th-th-th-that's all, folks!!!

The San Francisco Opera season came thudding to a close with a coarse, drab revival of one of my favorite operas, The Marriage of Figaro. I should point out that I saw the second cast (but if your marketing slogan is The Return of the Divas, shouldn’t there be fine print somewhere that says “except for Subscription Series G”?). I was sorry to miss Swenson as the Countess and particularly Relyea as Figaro, but usually I’m open to second casts; although I may not believe that a stranger is just a friend I haven’t met, I’m perfectly willing to believe that an alternate is a star just needing a break. In any event none of the singers particularly thrilled me, though all were good enough, even though the ensemble sounded off to me at several points.
And it wasn’t really the Opera’s fault that this was one of those evenings when I was surrounded by talkers (not whisperers – talkers). “Is that the Countess?” “Yes, that’s the Countess! There she is!” “And this is her first song?” “Yes! She’s singing it!” (dialogue not retouched for satirical purposes). Of course none of these observations, or any of the others I was treated to, could possibly wait until after the opera was over, possibly because it ended so late it would be difficult to remember that far back. Yes, after a brief lapse into reality which led the Opera to start Maid of Orleans (under three hours) at 7:30, they went back to presenting the almost-four-hour-long Marriage of Figaro at 8:00. I think that people who claim they can’t follow the garden shenanigans in Act IV are really just too tired by then to pay attention. (Does anyone else want to punch Cherubino in that scene, or at least send him for some “no means no” sensitivity training?) Even half an hour makes an enormous difference, but apparently the Opera feels that Mrs. Vanderbilt’s carriage can’t quite rumble up the walk before 8:00 and that anyone else who might be tired out from a week of work is probably an Irishman or some other sort of undesirable ethnic, who would be better off in a tavern or other low haunt, or at home beating his common-law wife and their thirteen grubby children.
You could certainly make an argument that Figaro is one of those operas that needs to be set in a very specific time and place (what with ordering the neighbor boy to join the military, let alone the whole “right of the first night” – another plot point that led to an extended discussion during the performance), though in that case it’s not clear to me why this production sets Act I not in a nice room conveniently located near the Count and Countess but instead in what is very obviously an open inner courtyard; it’s even less clear why all the characters have to behave in a way in which no human being has ever behaved outside of exhausted vaudeville sketches. Any moment of subterfuge (of which there are many) is accompanied by winks and grimaces and blinks that would tip off Helen Keller, but go completely unnoticed by the other party; all older women are rapacious man-eaters; stuttering is comedy gold; the mere sight of a chamber pot is not only comedy gold, but comedy gold covered with diamonds; any unwashed person (even better, an unwashed person who also has liquor on his breath – enter Antonio the gardener) causes everyone, even an aristocratic Spanish lady of a delicately melancholy disposition, to rear back in eye-rolling, hand-waving, gasping recoil. (This is the production, not the cast, and definitely not the opera; in fact I have to give credit to Twyla Robinson, who sang the Countess, for trying for some delicacy in portraying the attraction to Cherubino; when I saw this production a few years ago the woman singing the Countess gave a performance of unbelievable vulgarity, swooning and drooling over Cherubino in a way that rendered her protestations of innocence absurd and her forgiveness of the Count ridiculous and hypocritical. Yes, I know about La Mere Coupable, and I wish directors didn’t; that’s later in their lives, after she’s had to forgive more indiscretions and Cherubino has grown up some. In Marriage of Figaro he’s a boy who thinks he’s a man and she’s a woman who thinks he’s a cute boy – if she really took him seriously, she wouldn’t keep dressing him up like a girl; it’s a very delicately ironic relationship, which is why this heavy-handed production has to turn it into a Desperate Housewives moment that would presumably shock the “realism”-loving audience if they bothered to consider how old Cherubino actually is.)
Apparently many in the opera audience, not having been to any theatrical productions postdating the replacement of gaslights with electricity, eat this stuff up, but here’s what really bugs me about this production: if this had been announced as a vaudeville/Looney Tunes concept production there would have been predictable cries of outrage and further calls for the public execution of Pamela Rosenberg, but the only thing they would have had to change would be to brighten and simplify the sets, and maybe tone down some of the mugging. OK, Chuck Jones actually would have come up with better gags, but I stand by my point. Apparently there were sighs of relief at this “traditional” production; who was it who said tradition is just encrusted error?
About twenty years ago in Boston I saw Peter Sellar’s Marriage of Figaro, usually described as the “Trump Tower” production (the only one of his three da Ponte/Mozart operas that I saw on stage). The setting did create some incongruities (for instance, ordering the neighbor boy to join the military). And I disagreed with the decision to have the Count manhandle the Countess (to me his actions conveyed not aristocratic entitlement but bullying, and made him too unsympathetic), but it was a carefully thought-through decision, not one made for some spurious shock value, and although I disagreed with it I had to clarify in my mind why I disagreed and how I thought his behavior worked in the piece. In short, Sellars re-thought the relationships among the characters as if they were people with real emotions (I still think about his remark that Marzellina is obviously a lonely older woman looking for love and emotional connections, which is why she can switch so quickly from wanting to be Figaro’s wife and hating Susanna to being his mother and Susanna’s too), and that is why I remember the production so well after two decades.
(I had seen this production and this was my opinion before I heard of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s death, but I have to say, this is exactly the kind of – I was going to say dessicated shit, but instead I’ll say stale routine – that she would never, ever have appeared in.)

you know you've been reading too much Greek tragedy when. . .

I had been re-reading some of the Grene/Lattimore translations of Greek tragedy, and I was just a couple of days in (seriously!) when someone came up to me with one of those "Figaro qua, Figaro la, Figaro su, Figaro giu" tasks that take up most of my hours, some silly thing that no one knows what to do with so they give it to me, and to which my usual response is (outwardly) a slight smile and "I'll take care of that for you," and inwardly, well, you probably don't need to know exactly what I usually think inwardly except that it involves a string of colorful cursewords but this time out of my lamenting-chorus-heavy mind like Athena from the head of Zeus sprang the thought, "Strange is the tale you tell me / And strange the terror that seizes my heart."

San Francisco Opera: The Barber of Seville

Il barbiere di Siviglia has a long first act, so the intermission line at the lower-level men's room was even longer than usual. The man in front of me, probably late 30s / early 40s, said he had never seen Barber before & he was enjoying it a lot.

"But I'll bet you knew a lot of the music, didn't you?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Bugs Bunny, right?" I responded. He laughed & said he had been surprised to realize when the music started that nine-year-old him was being prepped for the opera by Chuck Jones. And here he thought it was just Saturday morning cartoons!

Not only are snatches of the music mainstays of the more sophisticated & perennially popular mid-century cartoons, but this opera has not only held but been a mainstay of the operatic stage since its premiere in Rome in 1816. All this makes it easy to take Barbiere for granted. I had skipped its last few appearances in San Francisco; in fact, I realized when I glanced at my Opera List that I had not seen it live in 20 years. This stylish & witty production by Emilio Sagi, with a powerhouse & mellifluous cast of singers, reminded me why Barbiere is an evergreen.

The staging is evocative enough of an appropriate time & place without being burdened with cumbersome "realism" or pointed updating. Generous use is made of a troupe of Spanish dancers, who set a stylish flamenco-tinged tone. There are lovely surreal touches throughout, such as the chorus crawling out from under the buildings that dominates the right side of the stage, or instruments (a guitar for a serenade, for example) being handed out from that crawl space. The buildings, which are both the  outdoors &, with some adaptations, indoors of Doctor Bartolo's residence, resemble those toy-like structures you see in the backgrounds of early Italian Renaissance paintings, only here instead of pastels, the buildings are all white. The sets & costumes are mostly whites & tans, with touches of color added as the story progresses, until we end with bright splashes of pink & red & a video of colorful fireworks exploding as Almaviva & Rosina drive off in a cherry-red car.

The production is genuinely funny, which is always a bit of a surprise & relief for a work as old & well-known as this one. There was lots of appropriate & appreciative laughter from the audience. Clever use is made of props, but it's not overdone: Rosina, very much in vixen mode, jabs at her surroundings with a pair of garden shears; streamers shoot out of Don Basilio's sleeves at the climax of La Calunnia. It's easy to do too much of this sort of thing – for me, Berta's business with sneaking cigarettes didn't work, mostly because I find smoking repellant – but the balance was on the right side here, & the funniest moments actually came from the material: after Basilio winds up his extravagant paean to Calumnia, Bartolo's decisive, "No, we'll do it my way" got a hearty & well-deserved laugh from me as well as the rest of the audience, & other than the man in front of me in the restroom line who was seeing his first Barbiere, I suspect most of us knew it was coming.

Benjamin Manis led a well-paced & stylish orchestra. There are two casts in this revival; here's the one I heard last Friday: Joshua Hopkins as Figaro, Maria Kataeva as Rosina, Levy Sekgapane as Count Almaviva, Renato Girolami as Doctor Bartolo; then, in all performances, Riccardo Fassi plays Don Basilio, Catherine Cook plays Berta, Olivier Zerouali is Fiorello, Gabriel Natal-Báez is Ambrogio, Thomas Kinch an officer, & Andrew Truett a notary. There was outstanding work from all of them. Sekgapane tossed off & held high notes with deceptive & charming ease; he was given his long final aria, & it was a pleasure to hear, though I did wonder why Rossini hadn't given equal time to Rosina & Figaro. It would have been delightful to hear even more of Hopkins & Kataeva. Girolami manages to make Bartolo amusingly pompous & calculating without overdoing it. The cast radiates a sense of fun; even Ambrogio's silent dance with Berta is joyous. Scenes that are often sort of a trial (like Almaviva disguised as a music instructor wishing peace & joy on an increasingly aggravated Bartolo) are genuinely bright & funny.

If I sound slightly surprised at how fresh & fun the show was, & how much I enjoyed it, that's probably because I am. I had seen the Met livecast of Barbiere last year, & though I found it on the whole quite entertaining, I also felt that at a number of points the plot machinery was showing its age: cranking & creaking rustily (always a hazard with works rooted in the commedia tradition). There are comedies whose every production – whose every performance even – reveals new angles & insights & flashes of color; Così fan tutte is my go-to example of these opalescent operas. Barbiere is not one of these. It gleams like a shiny, even brilliant machine, reliably producing an entirely respectable & to varying degrees enjoyable product. I thought this production was as good as Barbiere is going to get, making this old work, so alien to us in many of its rooted assumptions, into something fresh, funny, stylish, invigorating. This was the right way to break my drought with this particular war-horse.

All for Love

About a year ago I went up to Seattle to hear Florencia en el Amazonas. I had been up to Seattle twice before, both times for the Ring Cycle; this time I just went for the weekend, drawn by the casting of the redoubtable Nathan Gunn. I saw the first two performances. Nothing was on at the theaters that I wanted to see and it was too early for baseball, so then I came home. The opera (Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catan, a contemporary Mexican composer) is sort of "inspired by" Marquez rather than "based on". Apparently he generally opposes putting his stories into other media (such as film or the stage) but he allowed them to borrow characters and situations as a starting point and the librettist is a pupil of his and was recommended by him (though since I saw Florencia I have heard an opera based directly on The Autumn of the Patriarch, so go figure -- maybe Marquez changed his mind; he's entitled to). The basic story is that a famous singer travels up the Amazon to sing at an opera house in her native place but also to find a butterfly hunter she had loved years before. It turns out he has died in the meantime but she realizes at the end that she is still singing to him and she mystically turns into a butterfly. This is right after a cholera epidemic is announced, so I think it's up to individual interpretation whether she lives and has had a spiritual moment, or dies and is reunited with her love, or even actually turns into a butterfly of the rare type he had been searching for. There's also a young couple (the captain's nephew and a woman writing a biography of the singer though she doesn't realize until late in the voyage that she has been traveling with the diva all along) who end up falling in love with each other and a quarrelsome middle-aged couple (to my amusement, the audience at both performances I heard clearly related best to them) that ends up rediscovering their love after he is swept overboard -- the wife realizes she did love him and the river returns him. And there's also a sailor, Riolobo, on board ship (Nathan Gunn), who functions as sort of a combination of Figaro (always arranging and commenting) and Ariel (a spirit connected to larger elements of Nature). He does get a kick-ass entry and exit during the storm that ends the first act, when he descends from the skies as a river god (dressed in a sort of Aztec loincloth and wings -- Gunn is very goodlooking and gets asked to strip a lot, something Pavarotti never had to do -- wow, I'm just trying to picture Luciano descending from the air -- that would be some harness -- talk about Supersize Me!), sings his aria, and then flies (literally) off stage. Pretty spectacular. But as beautiful and even moving as the work is, I can't help feeling the libretto has a major weakness: it's all about Love and how it affects the characters' lives, but Love is only presented as a positive force. The love affairs are happy, the quarrelsome get a second chance, even death can't divide lovers as they unite mystically. There's no one there who is destroyed or hurt or ignored by Love. This is where magical realism turns into wish fulfillment and becomes kind of a prettiness -- look! pink rain! and everyone's in love! The diva has a mystical reunion with her love, of whom she has only happy memories; the young lovers decide they will fall in love after all (as if they had a choice!); the quarrelsome middle-aged couple realizes in the face of death and separation that they really love each other -- and then death and separation are annihilated and they're reunited happily and magically. Everyone is happily united at the end except Riolobo, who's the best-looking guy anyway and also gets to be a river god. Where are the people destroyed by love? or even just ignored? What are probably my two favorite operas, Tristan and Nozze di Figaro, are both all about love also but it's very clear there's a price to pay. And you may feel it's worth paying, but you do pay. And even though characters like King Mark and Marzellina may enlarge their spirits by forgiving those in love who have betrayed or ignored them, it's clear Love hasn't given them what they wanted. So I couldn't help feeling that Florencia, beautiful and truly moving as it is, ends up avoiding the darker aspects of its subject. It's as if Das Rheingold ended just with the gods marching into Valhalla -- it would be beautiful and stirring, but when you also hear the cries of the Rhine Daughters and see Fasolt's dead body, it gives you a more complex view of the gods' triumph. But I would certainly be happy to hear Florencia again, which is not true of all other operas. The music is very attractive, but unfortunately it is the sort that gets described as "accessible," which is code for "no dissonance or other unseemly innovations will shock your 19th century ears." But I liked it anyway.

random previews: opera

The San Francisco Opera season is well underway, but the one genuinely exciting, do-not-miss production is coming up in a few weeks: Karita Mattila in The Makropulos Case. As for the rest of the season, it doesn’t exactly heat the blood. For a while I thought Gockley’s aim was to turn the local house into the Met Lite, but at this point I’m thinking we should be so lucky, given the Met’s more adventurous repertory and staging in the last few years. We’re eating their dust out here in the West, not that I think the majority of the local audience minds. They seem quite in tune with Gockley’s advocacy of – well, let’s try for something neutral between “beloved classics” and “exhausted warhorses” – the more familiar works in the repertory, sung by already well-established names.

Anyone in search of anything more adventurous or challenging than People You’ve Heard Of, In Works You’ve Already Heard (or even those just searching for novelty) is out of luck. Gockley and the bulk of the San Francisco audience seem perfectly suited to each other. That’s not a compliment. Any potential audience members intrigued by works like Le Grand Macabre or St Francois are once again left to fend for themselves out there in the avant-garde wilds. Thank goodness for DVDs! What we're getting here are brand-name works presented in a more or less plush and traditional way. Nothing here is going to frighten the horses. Going to the opera in San Francisco now isn’t like going to the Museum of Modern Art; it’s like going to Bloomingdale’s.

By the way, I don’t really buy the claims that what San Francisco Opera is currently doing is “all about the voice”; everyone says that these days casting the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works is difficult to impossible, whereas we’re living in a golden age for Handel and Rossini singing. So are we getting Radamisto or La Donna del Lago? We are not. We’re getting inadequate productions of the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works, because a large segment of the audience isn’t interested in anything unfamiliar and no one is interested in convincing them that new stuff can be fun and engaging.

Yes, Aida and Madama Butterfly are great works, and there’s no disgrace in presenting them, but for a veteran of the opera house there isn’t a lot of urgency in hearing them; that’s the thing about Top 40 programming – sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to get another chance to hear that piece. Yet opera is a strange and addictive drug: a few months ago I looked up the performance dates of Aida for a friend, and suddenly was strangely excited at the thought of hearing the opera – Aida, of all things, an opera that has never interested me much outside of Leontyne Price’s involvement with it.

I ended up feeling I didn’t really need to pay those prices for another Aida, though Zajick was definitely a temptation. It turns out to be just as well, since I could have written the reviews without seeing it: the Zandra Rhodes designs were eye-catching but didn’t always work well, and the cast was vocally uneven. (I had seen Zandra Rhodes’s production of the Pearl Fishers and though I loved the colors I thought the setting was too cartoony.) Sung drama is the most basic form of drama, and an art form that has survived in varying forms for centuries deserves an audience that thinks of it as something more than candy-colored camp.


As for the rest of the season, I enjoyed Werther; and though Nozze di Figaro is one of my favorite operas, I loathe this production, which I’ve already seen in two different revivals (my mostly negative thoughts on that 2006 revival are here, and it was actually less vulgar than the first); I love Madama Butterfly, but feel I’ve seen it enough for a while. I did spring for a ticket to Cyrano, because I’ve always admired Domingo and the only other time I’ve heard him live was in Herodiade. And then there’s the Janacek; I assume we have Mattila’s star power to thank for bringing us one of this great composer’s fascinating works. I honestly don’t understand why he isn’t as popular as Puccini – to me he has that same kind of emotional directness and melodic richness. And Jenufa has one of the few happy endings I find convincing, even inspiring. So that’s the one can’t-miss for me this season.

I’m not excluding the upcoming June Ring Cycle from that assessment, either; I hoped that Walkure last June would guide and convince me one way or the other, but apparently I got the vocal off-night, which seems to be how these things go for me (so if I end up not buying tickets, you can be assured you’re in for a treat!). The production itself is not very interesting (my thoughts on Walkure are here, and in there is a link to my thoughts on the Rheingold, which I saw in both DC and here).

Fortunately other local groups are taking up the operatic slack for those who maybe don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for their hundredth Butterfly:

On October 30 and 31, Urban Opera is presenting a Purcell pasticcio, the Witch of Endor. They’re a new group and though I missed their previous presentation, Dido and Aeneas, it was highly praised.

Cal Performances is presenting Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival Opera in two Britten works, The Rape of Lucretia on March 24 and 25 and Albert Herring on March 26 and 27.

Ensemble Parallele is presenting Philip Glass’s Orphee, one of his Cocteau operas, on February 26 and 27, as a follow-up to their kick-ass Wozzeck.

Berkeley West Edge Opera is in a nifty new space in El Cerrito and has some interesting programs, starting with Handel’s Xerxes on November 13, 19, and 21, followed by an adaptation of Carmen called the Carmen Fixation and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody called Caliban’s Dreams.

Festival Opera hasn’t announced its 2011 productions as far as I know. For a while they were doing one warhorse and one more unusual work (like Rorem’s Our Town or Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) but lately it’s been two warhorses. I hope they resume their more adventurous ways. But even if they don’t, they present solid productions in a nice smaller theater, at a much lower cost than San Francisco Opera.

The other big opera excitement for me is the James Levine 40th anniversary CD and DVD sets. Cumulatively the sets are expensive, though the per-disc price is quite low. (And by not buying tickets to Aida, Butterfly, and Figaro, I more than covered the expense.) And click on those links and look at what you get! What I really love and admire here is the commitment to new or “difficult” works (there was a time when Mozart and Wagner were considered difficult. . . ). Two recordings each of Wozzeck and Lulu, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens and The Great Gatsby. . . everyone will have his or her particular jewels here, but anyone who doesn't find this collection thrilling . . . uh, is probably a big fan of the current programming at San Francisco Opera. I haven’t watched any of the DVDs yet, and have only listened to about half of the CDs, but I’m thrilled with the set and can’t recommend it too highly. My one complaint so far: the packaging is flimsy and difficult to use. I almost wrecked the DVD box trying to get the tray of discs out, and removing the CDs means reaching into the cardboard envelope and sliding them out by touching the disc – so a fail on the packaging, but the recordings are sheer gold.

Another Opening, Another Show: June 2026

When heading out this month, it's useful to keep in mind that there are events only implied here, events that will result in parades, parties, street fairs, & other suchlike occurrences that could mess up your travel / transit plans: leave early, give yourself plenty of time, enough time to enjoy whatever pops up to delay you instead of cursing it. I'm thinking mostly of Pride & Juneteenth, but there's also Bloomsday, & though I think there isn't a local celebration of that, there obviously should be.

Theatrical

ZSpace presents Becoming a Man by P Carl, directed by Lyam B Gabel, the story of a person who lived as a girl, then a queer woman, before transitioning to manhood after age 50, at ZSpace's Steindler Stage from 28 May to 14 June.

Phantom of the Opera returns to the Orpheum from 28 May to 21 June.

On 4 -6 June at ODC, People’s Circus Theatre will combine "circus, dance, and physical theatre" to portray The Unfinished Work of Camille Claudel.

On 12 - 14 & 19 - 21 June at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco, BARD Theater presents the Bacchae by Euripides, translated by Emily Wilson, adapted by E M Ervolina & Edward Paddock, choreographed by Paddock, & directed by Ervolina; after the 12 June performance, there will be a talkback with Wilson.

From 18 to 28 June, the Oakland Theater Project presents The Fre by Taylor Mac , directed by Mylo Cardona, "in which a lone Hero searches for order in a society that worships impulse. . . Part mud-riot, part rave, The Fre is a queer, all-ages play that stages polarization inside a literal ball pit. . . ".

On 19 - 21 June at Z Space's Steindler Stage, Fresh Meat Productions presents the Fresh Meat Festival of trans, queer and community performance; featuring "dance, music, drag, theater, and interdisciplinary performance" by Filipinx, the New Voices Bay Area Transgender, Intersex & Genderqueer Chorus, Zuzu Beloved, Shawna Virago, Sean Dorsey Dance. & new works by B DeVeaux, Pangaea, Shawn Lee with Bay Area Independent Chinese Dancers, & JanpiStar.

From 19 June to 12 July at the Potrero Stage, Golden Thread Productions & SFBATCO (the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company) co-present Arab Spring, a new comedy by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Nailah Unole didanas’ea Harper-Malveaux, about a recovering addict, his controlling big sister, & their attempts to give their deadbeat Dad an Islamic burial "before his body goes cold".

On 22 - 24 June as part of its Champagne Staged Reading Series at the Ashby Stage, Shotgun Players presents The Gull, an adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, written & directed by Tara Blau Smollen, set "in 1938 Oak Bluffs, a historic Black vacation community on Martha’s Vineyard".

From 24 June to 19 July in Z Below, Word for Word & ZSpace present Absolutely Science Fiction! Stories by Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut, directed by Delia MacDougall; the stories are Bradbury's The Veldt & Vonnegut’s The Big Space F*ck [sic].

From 25 June to 19 July, Theater Rhinoceros presents the west coast premiere of Goat Blood by Mark-Eugene Garcia, directed by Alejandro Torres, about a double date that goes very, very wrong.

Operatic

The San Francisco Opera closes out its season this month, starting with Rossini's The Barber of Seville, conducted by Benjamin Manis & directed by Emilio Sagi, with Figaro played by Joshua Hopkins (28 May & 5, 9, 13, 20 June) & Justin Austin (3, 6, 12, & 21 June, as well as the Encounter on 17 June); Rosina is played by Maria Kataeva (28 May & 5, 9, 13, 20 June) & Hongni Wu (3, 6, 12, & 21 June, as well as the Encounter on 17 June), Count Almaviva is Levy Sekgapane (28 May & 5, 9, 13, 20 June) & Jack Swanson (3, 6, 12, & 21 June, as well as the Encounter on 17 June), Doctor Bartolo is Renato Girolami (28 May & 5, 9, 13, 20 June)  & Patrick Carfizzi (3, 6, 12, & 21 June, as well as the Encounter on 17 June), Don Basilio is Riccardo Fassi, Berta Catherine Cook, & Fiorello Olivier Zerouali, & to reiterate the dates: 28 May, & 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 20, & 21 June. On 17 June, you can attend The Barber of Seville Encounter, in which part of the opera is performed & then there's a themed party in the lobby. I've never been to one of these but they're popular enough for the Opera to do them regularly.

The other opera on San Francisco Opera's June schedule is a revival of their stunning Keith Warner production of Elektra, with music by Richard Strauss to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Eun Sun Kim conducts, with Elena Pankratova in the title role, Michaela Schuster as Klytemnestra, Elza van den Heever as Chrysothemis, Kyle Ketelsen as Orest, & William Burden as Aegisth. & that's 7, 11, 14, 19, 23, & 27 June.

Festival Opera in association with the San Francisco Early Music Society presents Handel's magnificent Alcina, directed by Zachary Gordin & conducted by Derek Tam, with a cast including Nikola Printz in the title role, Courtney Miller as Ruggiero, Shawnette Sulker as Morgana, Sara Couden as Bradamante, Spencer Greene as Oronte, Nina Jones as Oberto, & Isaiah Musik-Ayala as Melisso; there are concert performances in Hertz Hall on 13 - 14 June as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival & Exhibition, & then a full production at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on 19 & 21 June.

Choral

Magen Solomon leads the San Francisco Choral Artists in Love, Lost and Found, a program featuring works by Gesualdo, Clara Schumann, Hensel, di Lasso, Monteverdi, Roger Nixon, Kirke Mechem, Daniel Afonso, Russell Burnham, & Allen Shearer, as well as premieres by Composer-in-Residence Max Marcus & Peter Hilliard, as well as the winning New Voices Project work by Yuri Lee; & that's 31 May at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 6 June at First Lutheran of Palo Alto, & 7 June at Saint Paul's Episcopal in Oakland.

Chanticleer offers American Early Music, a program designed to reflect "the various cultures that shaped early America, . . . Through polyphony, hymns, folk traditions, and spirituals. . . "; you can hear it all on 31 May at Saint John's Lutheran in Sacrament, 1 June at First Congregational in Berkeley, 2 June at Mount Tamalpais UMC in Mill Valley, 5 June at Mission Santa Clara, & 7 June at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco.

Artistic Director Chris Filice leads the International Orange Chorale in I Sing the Body Electric, a "vibrant choral program celebrating the beauty, vulnerability, and power of the human body through song. . . .  in music exploring embodiment, movement, love, and connection": you can find out what is on the program on 5 June at Saint Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco & & June at First Presbyterian in Berkeley.

On 7 June at ODC, Pacific Edge Voices will go on an A Cappella Road Trip with Deke Sharon, a celebration of songs linked to specific American places.

On 12 June at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir will give a Juneteenth Celebration concert.

On 13 June at the Curran Theater, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus celebrates the music of Dolly Parton.

On 20 June at Old First Concerts, KITKA presents an evening of Balkan, Baltic, Slavic, & Caucasian songs for the Summer Solstice; the ensemble is also celebrating the release of Kolo, "the ensemble’s thirteenth album on their own independent Diaphonica label. . .  .The concert (and album) evokes cosmic cycles of creation, growth, destruction, and renewal—the eternal turning of seasons and the shared rhythms of lives and voices woven together".

Vocalists

On 13 June at the Community Music Center of San Francisco, you can hear Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath in Song, a program featuring Dominic Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf & Ned Rorem's Ariel: 5 Poems of Sylvia Plath, performed by soprano Jesslyn Thomas & mezzo-soprano Erin Neff along with pianist Kevin Korth & clarinetist Andrew Friedman.

On 16 June at the Barbro Osher Recital Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Merola Opera Program & San Francisco Opera Center present the third & final of this season's Schwabacher Recital Series, featuring bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen & pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson (who is also Artistic Director of the Opera Center & the Merola Program), along with 2026 Merola Opera Program participants: Shannon Crowley, soprano; Charlotte Kelso, soprano; Chester Seungyup Han, tenor; Ryan Bryce Johnson, tenor; Paul Jang, baritone; & Deven Shah, pianist; together they will perform Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, songs by Henri Duparc, Là ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni, Ed or fra noi, parliam da buoni amici from Tosca, & pieces by Rossini, Verdi, Francesco Schira, & Respighi.

On 25 June at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Hume Concert Hall, the Merola Opera program will present L’Anima Napoletana, a selection of Neapolitan songs chosen by Merola faculty member Mario Antonio Marra.

On 26 June, San Francisco Opera presents its annual Pride Concert, hosted by Sapphira Cristál & conducted by Robert Mollicone, with vocalists Nikola Printz, Melody Moore, & Reginald Smith Jr, who will perform works by the late, much lamented Michael Tilson Thomas, as well as Gounod, Giordano, Offenbach, Terence Blanchard, Michael Abels, Stephen Schwartz, kd lang, Brandi Carlile, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, & others.

Orchestral

On 5 - 6 June, Elim Chan leads the San Francisco Symphony in Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, & Debussy's La Mer. This already looked like a great program, but Chan, of course, has recently been named the next Music Director of the Symphony, so there will be that level of interest & glamor on top of the wonderful pieces she's conducting.

On 7 June at Herbst Theater, Paul Schrage leads the SF Civic Symphony in Mussorgsky's Scherzo in B-flat major, Stravinsky's The Firebird, & Holst's The Planets; the concert is free but RSVPs & donations are gratefully accepted (it's general admission but giving a donation gets you seated first).

On 12 - 14 June, Tianyi Lu leads the San Francisco Symphony in Zhiân by Iman Habibi, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto (with soloist María Dueñas), & Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

On 12 - 14 June at First Presbyterian in Berkeley, Ming Luke leads the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra in the world premiere of Michael Schachter's Terezin Requiem & Haydn's Theresienmesse in B-flat major.

On 18, 20, & 21 June, James Gaffigan leads the San Francisco Symphony in the Beethoven 9, with vocal soloists Jessica Faselt (soprano), Kelley O’Connor (mezzo-soprano), Thomas Cooley (tenor), & Peixin Chen (bass), as well as the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, led by Jenny Wong; the Symphony is dedicating these performances to the memory of the late Michael Tilson Thomas.

On 20 June at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Robert Mollicone leads the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in Dearly, Queerly, Over the Rainbow, a program featuring Harold Arlen's Concert Suite from The Wizard of Oz, Jake Heggie's Good Morning, Beauty (with vocal soloist Nikola Printz, singing the words of Taylor Mac), & the Brahms 3.

On 21 June in Herbst Theater, John Kendall Bailey leads the SF Civic Symphony in Górecki's Symphony #3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (with soprano soloist Marnie Breckenridge), along with Chopin's Fantasy on Polish Airs & his Revolutionary Étude played by pianist Daniel Glover; the concert is free but RSVPs & donations are gratefully accepted (it's general admission but giving a donation gets you seated first).

On 21 June at the Chabot College Performing Arts Center in Hayward, Jane Brown leads the Bay Philharmonic in America in Rhythm & Rhapsody, a program featuring Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (with soloist Allegra Chapman), the Dvořák 9, From the New World Symphony, Aaron Copland’s Hoe Down, Saturday Night Waltz, & Fanfare for the Common Man, & José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango.

On 25 - 27 June, Stéphane Denève leads the San Francisco Symphony in Guillaume Connesson's Flammenschrift, Poulenc's Organ Concerto, & the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony (the latter two pieces feature soloist Olivier Latry).

Chamber

On 2 June at Old Saint Mary's in San Francisco, Noontime Concerts presents violinist Florin Parvulescu & pianist Xak Bjerkin; their program has not yet been announced.

The Friction Quartet (Otis Harriel & Kevin Rogers, violins; Mitso Floor, viola; Doug Machiz, cello) presents Transformations, a program featuring Julia Wolfe's Blue Dress, György Ligeti's String Quartet #1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes), & Haydn's String Quartet opus 76 #6 in E flat Major on 5 June at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco & 6 June at Saint Bede's Episcopal in Menlo Park.

On 13 June at the Noe Valley Ministry, the SF Civic Music Association presents An Afternoon of Chamber Music, featuring Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos, Jason Gibbs's Experiments in Consilience, Gordon Jacob's Swansea Town, Miriam Hyde's Trio for Piano, Flute, Clarinet, & the Brahms Piano Trio in C major, Opus 87.

On 28 June in Davies Hall, a chamber group of San Francisco Symphony musicians will perform Gareth Farr's Taheke, Sarn Oliver's CAT (Contemporary Artful Tonalities) String Quartet, Joan Tower's Petroushskates, & Fauré's Piano Trio in D minor, Opus 12.

On 28 June at Old First Concerts, Duo Soriga (soprano Josephine Lee & gayageum performer-composer Hwayoung Shon) will perform four new pieces by Shon & four new arrangements of traditional Korean tunes.

Instrumental

On 3 June in Davies Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presents violinist Njioma Grevious in recital; with pianist Andrew Goodridge, she will perform a selection from Bach's Sonata in A minor, Within the drifting contours of the land… by Electra Perivolaris, the Scherzo in C minor from the F-A-E Sonata by Brahms, Messiaen's Theme and Variations, Clarence Cameron White's Levee Dance, & Prokofiev's Sonata #2 in D major, Opus 94a.

On 9 June in Old Saint Mary's in San Francisco, Noontime Concerts presents pianist Oliver Moore (his program has not yet been announced).

On 21 June at Old First Concerts, pianist Jason Sia will perform Poème: A Song Without Words by Carmencita Guanzon Arambulo, L’isle joyeuse by Debussy, the Larghetto from Chopin's Piano Concerto #2 as transcribed by Carl Reinecke, Gaspard de la nuit by Ravel, & Earl Wild's Grand Fantasy on Gershwin’s Opera ‘Porgy and Bess’.

See also organist Gail Archer performing Messiaen at the Cathedral of Christ the Light, listed below under Modernist / New Music.

Early / Baroque Music

The big event this month is obviously the biannual Berkeley Early Music Festival & Exhibition (as early-music mavens know, Berkeley does even-numbered years & Boston odd), which launches on 5 June with Bach's Saint John Passion, led by  Nicholas McGegan & featuring the Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble & the Cantata Collective (that performances is in far-off, for some of us, Palo Alto, but the program repeats on 7 June in Berkeley) & which concludes on 13 - 14 June with Derek Tam leading the Festival Opera in concert performances in Hertz Hall of Handel's Alcina (there will be fully staged performances later this month in Walnut Creek; see above under Operatic for cast & links). In between there is, of course, lots going on, including gamelan & music from China as well as medieval, Renaissance, & Baroque Europe; check here for the full Festival schedule, but also check here for the wealth of Fringe Festival concerts; there is also the Exhibit, free & open to the public, on 11 - 13 June at the South Wing of First Congregational in Berkeley; click here for more information on the Exhibit & Marketplace & for a list of exhibitors.

Modernist / New Music

On 6 & 7 June at the Ruth Williams Opera House in San Francisco, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents the world premiere of Steam by David Dominique, with a libretto by Dominique & Joseph Tepperman, & cinematography by Kevin Everson, along with Stravinsky's A Soldier’s Tale.

On 9 June in Herbst Theater, the ARTZenter Institute & the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will present another of their concerts, with free admission & no reservation required, featuring the latest winners of their Emerging Composer program; this time the world premieres will be Divided Realities by Eric Estrada Valadez, A Grief Observed by Euna Joh, Memories of Storm & Light by Luca Pasquini, & My Rage is Quiet by Jackson A Waters.

On 20 June at the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, Gail Archer will give an organ recital featuring Messiaen's Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité.

On the Solstice, 21 June, New Music Bay Area presents the beloved annual Garden of Memory Concert at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland; you can see a line-up of this year's performers here & if you're interested, don't hesitate, as this event tends to sell out. (In fact, since it takes me quite a while to put these lists together, it may be sold out by the time you read this; but I'm not deleting it (I don't list sold-out events) because there may be volunteering opportunities.)

On 26 & 27 June at Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, Other Minds presents Composers Inside Electronics to celebrate A David Tudor Centennial; there are "two evening concerts, as well as an afternoon discussion/demonstration of some of the techniques behind Tudor’s experiments with electronics"; get more information here.

Jazz

On 11 -14 June, SF Jazz presents Afro-Cuban jazz master Chucho Valdés & his Royal Quartet (Valdés on piano, José Armando Gola on bass, Horacio “El Negro” Hernández on drums, Roberto Jr Vizcaino on percussion).

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass appear at Davies Hall on 16 June.

Dance

On 5 - 6 June at Theater of Yugen's NOHSpace, the U.S./Japan Cultural Trade Network presents Memento Forest — katami, a multimedia dance performance directed & performed by Marina Fukushima, exploring the realities of grieving & remembering a loved one.

On 12 - 13 June at ODC, you can experience the Community Showcase, the "culmination of the spring performance workshops for adult students", featuring a Fusion Bellydance Ismaaouni Performance Workshop with Jill Parker & Maite Gasco; Contemporary Dance with Improvisation & Contact Improvisation (Intermediate) with Suzanne Beahrs; Contemporary Dance and Martial Arts with Daiane Lopes da Silva and Soungyoung Park; ballet with ODC Ballet Director Chris Lam; Ballroom with Rafael Dominguez & Alise Halbert; Contemporary Dance with Erin Yen; Performance and Choreography with Nol Simonse; & Tap with Vanessa Sanchez; there will also be a special guest, Sambaxe.

Mostly Museums

Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing, a retrospective highlighting Hassinger's "work across sculpture, performance, video, and installation from the early 1970s to the present", opens at BAM/PFA on 6 June & runs through 29 November.

Ancestral Echoes — Crops of Empire, with work by mixed-media artist Demetri Broxton, opens at MOAD on 10 June & runs through 16 August.

Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the Bay Area artist, will display her collages, found-object sculptures, & immersive installations at the Oakland Museum of California starting on 12 June & running through 18 October.

Cinematic

The 25th San Francisco Documentary Festival takes place 28 May to & June; click here for the schedule.

BAM/PFA launches its summer films series this month, starting with French Noir: From the Shadows into the Light on 4 June, a series illustrating "how French cinema has been steeped in the characteristics of film noir through the decades—from the period of Poetic Realism in the 1930s–40s to the Nouvelle Vague beginning in the late 1950s and beyond" (David Thomson will be there to present several films, including Renoir's The Rules of the Game, as part of the launch of his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies); Summer with Monica Vitti begins on 11 June & includes her work with Antonioni as well as a later series of popular comedies; & A Complete Stanley Kubrick, which includes films by other directors that Kubrick was associated with, starts on 12 June.

Brava Theater will present its "very first edition of Scissor Cinema: A Double Feature" with two classic lesbian films, The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye on 5 June & Saving Face by Alice Wu on 6 June.

From 5 to 11 June, the Roxie Theater, in association with American Cinematheque & "nearly 100 theaters across the country and around the world" presents Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, which is pretty self-explanatory, & there are some great films in the line-up. (I've just heard about "Bleak Week" programming at movie houses, but apparently it's a nation-wide, if not world-wide thing. I'm all for it!)

As part of their Disney Restoration series, the Orinda Theater will present Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, introduced by Kevin Schaeffer, Director of the Restoration and Library Department  of Walt Disney Studios, on 6 June.

On 6 June at the Curran Theater, there will be a 40th anniversary screening of Clue: The Movie with stars Tim Curry & Lesley Ann Warren there in person, which is why I'm listing this, because I recently saw this movie for the first time, knowing that it's a cult classic & has a stellar cast, & "disappointed" doesn't begin to cover my reaction. I found it not only unfunny but really homophobic in its humor, even for a 1980s comedy. If you love the movie, enjoy! If you don't know anything about it, you may want to take a look before you commit your time & money.

On 15 June at the Roxie, you can see The Cocoanuts (yes, that is the correct spelling), the cinematic debut of the Marx Brothers, & if you want to see what a Broadway show would have been like in 1929, this early sound film gives you a good idea.

The 50th Frameline Festival will take place from 17 to 27 June; check here for a schedule of films.

On 19 June at the Curran Theater, there will be a special screening of Airplane!, with an in-person discussion after the show with stars Julie Hagerty & Robert Hays.

On 20 June at Brava Studio, Brava Theater Center presents Brava’s Short Block “Queer Resilience” ; see here for more information. 

On 26 June at the Paramount in Oakland, you can see Walt Disney's Fantasia.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: October 2019

Theatrical
Theater of Yugen starts the spooky season off early with Puppets & Poe: Devised Defiance, directed by Shannon R Davis, which combines several of Poe's poems and short stories using puppetry and traditional Japanese theater techniques; you can check it out from 3 October to 2 November.

Z Space presents its second annual Problematic Play Festival on 2 and 4 October, when you can hear readings of the new comedies Three Fat Sisters by Morgan Gould and Mediocre Heterosexual Sex by Madison Wetzell.

The Ubuntu Theater Project presents Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by company Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran, from 4 to 27 October at the FLAX Building in Oakland (just a short walk from the 12th Street BART Station).

On 5 October the Douglas Morrisson Theatre in Hayward presents Brian Copeland's The Waiting Period: Laughter in the Darkness, a solo show about his struggles with depression and thoughts of suicide.

San Francisco Playhouse presents The Daughters, a look at the past 60 years of lesbian history in San Francisco, written by Patricia Cotter and directed by Jessica Holt, from 9 October to 2 November; performances will be at the Creativity Theater at Yerba Buena, as SF Playhouse's mainstage will be occupied by Clare Barron's Dance Nation until 9 November.

The African-American Shakespeare Company opens its season with Othello, directed by Carl Jordan and starring L Peter Callender, at the Marines' Memorial Theater from 12 to 27 October.

Shotgun Players presents Elevada, written by Sheila Callaghan and directed by Susannah Martin, from 17 October to 17 November.

JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the two-part sequel to her beloved series of novels, opens at the Curran Theater on 23 October.

Ray of Light celebrates Halloween with its fifth annual revival of Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror Show, this time with new sets, choreography, and direction (though as of this typing I don't see a director listed on the website), running 23 October through 2 November at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco.

ACT presents Kate Attwell's Test Match, a time-travel drama about cricket, directed by Pam MacKinnon, from 24 October to 8 December at the Strand Theater.

Operatic
Ars Minerva Artistic Director and mezzo-soprano Céline Ricci will be joined by mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich, soprano Aurélie Veruni, and harpsichordist Kelly Savage on 5 October at the 906 World Cultural Center (at 906 Broadway in San Francisco) for an evening of music and spoken texts exploring legendary and heroic women of the Mediterranean (women like Cleopatra, Dido, or Ottavia, and music by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel, Pietro-Andrea Ziani, and Giovanni Porta).

San Francisco Opera presents the Mozart / da Ponte Le Nozze di Figaro from 11 October to 1 November, and I am delighted that this is a new production, since I loathed the old one.

For some introductory thoughts on one of the fall season's upcoming productions, head to the Wagner Society of Northern California meeting at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on 19 October to hear Brad Wade on the topic What do Hansel and Gretel have to do with Siegmund and Sieglinde?

Choral
Cal Performances presents Trey McLaughlin & The Sounds of Zamar on 3 October at Zellerbach Hall.

Choir! Choir! Choir! comes to Freight & Salvage on 17 October, and you, the audience member, are the choir and will be taught/led in performance – this sounds like potentially a lot of fun for someone who isn't me.

The San Francisco Girls Chorus opens its season on 19 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, with conductor Valérie Sainte-Agathe and soprano and guest curator Nell Snaidas exploring Latin American baroque music and poetry, and in particular the celebrated Mexican nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Vocalists
Huun-Huur-Tu, a quartet of Tuvan throat singers, bring their ancient but ever-new music to Freight & Salvage on 1 October.

Soprano Renée Fleming with pianist Richard Bado returns to Zellerbach Hall on 5 October for a Cal Performances recital that will include works by Schubert, Hahn, Delibes, Liszt, Kevin Puts, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Lehár, André Previn, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Adam Guettel.

Lieder Alive! presents tenor Pene Pati (recent, and universally praised, star of SF Opera's Roméo et Juliette) and pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg on 6 October in a program featuring Tosti and Strauss.

The SF Jazz Center presents Lila Downs  and her celebration of the Día de los Muertos (with the participation of the Grandeza Mexicana Folk Ballet Company and the Mariachi Feminil-Flores Mexicanas) at the Paramount Theater in Oakland on 12 October.

Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist-composer Brad Mehldau will perform Schumann's Dichterliebe and a new song cycle by Mehldau, The Folly of Desire, at the SF Jazz Center on 15 October.

Jazz singer Clairdee performs a program called The Thrill Is You on 19 October at the Rendon Hall/Fiddler Annex at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.

On 20 October Old First Concerts presents mezzo-soprano Naama Liany with guitarist Robert Miller in Una Folía, a program about "wild passion and an impossible love" featuring music by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Federico García Lorca, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Xavier Montsalvatge.

San Francisco Performances presents the eagerly awaited return of baritone Christian Gerhaher with pianist Gerold Huber in an all-Mahler program; that's 22 October at Herbst Theater.

Talking
SHN presents An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson on 14 October at Davies Hall; each ticket includes a copy of Tyson's new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, redeemable at the talk.

Novelist Zadie Smith visits City Arts & Lectures on 16 October.

Orchestral
It's guest conductor month at the San Francisco Symphony: from 3 to 5 October, Marek Janowski conducts Hindemith's Concert Music for String Orchestra and Brass, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with soloist María Dueñas, and the Mozart 41, the Jupiter; from 17 to 19 October, Cristian Măcelaru leads Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (in the orchestration by Ravel), and the world premiere of SFS commission Losing Earth by Adam Schoenberg, featuring percussionist Jacob Nissly; and from 24 to 26 October Karina Canellakis conducts the Prokofiev Piano Concerto 1 with soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk and the Shostakovich 7, Leningrad.

Edwin Outwater leads the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra in Linda Catlin Smith's Wilderness, the Shostakovich 5, and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (with piano soloist Jung-eun Kim) on 18 October.

Oakland Symphony Music Director Michael Morgan opens the season at the Paramount Theater on 18 October with a program titled Hot as Hell / Cool Jazz; the infernal heat in the first half is supplied by the Prologue to Boito's Mefistofele, featuring bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum, the Oakland Symphony Chorus led by Lynne Morrow, and the Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir led by Eric Tuan; the cool jazz comes after intermission courtesy of an imposing selection of music new and old from trumpeter Josiah Woodson and pianist/composer Taylor Eigsti.

At the Berkeley Symphony, new music director Joseph Young opens the season at Zellerbach Hall on 24 October with the late Olly Wilson's Shango Memory (Shango is the Yoruban deity of thunder and lightning), the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major with soloist Conrad Tao, and the Beethoven 5.

The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra will play Emilie Mayer's Faust Overture, along with a lecture-performance of the Beethoven 5, on 25 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 26 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 27 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.

Chamber
OcTUBAfest comes to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 6 October; the program is free (no reservations required).

Old First Concerts presents The Ives Collective on 13 October, playing works by Zoltán Kodály, Erich Korngold, and Peteris Vasks.

The San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, led by concertmaster Robin Sharp, plays piano quartets by Mozart and Fauré at Freight & Salvage on 14 October.

San Francisco Performances presents the Z.E.N. Trio playing Schubert, Brahms, and Shostakovich at Herbst Theater on 18 October (the Trio's name refers not only to the Japanese concept of Zen but to the players's names: pianist Zhang Zuo, violinist Esther Yoo, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan).

Starting 19 October and continuing for six other Saturday mornings into May, San Francisco Performances presents the Alexander String Quartet and musicologist Robert Greenberg in a lecture / performance series exploring the Beethoven string quartets.

San Francisco Performances presents the Calidore String Quartet, playing works by Haydn, Caroline Shaw, and Beethoven, at Herbst Theater on 21 October.

The San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players perform works by Bach and Schubert at the Legion of Honor's Gunn Theater on 20 October (matinee).

The Telegraph Quartet will performs works by Haydn, Berg, and Britten on 23 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; admission is free but reservations are recommended.

Strings & Keyboards
The SF Jazz Center presents pianist Kenny Barron, joined by pianist Benny Green and guitarist Miles Okazaki, celebrating Thelonius Monk at Herbst Theater on 10 October, which would have been the jazz legend's 102nd birthday.

Jonathan Biss continues his series of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas for Cal Performances at Hertz Hall on 12 and 13 October.

San Francisco Performances presents guitarist Manuel Barrueco at Herbst Theater on 13 October, playing works by Luis de Narváez, Héctor Angulo, Ignacio Cervantes, Julián Orbón, Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz, and Francisco Tárrega.

Pianist Neil Rutman visits Old First Concerts on 18 October to play music by Orlando Gibbons, Chopin, Lou Harrison, Frederic Rzewski, Fauré, and Ravel.

Organist Paul Jacobs gives a solo recital of Bach, Mozart, Ives, and Vierne on 20 October at Davies Hall (presented by the San Francisco Symphony).

Pianist Lang Lang returns to Davies Hall on 21 October (one night only), when he will join the San Francisco Symphony led by Ion Marin in the Beethoven Piano Concerto 2; also on the program are Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila and the Tchaikovsky 4.

Pianist Martin Katz, one of the celebrated accompanists of our time, will offer a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on 25 October; admission is free but reservations are recommended.

Under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, guitarist Jason Vieaux will play works by Scarlatti, Giuliani, Bach, Frank Martin, Barrios, Jobin, Ellington, and José Luis Merlín at Herbst Theater on 26 October.

I don't usually list "galas" but it looks as if there's an actual concert attached to this one, so here goes: San Francisco Performances presents pianist Richard Goode playing Janáček, Chopin, and Debussy at Herbst Theater on 29 October.


Early / Baroque Music
Paul Flight leads the California Bach Society in its season opener, Bach's Magnificat and Zelenka's Missa Divi Xaverii, on 4 October at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco, 5 October at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, and 6 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music celebrates the 400th birthday of Barbara Strozzi with a concert of her vocal music on 26 October; the concert is free but reservations are recommended.

Modern / Contemporary Music
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble opens its season with Changing and Unchanging Things, a concert exploring the intersection between Japanese and western art music (the title comes from the Asian Art Museum's upcoming exhibit about Noguchi and Hasegawa, two visual artists who also played in that liminal field). You can hear the world premiere of Karen Tanaka's chamber piece Wind Whisperer, Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, Dai Fujikura's Neo, and the world premiere of Hiroya Miura's Sharaku Unframed, a "micro opera" about the 18th century woodblock artist, on 5 October at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and 6 October at the Berkeley Hillside Club.

InterMusic SF presents the 12th Annual San Francisco Music Day on 6 October, from noon to 7:30, when you can wander among 32 different ensembles performing in the four performance spaces of the Veterans Building (adjacent to the Opera House, and the four spaces are: Herbst Theater, the Green Room, the Atrium Theater, and the Education Studio).

Ensemble for These Times performs Dracula Rising: Ghosts of Hollywood Past on 12 October at the Berkeley Piano Club; the program consists of chamber works and movie arrangements by Polish refugee composers of the 1930s and 1940s as well as Korngold and Castelnuove-Tedesco as well as contemporary works by David Garner, Lennie Moore, and Polish film composer Wojciech Kilar.

Pianist Sarah Cahill will be joined by Gamelan Sari Raras in a performance of the late great Lou Harrison's Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan on 13 October at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive; there are two performances, at 5:30 and 7:30; Gamelan Sari Raras will also perform traditional Javanese music (the performance will be repeated on 8 November at Hertz Hall, when the Javanese music performed by the ensemble will be modern rather than traditional).

Nicolas McGegan's farewell season at the head of Philharmonia Baroque kicks off with a world premiere by Caroline Shaw, The Listeners, a reflection on Carl Sagan's "Golden Record" and humanity's general interest in recording itself for what looks like an increasingly unlikely posterity; also on the program are Handel's Eternal Source of Light Divine and his Suite from Terpsichore; in addition to the orchestra and the chorus led by Bruce Lamott, the soloists are soprano Arwen Myers, contralto Avery Amereau, countertenor Reginald Mobley, and bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and you can hear it all on 17 October at Herbst Theater in San Francisco, 18 October at First United Methodist in Palo Alto, and 19 and 20 October at First Congregational in Berkeley.

Bard Music West explores the world of Polish modernist Grażyna Bacewicz in three concerts over over two days (18 - 19 October) at Noe Valley Ministry.

Old First Concerts presents Orphic Percussion, in a program that includes four world premieres, on 25 October.

The Wooden Fish Ensemble celebrates the music (and birthday) of Hyo-Shin Na at Old First Concerts on 27 October with a concert that includes four world premieres.

Don't forget to check the constantly updated calendar for the Center for New Music; here are some things that strike me for this month in the current listings: Fay Victor and Myra Melford with a free-flowing words and music evening on 3 October; Burton Greene playing solo piano as well as the Dunkelman/Ackley/Fluke-Mogul Trio on 4 October: Slow Wave: New Music for Viola, Clarinet, and Piano on 5 October; the Friction Quartet with bass clarinetist Bruce Belton playing the Bay Area premieres of new quintets by Marc Mellits, Sebastián Tozzola, and Michael Torke on 17 October; Jesse Perlstein and Shinya Sugimoto along with Glenda Bates and Oboetronics on 25 October; and Neil Rolnick's Journey's End, a work for computer and piano inspired by his late wife's struggle with cancer, performed by Kathleen Supové, on 26 October.

Jazz &c
Madeleine Peyroux sings at Freight & Salvage on 3 October.

The Seventh Annual San Francisco International Boogie-Woogie Festival will take place at the SF Jazz Center on 20 October.

The SF Jazz Center presents the flamenco sounds of the Paco de Lucía Project on 23 October at Herbst Theater.

BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet will regale you with Cajun music at Freight & Salvage on 24 October.

The Vijay Iyer Trio plays the SF Jazz Center on 26 October.

The Myra Melford Platform at Cal Performances presents the David Virelles Trio featuring Marcus Gilmore and Rashaan Carter, and Spider Web, a piece by Nicole Mitchell and Josh Kun involving spoken word, electronics, musical instruments, and movement, at Hertz Hall on 27 October.

The UC-Berkeley Jazz Ensembles will hold their fall concert at Freight & Salvage on 29 October.

Visual Arts
Starting on 2 October and running until 2 February at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, you can see the first US exhibit focusing on Sakaki Hyakusen, the founder of the Nanga school of Japanese painting. By the way, if you haven't been to BAM/PFA lately, check them out! Located an easy block or two from the downtown Berkeley BART station, they offer more consistently interesting and surprising exhibits than any other museum I know of in this area.

The Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley hosts Object Lessons, an exhibit featuring Egyptian artifacts ancient and modern, including items from the Tebtunis Papyri Collection, from 11 October to May 2020.

James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, a rare look at the late-nineteenth-century painter (born in France but also active in England) opens at the Legion of Honor on 12 October and runs until 9 February 2020

There are a couple of interesting exhibits opening this month at the Oakland Museum: ¡El Movimiento Vivo! Chicano Roots of El Día de los Muertos, exploring the activist roots of the local celebration of El Día de los Muertos, opens on 16 October; and No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, which is self-explanatory, opens on 12 October.

Dance
Tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran create their second commissioned score for a world premiere at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, which will also feature a light installation designed by Jim Campell, and that runs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1 to 6 October.

ODC/Dance and Volti revive KT Nelson's Path of Miracles, their very popular dance version of Joby Talbot's score, at the newly renovated Presidio Theater on 11 October (be aware that the theater is difficult to access without a car).

Renowned butoh troupe Sankai Juku visits Zellerbach Hall for Cal Performances on 12 and 13 October with Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land, a work directed, choreographed, and designed
by Ushio Amagatsu.

Cal Performances presents dance troupe Hālau O Kekuhi performing traditional Hawaiian dances in honor of Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes, at Zellerbach Hall on 20 October.

Dance/movement group MOMIX returns to Cal Performances and Zellerbach Hall on 26 - 27 October, with a sampler of movements from some of their more popular shows.

Cal Performances kicks it up old school with the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra (under artistic director Valery Gergiev) in La Bayadère at Zellerbach Hall from 30 October to 3 November.

Cinematic
The Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive launches some interesting film series this month:
David Thomson puts four films of the British New Wave into their cultural context, and that runs from 2 to 23 October; the Mill Valley Film Festival camps out in Berkeley, with various films scheduled from 5 to 12 October (of particular interest is Varda by Agnès on 12 October, in which the late filmmaker reviews her career); and the opportunity, beginning 3 October and scheduled through 16 November, to see new restorations of works starring or directed by Zheng Junli, dating from the early 1930s to the Cultural Revolution.

The SF Jazz Center presents Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi on 10 October, accompanied by GoGo Penguin in a live performance of their own original score.

On October 19 at the newly renovated Presidio Theater in San Francisco you can see the Silent Film Festival's latest restoration, Jane's Declaration of Independence, a 1915 two-reeler (that's about 30 to 40 minutes) that is the earliest surviving theatrical release actually filmed at the Presidio.

Face of a Stranger, a restored feature from 1977 by filmmaker and musician David Michalak inspired by German Expressionism and the silent films of the 1920s, plays at the Center for New Music in San Francisco on 23 October with a newly recorded score by Thollem McDonas; the showing is preceded by a short set from Bruce Ackley.

The SF Jazz Center celebrates Halloween with a special showing at Grace Cathedral of the 1920 John Barrymore Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, accompanied by organist Dorothy Papadakos. Let the holidays begin!

stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

The San Francisco opera season resumed (for me, at least; I think Don Giovanni actually opened first) with Der Rosenkavalier. Lovely sets, excellent singers, new insights into the work, and I kept thinking, My God, this is so long. First the good stuff: I liked the recreation of the original Alfred Roller designs, though as always I wish directors were a little more conscious of sightlines – the opening scene had everyone in my left-hand side of the orchestra straining to see the Marschallin and Octavian tucked away in the left-hand corner of the stage. Everyone has justifiably been crazy about Joyce DiDonato’s boyishly manly Octavian, one of the more convincing trouser-role performances I’ve ever seen, but the ones who really caught my attention were Sophie and Baron Ochs. Sophie was performed by a gorgeous young Swede, Miah Persson, who was exactly the right combination of naïve and imperious; I especially liked the way she sang her part of the Presentation of the Rose as if she had carefully memorized it and was proud of herself for performing it flawlessly, as indeed Sophie would have done and felt. Baron Ochs was Kristinn Sigmundsson, who brought out the Falstaff in Ochs rather than reducing him to the usual crude country cousin. He physically towered over everyone on stage until Jeremy Galyon showed up as the notary and then the police commissioner, though it’s hard to tell if it’s because he’s especially tall or if the rest of the cast is fairly short. I especially liked the way he listened attentively and started applauding naively halfway through the Italian tenor’s aria; after the Italian signals disapproval, he shrugs and goes back to his negotiations; usually Ochs is entirely unmoved by art. Of course, making Ochs more sympathetic makes the third-act shenanigans even less amusing and more drawn-out than they already are. I never find pranks very funny, and they pall on repetition – the thought of having to sit yet again through the bohemians’ antics is just another reason for me to avoid La Boheme. Like it or not, most of us are closer to Ochs – buffoonish, status-anxious, oblivious – than to anyone else on stage, which brings us to the Marschallin, who of course is the character every audience member likes to think of him- or herself as being. Soile Isokoski, who is much better looking than her head shot suggests, was good if a bit subdued, and I give her full credit for pulling off the difficult task of performing a “wise” role and seeming actually wise instead of condescending – maybe the secret is to perform from a place of love rather than power (Hans Sachs is similarly difficult to pull off). But though her foresight and compassion with Octavian are what grabs the audience, it should be noted that at some level the audience is also taking in that, first, she has no problem finding younger lovers on whom to lavish the aforesaid foresight and compassion (which is a form of controlling them), and, second, she has an absolutely unassailable social and economic position – it’s all very well to sneer at Ochs, but his snobbish insistence on his social status comes from ignorance and lack of sophistication and a fear of being slighted, and is sadly where most of us find ourselves, much as we might like to pretend that we are immovable jewels in the crown of Maria Therese. I find the Marschallin a bit too much a wish-fulfillment figure (as opposed to her obvious model, the delicately sorrowful Countess Almaviva in Nozze di Figaro, the gently ironic treatment of whose relationship with Cherubino keeps her in a more realistic perspective). By the second or third time the Marshallin declares that “she had had enough of men, just then,” I started to find her renunciation a bit self-dramatizing. I also started wondering if her cuckolded husband had had enough of women, just then. Which brings us to one of my problems: there are so many beautiful moments in Rosenkavalier – I can put up with the third-act pranks knowing that they culminate in the trio, for example – but everything seemed to happen about twice as many times as it needed to. Four hours is a long time to sit through a domestic comedy; I can sit through Parsifal or the Ring or Tristan without a thought for time, because those stories demand the extraordinary, but it’s relevant to my point that the only Wagner opera where I go in thinking about how long it’s going to last is Meistersinger. I’ve always enjoyed Rosenkavalier, and its pre-postmodern play with parody, identity, and pastiche is something that would appeal to me. So what was my problem? I’m really not sure. I wasn’t in the mood to go to the theater (which is why I buy tickets in advance; if I depended on going when I felt like it I’d leave the house about twice a year). Usually a performance puts me in the mood, but this time, despite its many excellences, it didn’t. I was surrounded by talkers and felt tired. My failure to respond whole-heartedly could be my fault. I might have felt differently on another night. I might also have seen Rosenkavalier once too often for the glorious moments to overcome the sense of familiarity.