; on 9 October, pianist Edward Simon, along with unnamed special guests, will play some more Monk; & the festival closes out on 10 October with the Kenny Barron Trio.
On 21 October at the SF Jazz Center, trumpeter Marquis Hill revisits music from his decade-old debut, New Gospel.
On 30 October, the Larry Vuckovich International Trio (pianist Vuckovich, bassist Ken Okada, & drummer Akira Tana) will play standards from the Great American Songbook at the SF Jazz Center.
Dance
Alonzo King's LINES Ballet continues its 40th season with a celebration of the long collaboration between King & tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, & that's at the Yerba Buena Center on 12 - 16 October.
On 29 - 30 October in Zellerbach Hall, Cal Performances presents the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 13 Tongues. an exploration by the group's new artistic director Cheng Tsung-lung of his childhood vision of Taipei street life, set to an eclectic score by Lim Giong.
Visual Arts
Angela Davis – Seize The Time, an examination of the construction & use of Davis's image over the decades, opens on 7 October at the Oakland Museum & runs until 11 June.
Cinematic
Several film series launch at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive this month: In Dialogue with China: Family, Memory, Resistance, and Change, featuring contemporary films from mainland China, starts on 6 October; a centennial celebration of Pier Paolo Pasolini begins on 22 October; & starting on 29 October "rare & distinctive" films from Soviet-era & post-Soviet Georgia will be shown as part of Georgian Cinema: Highlights from the BAMPFA Collection.
You could do worse than spending Halloween at Grace Cathedral watching the SF Jazz Center's presentation of the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame, with organ accompanist by Dorothy Papadakos.
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