Museum Mondays

Alice Neal (1916-1985)

Mary Bright Commemorative Quilt
Routed West, BAMPFA
Berkeley, CA
November, 2025

Click to enlarge

 

Organs in the News

Organ at St. John's Presbyterian, Berkeley

Not in the news, but it's the organ photo I had.

Photo by me

Some recent stories to do with mighty organs. Okay, Peter Hartlaub's is from 2023, but read it anyway.

• Alex Ross, The New Yorker, "The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films."
• Lucy Hodgman, San Francisco Chronicle, "A massive pipe organ is dividing a small California town. Can it be saved?" (gift link)
• Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle, "A 40-ton organ sits under City Hall. San Francisco is trying to give it away." (gift link)

Very locally, the Castro Theater is re-opening soon and apparently will have a new organ. I know nothing of the fate of the much-disputed-over old organ.

 

A Different Look Back at 2025

Sea lions

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

Personally, 2025 was a pretty good year for me, even though it was an

absolute dumpster fire politically and socially. If anything, it's even worse

than I had thought a second Trump administration would be. The hatred 

toward brown and black people, immigrants, and trans people is 

unbelievable, as are the various assaults on the rule of law. This is the most

corrupt administration ever, with the Trump family hauling

in hundreds of millions from various schemes. I'm glad that there's so 

much resistance and that  Democratic candidates are overperforming. 

May that trend continue.

I've been writing more and more over the last few years. In 2025, 

retired from full-time work, I published 57 pieces, broken down as follows. 

• 36 reviews, of which three were CD reviews. The rest were reviews of live performances.
• 21 artist spotlights, interviews, news articles, features, and previews.

I published in the S.F. Chronicle, San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV), 

Opera Magazine, Opera Now, Parterre Box, and the journal of the

Wagner Society of Northern California. I had never published in Opera Now

or Parterre Box before, and the piece in Opera Magazine was big, 2000 words

on Opera San José. I still haven’t pitched an article I’ve been thinking about for

the last year, but I will pitch it soon.

Friday Photo

Church Detail

Munich, August, 2015

 

Stationery Store Blues

Moleskine journalist's notebook

Hardcover, 8" x 5.5"

Over at The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross has a plaintive post about changes to the Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2, a vital tool in his life.  The post includes a funny/sad video by Adam Savage, which I urge you to watch in full. Savage does not comment on one change, a new, blunter font used on the pencil itself, but I noticed.

I don't use this particular pencil, but of course I have a personal stationery tragedy. Sometime during the pandemic, Moleskine discontinued the classic journalist's notebook, which had a flip-over hard cover. I didn't go to j-school and never worked at a newspaper, so when I started reviewing, I found a notebook I liked to write in rather than using cheap reporter's notepads. I have not yet been in a situation where such a notepad would be useful, such as pursuing some unwilling public figure while trying to get them to comment on an unpopular subject. In such a circumstance, I'd probably be trying to get my phone in front of their face anyway.

I don't care about reviews telling me that there are notebooks with better paper than the Moleskine. I miss that notebook and learned it had been discontinued too late to try to buy up available supplies. 

It's true that Moleskine makes a miniature version of the flip notebook, but it is seriously too small to be useful to me either for concert notes or interview notes or reading notes. I have used the lined classic Moleskin as well, but my handwriting is not good and even though I am right-handed, I worry about smudging notes of already dubious readability during a concert. There's much less risk of that with a flip notebook. 

Moleskine also makes, or made, a soft-cover full-sized reporter's notebook, and one year I accidentally bought one of them. I took a look at it yesterday and saw that its first use for music-related notes was a season-announcement press conference at SFO. The first note reads:

- Pat, Pat, Pat, and Pat

Clearly, this was the press conference for the 2013-14 season; as announced, Patricia Racette had four roles in three operas. After Dolora Zajick dropped out of Dolores Claiborne, that became five roles in four operas.

After some investigation into alternatives to the journalist's notebook, I wound up using a soft-cover notebook that is sturdier than a reporter's notepad but smaller and much less stiff than a hardcover. It is intended to be used as a landscape-orientation sketch notebook, but I use it in portrait orientation. Nonethless, I miss the Moleskine notebook and wish they'd bring it back.

San Francisco Symphony Auditions

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

San Francisco Symphony has a number of auditions coming up.

• Associate principal horn and assistant principal / utility horn. Two positions. This reflects the impact of hiring Diego Incertis Sánchez as principal horn: the principal should have input into hiring to fill the vacancies, because the principal will have a concept of how the horn section should sound and thus helps choose players who will create that sound.
• Associate principal bassoon. This position has been filled for the last year by former principal bassoon Stephen Paulson, so it appears he will be retiring from the orchestra after 48 years in that position.
• Section cello (multiple positions), perhaps reflecting retirements that haven't been announced yet.
• Section viola

 

The Best of 2025

Kang Wang as the title character

The Monkey King

San Francisco Opera

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO

 

SFCV published the writers' collective opinions of the best performances of the year. The Bay Area list is here. My five choices were these:

• Esa-Pekka Salonen's Mahler 2
• Poiesis Quartet at Noe Music
• The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera
• Pivot Festival, Carla Kiehlstedt's 26 Little Deaths
• Tartuffe, Pocket Opera

It was a tough call. Here's the rest of my long list:

• La bohème at SFO; a seriously great run, beautifully directed, with two terrific casts.
• MTT 80, a deeply touching celebration of the man.
  
• Parsifal at SFO
• Rigoletto at SFO
• Bluebeard's Castle at Opera San José
• Turn of the Screw at SFCM, better staged and conducted than what I saw at Santa Fe over the summer.
• John Adams third piano concerto, After the Fall, at SFS. I couldn't include the concert on my short list because the second half was (&)%$)_@_ Carmina Burana.
• Dalia Stasevska at SFS, in the Thorvaldsdottir cello concerto and RWV's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.
• Cabrillo Festival, Becoming
• Hello, Star at OP. Just a perfect 45 minutes of opera begging for a larger orchestra. A wonderful libretto, beautiful music, great direction on a tiny stage.
• Donald Runnicles and Irene Roberts at SFS

As you can see, I named four of the last six operas at SFO as among the best things I saw; Dead Man Walking was also superb. SFO had a stupendous year and in fact has been on a roll since the centennial season. Hats off to Matthew Shilvock and his team for this long string of artistic successes, which has also included a fair number of sellouts.

As for the flip side, I am going to pass on flagging concerts I found disappointing or wrong-headed. There's not much doubt that the worst event of the year was Esa-Pekka Salonen's departure from San Francisco Symphony after just five years as music director. He reinvigorated the orchestra's programming, led many great concerts, hired many terrific musicians, and thanks to the short-sightedness of the board and management, which couldn't figure out how to fund his ambitions for the future, he is gone.

• Joshua Kosman's picks
• SFCV Los Angeles writers' picks
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center

A New Major Benefactor at San Francisco Opera

Jensen Huang, Lori Huang, and Matthew Shilvock

Photo: Kristen Loken / San Francisco Opera

Jensen and Lori Huang have made a multi-year commitment to donate $5 million/year to San Francisco Opera. If the names seem familiar, Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, which makes high-performance chips that are in great demand to power artificial intelligence applications and data centers. Nvidia has been in the news quite a bit lately. The Huangs are very wealthy. They were also honorary chairs of the honorary committee for The Monkey King.

San Francisco Opera continues to succeed in cultivating prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, unlike most Bay Area arts organizations. You might or might not have noticed that Dr. William and Mrs. William M. Coughran are major donors at SFO, and if you did notice, you might or might not know that Bill Coughran was a senior vice president of engineering at Google. He's been on the SFO board for a number of years.

SFO has now commissioned two operas based on classic Chinese novels, additional demonstrations of why diversity and inclusion are so important to the arts. Both Dream of the Red Chamber and The Monkey King have been artistic and commercial successes; The Monkey King is utterly sensational and the company could have sold out a few more performances. In past seasons, Omar and El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego were also successfully artistically and commercially. This is why opera must include voices from all cultures.

After the jump is the press release from SFO about the Huangs' donation.

Museum Mondays

Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA

Sherry Ann Boyd, Piecer, Richmond, CA, 1990

Irene Bankhead, Quilter, Oakland, CA 1990

Routed West, BAMPFA 

Berkeley, CA

November, 2025

Click to enlarge

 

Friday Photo (A Bit Early)

At the grave of Hector Berlioz (December 11 1803 - March 8, 1869).

His wives Harriet Smithson and Marie Recio are also buried here.

October, 2018

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Anna Nicholson

Untitled (Log Cabin, Barn Raising Variation)

Routed West

BAMPFA, November, 2025

 

Frank Gehry

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

Well, damn, Frank Gehry has died. He was among the greatest architects of our time and certainly one of my favorites. There are few buildings I love as much as Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen; a wonder in design, with so much detail, constantly changing in the light, a Gesamtkunstwerke in every sense of the word, since he designed the building, a fabulously intricate building, down to the fabric used on the seats.

Oh, and it has magnificent acoustics, at least for the audience. I understand from someone who has been there that it can be difficult for the musicians to hear each other on stage. The acoustics aren't quite perfect: the last performances I heard there, in December 2024, were of Schoenberg's mighty oratorio Gurrelieder, which has an immense orchestra and a big chorus. A friend and I agreed that at the sonic maximum, the hall was slightly overloaded and the sound became blurry. Regardless, the hall is still a marvel.

Practically speaking, I have to wonder whether there are any implications to the possible renovation of Davies Symphony Hall, here in San Francisco, since his architectural firm is one of two listed on the project. Davies is acoustically mediocre and dull to look at. A renovation would cost around a half-billion  dollars, not the ridiculous $100 million that I've seen bruited about (see Geffen Hall in NYC for why $500 million is far more realistic).

He won't be buried at WDCH, but Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's Cathdral, London, applies equally to Gehry: LECTOR, SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE. ("Reader, if you seek a monument, look around.")

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

 

Friday Photo

Pelicans

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

(Click to enlarge)

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Emma Hall (1878-1949)

Detail of a Double Wedding Ring Quilt

Routed West at BAMPFA

November, 2025

 

Ars Minerva's Ercole amante

Sara Couden and Nina Jones in Antonia Bembo’s 

Ercole amante (Photo: Valentina Sadiul)

Between The Monkey King and Gautier Capuçon's cello recital, I saw Ars Minerva's world premiere staging of Antonia Bembo's 1707 opera, Ercole amante. I'd previous written a preview for the Chronicle and SFCV, and Ars Minerva has a strong track record with its revivals of forgotten works, so I was particularly looking forward to it.

Well, you win some and you lose some, and this was, alas, not quite there. To start with, in the first act, the orchestra sounded ragged and underrehearsed. (Things were tighter and livelier in the second act.) To continue, the opera, which was heavily cut, wasn't as good as I'd thought it would be, based on my interviews with company founder Céline Ricci and music director Matthew Dirst. There were fewer arias and more recitative than I'd expected, and the latter got rather tedious in the first act.

I should have listened to the (also heavily cut) recording made from the 2023 concert performances by Il Gusto Barrocco, to try to get some sense of what the opera is like; possibly they made different cuts from Ars Minerva's, since the latter company made some cuts based on what they could reasonably stage.

Lastly, there was an unfortunate vocal hole at the center of the opera: Zachary Gordin, Ercole, who sang the entire opera bare chested and bare legged, dressed in sandals and a gold skirt, has very impressive musculature, but a somewhat less impressive voice. He looked great and was fine dramatically, but the opera would have worked better with a more commanding baritone in the title role.

The other singers were good to excellent (Aura Veruni and Melissa Sondhi as dueling goddesses; Kindra Scharich as Ercole's long-suffering wife, Deianira; tenor Max Ary as Ercole's son Hyllo sounded uncomfortable at the very top of his range but was otherwise fine; Lila Khazoum as Hyllo's fiancée; Sara Couden as a page; Nina Jones as Deianira's servant; Nick Volkert in several roles). Ricci's staging was funny and did everything it needed to with a tiny number of props. I loved Entropy's projections, which were based on Baroque stage design and various paintings.

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Lisa Hirsch, preview, SFCV and S.F. Chronicle

Friday Photo

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

 

Secret Handshake

Stones of Stenness

Orkney, UK

June, 1982

Photo: Lisa Hirsch

"The Orkney archipelago possesses a singular aura—luminous, changeable, dreamlike."

Alex Ross, The New Yorker, Nov. 24, 2025

 

More Monkey King

Kang Wang as Sun Wukong

Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's The Monkey King

Photo: Cory Weaver / courtesy of San Francisco Opera

I want to call your attention to Tony Bravo's wonderful article about The Monkey King and puppeteer / designer Basil Twist. I'm adding this to the media round-up, but it would be very easy to miss there.

 

Museum Mondays

Hattie Mitchell

Detail of a quilt documenting her trip to France in 1906

Appliquéd and embroidered, 1906-08, 1914

Quilted and finished, 1930

Routed West at BAMPFA

November, 2025

 

Friday Photo

Cormorants

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

 

Gautier Capuçon, Gaia

Jérôme Ducros, piano and Gautier Capuçon, cello

Photo: Kristen Loken, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

 

Let me start these comments on Gautier Capuçon's Gaïa concert, held on Sunday, November 18, with a quizz: how many times do my notes for the program, which included 17 works (16 programmed, one encore), say "too many arpeggios" or "hmmm, scales", or something like that? *

The concert was more varied than the question might imply, and of course, if you've got a string instrument to compose for, with those four tempting strings, it's an obvious strategy. The concert was not like being stuck in phone booth with Philip Glass and a cello, but a surprising number of the composers took advantage of this particular strategy.

Would I have liked more variety? Yes. Not only were there too many arpeggios in total, but every one of the works was in a kind of anodyne tonality, with only a couple of composers pushing the harmonic envelope in any way. Reader, what I really longed for was something by Carter or someone like him: spikey, angular, atonal, to break the sense that the programming looked at just one part of a vast harmonic universe.

With this recital, Capuçon launched the publication of his eponymous new recital CD, which consists of commissioned works inspired by nature and humanity's relationship with the planet. The program started with a slightly terrifying video of the cellist playing in various hazardous locations in the French alps. I mean....I wonder about the size of the crew it took to get him and his cello and the belaying equipment and cameras up there, even though you see him hiking through snow with his cello case strapped to his back. I'm also wondering which instrument he took up there with him. I kinda hope it was a carbon-fiber cello, not one of his precious wooden instruments.

The video accompanied the first work on the recital, Max Richter's Sequence for Gaïa. You can see it here. (Be sure to read Joshua Kosman's take on the program, which is um shorter than this.)

One other thing I would have liked to be different: the program started at 7 and had no intermission. I figured it would last 90 minutes, tops. But Capuçon introduced each group of two or three works from the stage. The intros were remarkably similar! [Composer] is my great friend and s/he cares so much about nature and the planet! I estimate that this added 20 to 25 minutes to the program, and nope. Just don't do this. Thank everyone at the start and leave it at that.

A few of the pieces stood out: composer/pianist Gabriela Montero's Sur le lac du Bourget sounded like a jazzy 20s song. Olivia Belli's Tàmâr Méthüshelä had a lovely piano part (let me here praise pianist Jérôme Ducros, whose quiet virtuosity made him a superb recital partner). I liked works by Abel Selaocoe and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who came on stage to play a cello duet with Capuçon and wrote him a beautiful cello line. The young cellist Quenton Blache had a standout work as well.

Kudos to the group of cellist from the SFS Youth Orchestra and especially principal Melissa Lam, who also played a duet with Capuçon. But this recital was too much of a muchness. 

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Colin Ziegler, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Jeff Kaliss, SFCV (artist spotlight)

* Looks like six, to my surprise. Sure felt like more at the time.

San Francisco Opera Premieres The Monkey King

 

Kang Wang as the title role in The Monkey King

Members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus

Puppetry designed by Basil Twist

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of SF Opera

The Monkey King opened last week at San Francisco Opera, and hoo boy, we have a series of well-earned raves by everybody who was there. My friend Rob remarked afterward that he wasn't sure whether it was a great opera, but it is certainly a great show. I think the music is excellent, but there is so much going on visually that the music isn't the first thing you'll remember about it.

The run of performances is completely sold out; I've been checking multiple times a day, and there are maybe five tickets total available right now. This is astounding; it's too bad that SFO has no record of adding performances, not, at least, since the first run of Dead Man Walking 25 years ago.

You can, however, catch the livestream for $25 on Tuesday, Nov. 18 or watch the stream on demand from Sunday, Nov. 23 at 10 a.m. to Tuesday, Nov. 25 at 10 a.m.

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Joshua Barone, NY Times 
• Heidi Waleson, WSJ (includes a review of Parsifal)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box
• Thomas May, Opera Now
• Caroline Crawford, Local News Matters
• Elsa Tranter, Classical Voice
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Yoshi Kato, preview, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Tony Bravo, SF Chronicle, fabulous feature on the puppets and scenery

Museum Mondays

Annunciation

Giovanni dal Ponte 

(Giovanni di Marco)

c. 1425

 

Friday Photo

Pelican

Elkhorn Slough, CA

October, 2025

(Click to enlarge)

 

Poiesis Quartet

Poiesis Quartet

Photo by Eden Davis

Before the pandemic, my friend DB had twice gone to Banff, in Canada, to attend the Banff International String Quartet Competition. BISQC, as its known, has taken place every three years since 1986, and a number of prominent quartets have won or placed in the competition, including the Hagen, Lark, St. Louis, Ying, Miró, Belcea, and Castalian.

I'd considered attending, but it wasn't going to be possible this year for either myself or DB. But the BISQC conveniently livestreams all of the competition rounds and then archives the performances, making it possible to sort of attend from afar. It is true that even with a good sound system or smart TV, it's not really the same; you won't hear the sound that's in the concert hall or feel the energy there.

So I proposed that DB and my friend BH watch what we could and compare notes over Zoom when we could. This worked out extremely well. DB and I are in the Bay Area, while BH is in Philadelphia; it wasn't too onerous to figure out meeting times, and we could watch the livestream or archived performances. (If you want to see any of the performances, start here.)

There were nine generally excellent string quartets in the competition; a tenth withdrew before the competition. (From that quartet's web site, it looks as though they might have disbanded or been faced with a major problem of some sort.) The competition is held in multiple rounds, as follows:

• 21st century and Haydn round. Playing Haydn is a real test of any performer's ability to catch the composer's grace and wit, whether the performer is a pianist, conductor, or string quartet.
• Romantic round
• Canadian commission round. Every quartet plays the same work, having received the music at the same time and given the opportunity to work with / consult with the composer. This year's commission was Kati Agócs's very beautiful Rapprochement.
• Beethoven/Schubert + 21st c. round
• Finals. Each quartet performs a program of its own choosing.

There was really no doubting the skill and musicianship of these groups, though I confess that I did not much like the artistic choices made by the Quatuor Magenta.

So, to make a long story short, the Poiesis Quartet, formed at Oberlin and currently studying at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, won the competition as a whole and also won the Canadian Commission Prize for their performance of Rapprochement. 

Where the Poiesis obviously stood out was in their performances of 20th and 21st c. music, but they also played a magnificent Brahms Op. 67, the only Brahms heard in the entire competition,  if I'm remembering this correctly. DB said it was the best single performance of a Brahms quartet in his experience.

Where this is all leading to: the Poiesis made their San Francisco debut this past Sunday, at Noe Music, a great venue for chamber music. Their program included several works from their final round:

• Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, Pisachi
• Brian Raphael Nabors, String Quartet
• Kevin Lau, String Quartet No. 7
• Sky Macklay, Many, Many Cadences
• Sergei Prokofiev, String Quartet No. 2

What can I say? The Poiesis plays a lot of intense music, with astonishing focus and intensity, filling the smallish venue with full-bodied sound. Their focus came across in the livestreams, but the sheer intensity of their playing didn't.

Their sheer confidence, in themselves and each other, astounded me; their unanimity of thought and execution is amazing. Are they mind-readers?

Each of the pieces on their program, except the Prokofiev, is from the 21st century; Kevin Lau's 7th is a Poiesis commission. The works cover a wide range of styles and take both technique and wit to play.

Sky Macklay's Many, Many Cadences is just what it says, a nearly unending series of cadential phrases covering the full range of each instrument in the quartet and mostly going at a breakneck speed. It definitely takes a sense of humor, as well as great timing, to play well. It is funny, too, if you understand what's going on, plus there's a funny moment built in.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate's Pisachi incorporates music from a Pueblo Buffalo Dance, a Hopi Buffalo Dance, and a Hopi Elk Dance. It is lovely, delicate, transparent by turns, elsewhere more intense (everything Poiesis plays isn't totally balls-to-the-wall). Tate himself is Chickasaw and his program note say that it's his "intent to honor his Southwest Indian cousins through classical repertoire."

I'm in fact not going to be able to characterize each of the works, so I will mention that you can hear the Poiesis Quartet at Stanford Live in May. The program is similar to this, but swapping Haydn for Nabors.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• DB at Kalimac's Corner