San Francisco Symphony: Adriana Mater

Last night I was at Davies Hall to hear the San Francisco Symphony in the first of a three-performance stand of Adriana Mater, the 2005 opera about war-time tragedy with music by Kaija Saariaho & libretto by Amin Maalouf. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, a longtime friend & associate of the composer, conducted & the work was staged, as part of his multi-year association with the Symphony, by Peter Sellars, who was instrumental in the work's creation & to whom it is dedicated. This run of concerts was clearly going to be a jewel in the season's crown even before the 2 June death of the beloved & much-missed composer. The performances are dedicated to her memory & music.

There are four characters: Adriana herself (performed by mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron), her sister Refka (soprano Axelle Fanyo), the alcoholic drifter Tsargo (baritone Christopher Purves), & Adriana's son, Yonas (tenor Nicholas Phan). The action took place on several platforms jutting out into the first rows of floor seats & one in the middle of the orchestra stage itself; the characters are often isolated on the individual platforms. The costumes mostly look like street wear & are suggestive of a contemporary setting. Despite some strange vocal effects that I assume came from amplification (or possibly the odd acoustics of the always unsatisfactory Davies Hall – & by the way I had forgotten how excruciatingly uncomfortable the seats there can be), such as the voices suddenly sounding very different when a singer faced a different direction, or even sounding altered (though possibly that was intentional), all four singers were dazzlingly impressive: fully present in their intense & difficult vocal lines & their characters, & even the use of I guess iPads with (again, I guess) the music didn't undercut their effectiveness.

The music is magnificent, like some great mysterious beast rising up from the depths. I've heard recordings of other works by Saariaho, including her first opera, L'Amour de Loin (Adriana is her second opera) but I had never heard anything from this piece before. It's a very rich, dense score & Salonen led the band in a gripping account. The opera is in seven tableau, which were presented in two parts of about an hour or so each. There is a small chorus, set off to the side, who provided ghostly effects, giving the action a resonance beyond the four characters we were shown.

But all this splendid artistry is in the service of a surprisingly simplistic melodrama. Shorn of its artsy dream-arias & poetic repetitions, Maalouf's libretto is crude & clumsy in its characterization & story-telling. The setting is an unnamed country, soon to be engaged in a civil war. Adriana, while returning to her house, speaks with Tsargo, a weak drunkard. It is clear that she is Good & he is Bad, though no real reasons for these judgments are given. He reminds her that they once danced together (the music turned, briefly but enchantingly, to a dreamlike lovers' atmosphere). She rebuffs him, in the polite way of women to men they aren't romantically interested in. Refka reproves her for even speaking to Tsargo, who is beneath them & seems dangerous; Refka is also Good, but more cautious. When war begins Tsargo returns, suddenly a soldier carrying a machine gun. He demands entry to Adriana's house so that he can monitor enemy forces in the street. She refuses. He forces his way in & there is a very powerful orchestral interlude, during which, according to the plot summary in the program, "we deduce that he rapes her". (The rape is not staged.) She decides to have the child, but wonders which parent he will resemble: "Cain or Abel?" is how she puts it. & the lights go up.

I assume the lack of any political, cultural, historic, or social aspect to the war is deliberate, to give it a timeless, almost mythic feeling. But this lack also flattens the characterizations: would a more specifically situated Adriana & Refka really have no side they supported? Their neutrality, which is clearly meant to be seen as a good quality, since War is bad, could look like cowardice or opportunism if the stakes were spelled out. Tsargo is weak & ineffectual until the war starts: but once it does, he is suddenly a powerful & much feared mercenary. This makes him a useful allegorical figure representing the damages & terrors of War, but is less effective as a description of an actual human being, particularly as he dwindles right back into decrepitude when the plot requires his weakness rather than his strength. (There is also apparently no PTSD for this former soldier.)

The second half begins with a scene between an angry Yonas & his mother; he is now a young man & he has just discovered that his father was not the hero who died defending them that his mother had always described, but instead someone whom he repeatedly refers to as "a monster". We don't know how he's learned about his father – his mother asks, but he dismisses the question. But if, as he also says, everyone else knew the facts & has been laughing at him, why is he only discovering them now? It seems unlikely that no one would have taunted him with this knowledge before. & wouldn't it be obvious, even to an upset youth, why his mother didn't tell him he was the product of rape? But this knowledge comes now, out of the blue, because the storyline needs it to happen now; any questions about this particular situation are dismissed or ignored. We are given the scene, but no sense of a real life behind it. Yonas tells his mother, despite her protests, that he needs to kill that monster, his father. During the whole scene he has been brandishing a machine gun, just as his father did earlier, so clearly his anger makes him potentially Bad, like his father. But is this rage typical for him, or not? We have no way of knowing. He meets his father, now alone & blind, & Yonas can't bring himself to kill him – no reasons are given, he just can't do it. His mother is glad that he has not murdered his father, telling him, "We are not avenged, but we are saved" (which is indeed an effective line). He, Adriana, & Refka join in a group hug. Tsargo will, presumably, eventually die in his gutter.

But the crucial thing about this scene is that Yonas has not made a conscious moral choice not to kill: he simply finds himself unable to. It's been suggested all along that the mother's "good blood" is warring in him against the father's "bad blood", though, as mentioned, we don't know enough about Yonas to have any sense of his personality outside of this immediate situation. (There is also no examination of what it means, in a country subject to deadly violence, for a man to be unwilling, or unable, to kill). The retrograde & frankly dangerous implication here is that there is "good blood" & "bad blood" that determines our personality & actions, & Yonas's failure or inability to kill his father is due to the mother's "good blood" winning out. You have to reach pretty far into "this is all metaphorical" territory not to see the eugenicist views underlying the action here, & sure, you can do that, but it seems to me disingenuous not to see them as a clear implication. The attempt to create a (relatively) timeless story strips out the specific details & situations that would lead to moral complexity & ambiguity.  It's clear from the start which character is Bad & which ones are Good, there's no resistance or choice involved in the drama, & nothing that happens here is surprising or disturbing or discomfiting. As I said, the music is magnificent, & if a recording becomes available I would buy it in a minute. But I wouldn't read along in the libretto.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: May 2014

Theatrical
Shotgun Players present Daylighting: The Berkeley Stories Project, written by Dan Wolf (based on real-life stories from Berkeley residents) and directed by Rebecca Novick, 22 May - 22 June at the Ashby Stage; more information here.

Cutting Ball Theater continues its run of the American premiere of Samuel Gallet's Communiqué No. 10, translated and directed by Rob Melrose, through 25 May. And the Hidden Classics Readings Series closes out its season on 4 May with Rabinal Achí, an ancient Mayan play translated by Dennis Tedlock and directed by Lakin Valdéz. More information on the Gallet is here and on the Hidden Classics reading is here.

Symphonic
The Berkeley Symphony closes its season on 1 May with a concert featuring the local premieres of some new music (Salonen's Nyx and Saariaho's Adriana Songs) and some very familiar music (the Beethoven 5). Joana Carneiro conducts and mezzo-soprano Laura Krumm is the soloist in the Saariaho, which is drawn from her second opera, Adriana Mater. The San Francisco Symphony will be playing the Salonen about a year from now, so this is a rare chance to hear a new big orchestral piece twice, with different ensembles. More information on the Berkeley performance may be found here.

The San Francisco Symphony presents Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Brahms 4, Lemminkäinen's Return by Sibelius, and the Bartok Violin Concerto No 2 with soloist Christian Tetzlaff, 14 and 16 - 17 May (details here); Tilson Thomas also conducts works by Fauré, Schubert, Grieg, Litolff, and Debussy, along with the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No 1 with soloist Yuja Wang, 22 - 25 May (details here); and Charles Dutoit conducts the Poulenc Gloria, the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, and the Fauré Requiem with soprano Susanna Phillips and Hanno Muller-Brachmann, 29 - 30 May (details here).

New Music
Check out Volti (under Choral) for new music by Ted Hearne (the SF Symphony's New Voices composer for next season), Melissa Dunphy, and Kireke Mechem.

Also check out the Berkeley Symphony (under Symphonic) for local premieres of works by Salonen and Saariaho.

The Center for New Music presents Hoods, a "chamber opera mash-up of the Red Riding Hood and Hekabe stories" by Carolyn Chen on 23 May; details here. ("Hekabe" is a more authentic transcription of the name of the woman usually known as "Hecuba.")

They also present Wild Rumpus Music on 3 May in a program of "reinterpreted and reinvented materials" featuring music by Lee Weisert, Eliza Brown, David Lang, Asha Srinivasan, and Daniel Wohl; more information here.

Baroque Music
The San Francisco Symphony presents Ton Koopman leading two Bach-related programs: first by J S Bach and C P E Bach on 1 - 4 May (details here) and then only by J S Bach, including the Missa Brevis, on 8 - 10 May (details here).

The San Francisco Symphony also presents violinist Christian Tetzlaff performing Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin on 11 May; details here.

Vocalists
San Francisco Performances presents mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and pianist Warren Jones on 3 May at the Nourse Theater, with a program of songs by Poulenc, Ferré, Brel, Coward, Porter, and the DeSylva/Brown/Henderson team. More information here.

The San Francisco Symphony presents baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky with pianist Ivari Ilja in an all-Russian program that includes the Shostakovich Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buanarroti on 25 May; details here.

Choral
Volti presents a new piece by Ted Hearne, who was recently named the San Francisco Symphony New Voices Composer for next season, along with works by Melissa Dunphy and Kirke Mechem. That's 17 May at St Mark's Lutheran in San Francisco or 18 May (at 4:00) at the Marsh Arts Center in Berkeley; more details here.

Chora Nova presents an all-Zelenka concert at First Congregational in Berkeley on 24 May. More information here.

The Lacuna Arts Chorale performs works by J S Bach, Buxtehude, Mendelssohn, Hindemith, and Distler on 16 and 18 May at St Luke's Episcopal Church (at Clay and Van Ness in San Francisco); more information here.

Cinematic
The San Francisco Symphony plays along with Disney's iconic Fantasia (as well as its lesser sequel, Fantasia 2000) on 31 May and 1 June; more information here.

This year the San Francisco Silent Film Festival moves from July to late May – 29 May to 1 June, to be exact. This year's programs look exceptionally enticing; they have great stuff every year, but this time they seem to have a higher than usual percentage of things I haven't already seen on DVD. They have great live music at all the performances, which are held in the ornate Castro Theater. Get more information, including the schedule, here.

The SF Jazz Center presents guitarist Marc Ribot playing along to Chaplin's The Kid on 29 May; more information here.

Jazz
Cal Performances presents the Marcus Shelby Orchestra in a tribute to Duke Ellington. The first half includes Ellington standards, featuring Faye Carol and violinist Matthew Szemela, and the second half includes actors from the California Shakespeare Theater, helping present the Ellington-Strayhorn Shakespeare suite, Such Sweet Thunder. That's 2 May; more information here.

The SF Jazz Center presents violinist Regina Carter paying (and playing) tribute to her southern grandfather, 1 - 4 May (more information here); they also have The Bad Plus 8 - 11 May, with their version of The Rite of Spring on the 8th and 11th (more details here).

Chamber Music
Cal Performances presents cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han demonstrating The Unfolding of Music with sonatas by Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and Britten; that's at First Congregational Church on 3 May; more information here.

Talking
Cal Performances presents statistician Nate Silver on 4 May; more information here.

City Arts & Lectures presents soprano Jessye Norman in conversation with Michael Tilson Thomas on 13 May; details here.

Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra: Elgar, Wu, & Tippett

Yesterday afternoon I was at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley for the third & final performance by the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra of their latest program, Voices of War, a topic sadly as relevant as ever; in fact, as Music Director Ming Luke told us, though this concert might be seen as a response to the world's current conflagrations, these pieces had actually been scheduled years ago, only to be disrupted by the pandemic.

The first piece, Elgar's Sospiri, was a pleasant surprise, as it was not listed on the website description of the concert. It is a meditation for harp & orchestra, provoked by the First World War, & I'm surprised it isn't better known, as it is reminiscent of Barber's celebrated Adagio for Strings, with a similar dignified sense of mounting sorrow. Perhaps it's the piece's relative brevity, & its comparative emotional complexity (it doesn't build on a single subject as the Barber does, but moves meditatively around) that render it less suitable for public commemorations. It did seem a very personal statement, despite the large forces involved. I was glad to "discover" it.

The Elgar was followed by the wind blows full of sand, a setting by Sam Wu for chorus & orchestra of Li Po's Lament of the Frontier Guard, as rendered into English by Ezra Pound. Wu did not set the entire poem, but made effective use of large sections & fragments of it, which helped emphasize the dislocated & desolate effect of the work. The setting is bleak but beautiful as a desert is beautiful; waves of sound sweep forward, intersected with fragile, almost scratchy effects from solo strings. The chorus is sometimes united, sometimes halved, singing over & under each other in a sort of call-&-response way. as they contemplate the yellowing grasses & the chilly expanse of bones "white with a thousand frosts". As the words describe the imperial anger & brutal battles that left so many bodies to waste in this distant field, the music grows stridently martial, with the sort of harsh indifferent sarcasm of the marches in Shostakovich's symphonies. The battle recedes but the bones remain; the chorus's final word is forgotten. This powerfully effective piece was commissioned by the BCCO & given its world premiere in these performances. Wu was present & came on stage to an enthusiastic ovation. This piece wsa conducted by the group's Assistant Conductor, Samantha Burgess; Music Director Ming Luke directed the Elgar & the final piece, Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time.

Tippett wrote the piece to express his profound anguish over the events surrounding Kristallnacht, but his aim was to write a piece about the universal underlying situation (the violence provoked by oppressing one group of people, including the violent force used to suppress their resistance) rather than the facts behind this particular situation: thus instead of Herschel Grynszpan, whose killing of a German diplomat in Paris was used as an excuse by the Nazis for a night of terror against German Jews, we have The Boy, & his Mother, & an unnamed power oppressing an unidentified people. They could be Jews, but they could also be Black Americans; the libretto mentions "pograms in the east, lynchings in the west", &, just as Bach used Lutheran hymns in his chorales, Tippett widens his musical & emotional net by using Black American spirituals for several of the choruses.

Tippett wrote his own libretto, at T S Eliot's suggestion. His lines may not have the rhythmic power of Eliot's work, but they make up for any lack of elegance with sincerity & directness, though that's not the same thing as simplicity; given his lifelong interest in Jungian psychology, Tippett references our shadow selves & other underlying psychological structures as he looks forward to some sort of future human reconciliation. Tippett's attempt in his libretto to create a universal situation certainly struck me as superior to Amin Maalouf's similar attempt for Adriana Mater, which has extraordinarily powerful music by Saariaho in the service of a clumsy & reductive libretto. Tippett was wise to write an oratorio, in which the action is interspersed with meditations / interpretations & suggestive emblems, rather than a more overtly dramatic opera.

The BCCO had certainly lined up a powerhouse quartet of soloists: soprano Brandie Sutton, alto Sara Couden, tenor Jonathan Elmore, & bass Kirk Eichelberger. Sutton sang her lines, which included The Mother's, with a soaring & anguished purity; Elmore was the plangent & earnest Son. Couden gave conviction & power to her meditations, & Eichelberger stentorian authority to his. The whole concert was pretty remarkable; I'll admit that I only recently found out about this group, though it's been around for nearly 60 years, &, as this program showed, it does excellent work.

The concert was free & open to the public, which is also a pretty remarkable thing, but though I understand the need to ask for money, I wish that particular speech had been placed somewhere other than right after Wu's piece, as it jolted us right out of the powerful effect he had created. We get bumped back into reality soon enough.

The program book mentioned that Tippett's use of spirituals in A Child of Our Time has "drawn charges of cultural appropriation". I find his use of them respectful & empathetic, & a way of incorporating the history of American racism as part of the universal struggle he is trying to depict. What's his alternative? Ignoring the oppression of Black Americans? Should he, a gentile from England, also not have been moved to compose by the plight of Jews in Germany? Cultural appropriation is a real thing, but also a complicated thing, & it's a term that gets tossed around more easily than it should, without much thought or distinction. The history of culture is the history of "appropriation": borrowing, outright theft, misunderstandings, re-interpretations, revisions, an empathetic realization that a culture that is not your own is saying something to you . . . The alternative seems to be a reductive insistence on a mostly imaginary cultural purity, & of course "cultural purity", unpolluted by foreign influences/appropriations, is a central tenet of fascism. & as the program also mentions, Pound, whose influential version of Li Po's poem was the basis for Wu's powerful work, was a fascist & an anti-Semite. Yet his version (or appropriation) of the Chinese poet speaks with harrowing truth about the effects of authoritarian violence, & Wu, an Australian of Chinese descent now active in the United States, made it the source for an excellent new work. It's a reminder that all we can do is try to make the best we can of a troubled & unsatisfying world.

Congratulations!

I'm hardly the blog of record for stuff like this, but since I just heard this, I thought I would offer congratulations to Kaija Saariaho, the latest recipient of the Nemmers Composition Prize.

The press release says this was announced April 2, but I haven't heard anything about it. From the release:

"Saariaho was cited by the selection committee for 'transforming avant-garde techniques into a world of luminous, shifting color and emotional depth, mirroring the human experience.'"

Saariaho's response was, ". . . I was especially happy to read the prize citation because it indicates that I have been successful in reaching some of my musical goals."

She will be in residence at Northwestern University's School of Music next year, and during the 2009-2010 season the Chicago Symphony will perform one of her works. We can start placing bets (such as, when the little demons buy themselves little iceskates) on when L'Amour de Loin or Adriana Mater will show up at the Opera House. But the Symphony will probably come through for us, eventually.

Another Opening, Another Show: June 2023

Here we are, at the halfway point of this year. As a reminder, the last weekend of June includes the Pride parade & other celebrations in San Francisco, so you may want to think twice about heading into SF (whether by car or public transportation) unless, of course, your aim is to go to the Pride events, & in case you think this warning is unnecessary, I once blithely booked two concerts in Civic Center, end point of the parade, on the last Sunday in June, completely forgetting about Pride, & to make matters worse both local baseball teams had home games that day, which is unusual; BART was unbearably packed, & though the green-&-gold crowd left after one stop, & the black-&-orange crowd once we got to Embarcadero (or, for some of them, Montgomery, as you can get to the ballpark from either station), the rainbow crowd was with me to the end. It took me about 40 minutes to make the usually 10-minute walk from the Civic Center station to the Opera House, & then looking for a place to eat between concerts led to much wandering & searching, even though many restaurants were almost empty when I looked in, but they were (allegedly) waiting for people who had reservations, or perhaps were simply drunker & more free-spending than sober little me. Anyway, now you can't say that nobody warned you.

Theatrical

There seem to be more musicals than usual opening this month, so I guess summer really is on the way.

ACT presents a stage version of the Wizard of Oz, based on the beloved 1939 film as adapted for the Royal Shakespeare Company by John Kane; this production is directed & choreographed by Sam Pinkleton & runs from 1 to 25 June.

Cutting Ball Theater & Skywatchers offer Towards Opulence, the Opera on 3 - 4 June, presenting life in the Tenderloin in the larger context of American social & financial systems.

42nd Street Moon presents She Loves Me (book by Joe Masteroff, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick), based on a play by Miklós László that is now most familiar to us as the source of Lubitsch's beloved film The Shop Around the Corner, & that will open 8 June & run through the 25th.

Ray of Light Theater presents a concert version of Spring Awakening (music by Duncan Sheik, book & lyrics by Steven Sater) at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco from 8 to 11 June.

The Lorraine Hansberry Theater gives us the world premiere of In the Evening by the Moonlight by Traci Tolmaire, co-created & directed by Margo Hall, imagining an evening spent together by Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, & Nina Simone at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, & that runs 15 June to 2 July at the Young Performer's Theater at Fort Mason.

Aurora Theater presents Hurricane Diane by Madeleine George, directed by Jennifer King, about Dionysus visiting a New Jersey cul-de-sac "in the guise of a butch gardener named Diane, hell bent on reversing climate change" & that opens 16 June & runs to 16 July.

The touring company of the recent Broadway revival of the Sondheim/Lapine Into the Woods will be at the Curran in San Francisco from 20 to 25 June.

San Francisco Playhouse's summer musical this year will be A Chorus Line (music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban, book by James Kirkwood Jr & Nicholas Dante; directed by Bill English & Nicole Helfer, with music direction by Dave Dobrusky & choreography by Nicole Helfer), & that opens 22 June & runs to 9 September.

From 23 June to 30 July, Berkeley Rep offers the world premiere of Out of Character, a one-person show written & performed by Ari'elel Stachel & directed by Tony Taccone, about dealing with his Middle Eastern (Yemeni Jewish) background post-9/11.

Talking

You can spend An Evening with Jane Fonda at the Castro Theater on 1 June.

City Arts & Lectures has some interesting-looking programs this month: Politician & writer Stacey Abrams appears on 3 June in conversation with Dan Pfeiffer (co-presented with Marcus Books, & each ticket includes a copy of her book Rogue Justice); poet Ocean Vuong appears on 9 June in conversation with Mike Mills; & on 19 June former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be in conversation with Jelani Cobb.

Operatic

Opera Parallèle presents The Shining, based on Stephen King's novel (rather than the celebrated Kubrick film), with music by Paul Moravec & libretto by Mark Campbell, at the Yerba Buena Center on 2 - 4 June.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts & Peter Sellars directs the Kaija Saariaho (music) & Amin Maalouf (libretto) opera Adriana Mater, with soloists Fleur Barron (mezzo-soprano), Axelle Fanyo (soprano), Nicholas Phan (tenor), & Christopher Purves (baritone) at the San Francisco Symphony on 8, 10, & 11 June.

San Francisco Opera closes its Centennial Season with a special concert & three operas: the concert will be 16 June, when "Conductors Eun Sun Kim, Sir Donald Runnicles, and Patrick Summers lead a cavalcade of beloved San Francisco Opera stars in a program that spans our history"; singers listed on the website include Karita Mattila, Ailyn Pérez, Patricia Racette, Nina Stemme, Heidi Stober, Adela Zaharia, Susan Graham, Daniela Mack, Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Fabiano, Brandon Jovanovich, Russell Thomas, Lucas Meachem, Brian Mulligan, & Christian Van Horn.

The three operas are: Puccini's Madama Butterfly, in a new production by Amon Miyamoto, conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim & starring Karah Son as Cio-Cio-San & Michael Fabiano as Pinkerton (Moisés Salazar takes the 1 July performance), & that's 3, 6, 9, 18, 21, 24, & 27 June & 1 July; Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, which received its American premiere in San Francisco back in 1959, will be conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles, using the David Hockney production, with leading roles taken by David Butt Philip, Camilla Nylund, Linda Watson, Johan Reuter, & Nina Stemme, & that's 4, 10, 20, 23, & 28 June; & the premiere of an SF Opera co-commission, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, with music by Gabriela Lena Frank & libretto by Nilo Cruz, conducted by Roberto Kalb & directed by Lorena Maza, starring Daniela Mack as Frida Kahlo & Alfredo Daza as Diego Rivera, & that's 13, 17, 22, 25,  & 30 June.

In conjunction with the production of Frau,  on 2 June the San Francisco Public Library will host Larry Wolff as he discusses his new book, The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, which "explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed [the] opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War"; friends who heard him give this presentation for the Wagner Society of Northern California were very impressed.

Pocket Opera gives us Offenbach's delightful Orpheus in the Underworld, with music direction by Frank Johnson & stage direction by Bethanie Baeyen, on 11 June at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, 18 June at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, & 25 June at the Gunn Theater in the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Choral

The San Francisco Girls Chorus (Chorus School Level IV), led by Monica Baruch & joined by César Cancino on piano, Stefan Cwik on guitar, Heidi Modr on violin, & Jared Pabilona on string bass, will perform works by Otmar Mácha, Aaron Copland, Sarah Quartel, Princess Lili’uokalani (arranged by Stephen Hatfield), György Orbán, Ernani Aguiar, Mendelssohn, & Eric Whitacre at Old First Concerts on 2 June.

The International Orange Chorale starts its 20th season with Best of the Zest, a collection of audience favorites from past seasons, including works by Joby Talbot, Gordon Hamilton, Ily Matthew Maniano, & that's 3 June at Christ Church East Bay in Berkeley & 10 June at Saint Matthew's Lutheran in San Francisco (in case you initially misread the location as I did: this is a church near Mission Dolores, not the more usual venue of Saint Mark's Lutheran near the Cathedral).

Chanticleer marks the 400th anniversary of the death of recusant composer William Byrd by exploring his works in Music for a Hidden Chapel on 7 June at Saint Stephen's Episcopal in Belvedere, 8 June at Mission Santa Clara, 10 June at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, & 11 June at Saint John's Lutheran in Sacramento.

Its world premiere was postponed due to COVID, but the San Francisco Girls Chorus, led by Valérie Sainte-Agathe, will at last be presenting a work it commissioned, Matthew Welch's Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary, with stage direction by Sean San José & featuring Florante Aguilar on guitar, Patti Kilroy, on violin, & Levy Lorenzo on percussion, & that's 16 - 18 June at the Magic Theater at Fort Mason.

Vocalists

On 2 June, the Merola Opera Program presents the world premiere of a work it commissioned, 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man by B E Boykin, setting poetry by Raymond Patterson & performed by baritone Sidney Outlaw & pianist Warren Jones, at the Bayview Opera House in San Francisco; the program will also include pieces by Fauré, Brahms, William Grant Still, & Mohammed Fairouz (Deep Rivers, featuring players from the Oakland Symphony).

On 29 June, the Merola Opera Program will present this year's singers in a program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music titled Metamorphosis: Recovery, Renewal, and Rebirth, featuring pieces by Alma Mahler, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Robert Owens, Florence Price, & others, selected by Merola Artistic Director Carrie-Ann Matheson & tenor Nicholas Phan (the recital will be performed with English surtitles, as more recitals should be).

 Orchestral

Manfred Honeck leads the San Francisco Symphony in the SFS premiere of amazon by Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (with piano soloist Beatrice Rana), & the Schubert Symphony in C major, the Great, & that's at Davies Hall on 1 - 3 June.

Music Director Joseph Young leads the Berkeley Symphony in the world premiere of Xi Wang's Lotus Prayer, along with Carlos Simon's Portrait of a Queen & Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, at Zellerbach Hall on 4 June.

Dawn Harms leads the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony in the Brahms 2, Mary Watkins's Soul of Remembrance (from Five Movement in Color), & the Bernstein 2, the Age of Anxiety (with soloist Sara Davis Buechner) on 10 June at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The Golden Gate Symphony presents Songs of Remembrance, paying tribute to Jewish composers who worked while imprisoned during the Holocaust (the exact program has not yet been announced), on 4 June at Herbst Theater.

The International Pride Orchestra gives the "debut performance of the world's first international LGBTQ+ orchestra" on 22 June at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; the evening is hosted by drag performer Peaches Christ & features soprano Breanna Sinclairé; the program includes the world premiere of Loud, which the IPO commissioned from Jimmy López Bellido, as well as the arias Elle a fui, la tourterelle from Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffman, O mio babbino caro from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, & Somewhere from Bernstein/Sondheim's West Side Story, & then Soul of Remembrance from Five Movements in Color by Mary Watkins (also featured by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony this month) & the Tchaikovsky 4 (the site lists three conductors – Christine Brandes, Robert Moody, & Michael Roest – but it wasn't clear to me who will be leading what).​

Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen closes out the San Francisco Symphony's season with three concerts: on 15 - 17 June, pianist Igor Levit is the soloist for the Beethoven Piano Concerto 5, followed by the Eroica; Levit returns on 22, 24, & 25 June as the soloist in that strange rarity, the Busoni Piano Concerto (in its SFS premiere), & 29 - 30 June & 1 July, soprano Julia Bullock joins Salonen & the band for a concert made up mostly of SFS premieres: Reena Esmail's Black Iris, Gershwin's Somebody from Somewhere, Margaret Bonds's The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Gershwin's Summertime, Bonds's Winter Moon, Gershwin's Soon, & Ravel's complete Daphnis et Chloé.

Chamber Music

Cellist Jennifer Kloetzel & pianist Allegra Chapman will perform music by Beethoven, Frank Bridge, Libby Larsen, & Rachmaninoff along with a world premiere from  Richard Aldag at Old First Concerts on 9 June.

Artists from the San Francisco Symphony, joined by pianist Igor Levit, will play Frank Bridge's Lament, Mark O'Connor's Appalachia Waltz & Emily's Reel, & the Shostakovich Piano Quintet in Davies Hall on 18 June.

Instrumental

Pianist Francesca Khalifa will play music by Debussy, Brian T. Field, Bartók, Gabriela Ortiz, & Miguel del Aguila at Old First Concerts on 23 June.

Pianist Igor Levit, as part of his residency this month with the San Francisco Symphony, will perform a solo recital in Davies Hall on 27 June, featuring music by Brahms (arranged by Busoni), Fred Hersch, Wagner (arranged by Zoltán Kocsis) & the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor.

Early / Baroque Music

On 3 June at First Congregational in Berkeley, the San Francisco Early Music Society will host its first summer mini-festival, including a choral workshop on Early Music part-singing with Magen Solomon, a lecture by Kip Cranna (If Only He Had Written an Opera – Johann Sebastian Bach), & two concerts: in the afternoon Harmonia Felice (Amy Brodo, cello & viola da gamba; Roy Whelden, viola da gamba; Jon Mendle, lute & theorbo; Yuko Tanaka, harpsichord) will perform music by Johannes Schenck & Isabella Leonarda & Beneath a Tree (Gail Hernández Rosa, violin; Daniel Turkos, bass), will perform music by Bach & Mozart as well as Celtic tunes & what they describe as "a Bay Area surprise!", along with Junior Bach Festival violinist Emil Ma performing Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin in D minor; & in the early evening you can hear Nash Baroque (Vicki Melin, traverso; Farley Pearce, viola da gamba; Katherine Heater, harpsichord; Irenie Melin-Gompper, dance) exploring music & movement in Rameau’s Dardanus, & the Sikh Heritage Symphony (Leena Singh, rabab; Gurpreet Singh, taus; Keerat Singh, sitar; Rajvinder Singh, tabla) will explore the long history of Sikh devotional music (Gurmat Sangeet) through the Gurmat Raaganjali, which "explores the 31 single raags found in the Guru Granth Sahib, the central sacred text of Sikhism", & along with that Junior Bach Festival harpsichordist Shuxian Ding will perform the prelude from Bach’s English Suite in A minor.

American Bach Soloists presents an Artist Showcase concert at the SF Conservatory of Music on 4 June, featuring harpsichordist Gabriel Benton with flutist Bethanne Walker & violinist YuEun Gemma Kim, performing works by Bach, Boismortier, & Rameau.

See also Chanticleer performing William Byrd, listed above under Choral.

Modern / Contemporary Music

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Starry Nights, featuring the world premiere of a new flute concerto by Josiah Catalan, Night of the South Winds, along with Nina Shekhar's Bedtime Stories, Martin Rokeach's Sleepless Night, & Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), & that's 4 June at the Piedmont Center for the Arts & 5 June at the SF Conservatory of Music.

The annual summer solstice celebration of new music & its performers, Garden of Memory at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, will take place on 21 June.

On 24 June at the Center for New Music, you can hear Five by Five, in which five Bay Area composers present five new works written for flute (Jessie Nucho), clarinet (Stephen Zielinski), violin (Maki Ishii Sowash), cello (Vicky Ehrlich), piano (Keisuke Nakagoshi), & voice (soprano Shauna Fallihee); the composers are John Beeman with Sprites, inspired by an unusual weather phenomenon: Steve Mobia with Fissures, referring to sudden breaks in thematic structures: Allan Crossman with selections from his ballet The Sleepless Beauty; Alden Jenks with a song cycle based on poetry by Akiko Yosano describing a woman’s experience of an unhappy love affair; & Davide Verotta with Five Movements for Small Ensemble, a moody piece about moods; Steed Cowart conducts.

The annual Kronos Festival, which this year celebrates the quartet's Fifty for the Future commissions, will be held at the SF Jazz Festival on 22 - 24 June; you can explore the line-up here.

Art Means Painting

What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection opens at, of course, BAM/PFA on 7 June & runs through 9 June 2024, & will be an exploration via "thematic sections" of the museum's permanent collection, including "seventeenth-century Japanese scrolls, eighteenth-century European paintings by women artists, and American landscapes and folk art of the nineteenth century, alongside mid-century abstract painting, feminist art, quilts, and conceptual art", though it's a little unclear from the website description if all these things are being displayed all at once all year or if there will be rotating exhibits.

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England opens at the Legion of Honor on 24 June and runs through 24 September.

Cinematic

BAM/PFA kicks off its summer films this month with three series: Ambassador of Cinema: Tom Luddy’s Lasting Influence at BAMPFA launches on 1 June & runs through 15 July & features many favorites pf the PFA's first program director; Claudia Cardinale: Once Upon a Time launches on 9 June & runs through 22 July, & Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo launches on 16 June & runs through 29 July & portrays the "low part" of Tokyo through films both classic & obscure.

There will be a 35th anniversary showing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? at the Castro Theater on 10 June, with special guest Charles Fleischer (Roger Rabbit).

The Frameline Festival of LGBTQ+ films will take place at the Castro Theater from 16 - 24 June (the whole line-up has not been announced as I type this, but a preview is here).

The Roxie in San Francisco has some interesting programs coming up, though as I write this they have not yet posted their whole schedule for June: on 4 June you can see Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses, starring Peter, best known as the Fool in Ran, Kurosawa's version of King Lear, & this time the tragic source is Greek for this tale set in the Tokyo demimonde; 5 June brings 1997's Virtue, from a now-gone San Francisco underground, followed by an interview with the film's director, Camera Obscura; on 8 June DocFest brings Black Barbie: A Documentary, about the first Black Barbie; & on 10 June you can see, on the big screen & in 35 mm, one of the all-time Hollywood classics, The Wizard of Oz, so this month begins & ends with Dorothy & the witches, & there's no place like home, is there.