Daniel Harding, Please Fly Me to Paris.

Daniel Harding

Photo: Polly Brown, Courtesy of Los Angeles Philharmonic

No kidding: my summer vacation starts with an Air France flight from San Francisco (SFO) to Paris (CDG), and Harding is a part-time pilot for Air France.

I expect that Harding, who is also a conductor, will be spending a little more time, okay, a lot more time, in California than he used to, because he's just been named the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, effective with the 2027-28 season. He succeeds Gustavo Dudamel, who, after 17 seasons, is on his way to the N.Y. Philharmonic.

The LA Phil, as it styles itself, is about to have an interesting leadership structure, with Harding starting out with 8 weeks, increasing to 12, as the music director;  Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was music director of the LA Phil from 1992 to 2009, as creative director, with approximately 6 weeks a year (he also has a gig at the Orchestre de Paris, and Harding lives in Paris – his four children are there – so perhaps they can have confabs in the City of Lights); and Dudamel with up to 4 weeks, plus there's conductor-in-residence Anna Handler, a position to which she was recently appointed.

Between Harding, Salonen, and Dudamel, they've got up to 22 weeks of the season covered, leaving the rest for guest conductors. I hope the three of them get along well. And I hope Handler gets in some conducting too.

The appointment didn't take me by surprise, because I read Mr. CK Dexter Haven's blog, All is Yar, and he handicapped the conductors he saw as candidates the other week, putting Harding on top. (Note that he also has a believable explanation of why San Francisco, not L.A., signed Elim Chan.) He has good access at the orchestra and has interviewed a number of incoming and outgoing musicians; I have fond memories in particular of a two-part interview with Michele Zukovsky when she retired from the principal clarinet chair after 55 years.

Is anyone taking bets on just how many reviews and articles about Harding will include piloting and flying metaphors?

Coverage elsewhere:

• LA Phil press release
• Adam Nagourney, NY Times (gift link)
• Mark Swed, L.A. Times (paywall)
• Richard S. Ginell, SFCV
• Brian Lauritzen, Classical California
• Laurie Niles, Violinist.com

Friday Photo

Cauliflower

Civic Center Farmers Market, San Francisco

March, 2026

 

Luna Composition Lab

New York Times screencap

Ellen Reid and Missy Mazzoli in Reid's Brooklyn loft/studio

I've had a busy few weeks, and the biggest story I published was in the New York Times (gift link), about Luna Composition Lab, an educational nonprofit started by composers Ellen Reid and Missy Mazzoli to fill a gap they had noticed in their training: they're never had a woman as a composition mentor.

I was thrilled to interview Reid, Mazzoli, Luna Labs' executive director Alyssa Kayser-Hirsh, and three Luna Lab alumni, the composers KiMani Bridges, Yuri Lee, and Maya Miro Johnson. It is an amazing program, providing one-on-one online composition lessons and mentoring to six young female, nonbinary, or non-gender-conforming teens, age 13-18, every year, providing continuing professional development opportunities, performances, and a professional recording of the young composers' project from their mentoring year.

There's also a wonderful online course, Adventures in Sound, that teaches basic music theory and composition; composer Whitney George developed and teaches the curriculum.

Luna Lab is ten years old this year, and they've got many events planned. Two big ones are an anniversary performance in New York and an anniversary performance in Berkeley, CA, at Cal Performances. (You bet I'll be there.)

Many organizations are Luna Lab partners for Luna Lab@10; in California, these include the Kronos Quartet, Ensemble for These Times, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Friction Quartet, S.F. Girls Chorus, and the Sarah Gibson Foundation. There are many, many others across the country; watch for performances of works by Luna Lab alumni.

Lastly,  San Francisco Choral Artists will present the world premiere of Yuri Lee's "I Loved You First." She is this year's winner of their New Voice Project. Performances are on May 31 (SF), June 6 (Palo Alto), and June 7 (Oakland). The entire program looks great, mixing very new and very old works.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Die Walküre

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

I don't usually do review round-ups for performances I haven't seen, but in this case, I will. A semi-staged Die Walküre was among Gustavo Dudamel's last performances as music director of the LA Phil. I had thought of going, but I thought I had no hope of getting press tickets; writers in Southern California had the assignments for SFCV and Parterre Box. But Michael Strickland got a press ticket for one act, so maybe I could have as well. (Of course, I would have missed last week's excitement if I'd been away.)

The opera was performed twice, both times one act per night, and yes, if you wanted to see the whole thing you needed three tickets, with prices going up to $350 per. (Ouch.) Jim Farber mentions the enormous overtime that two regular performances would have entailed; for S.F. Opera, my understanding is that performance overtime starts at five hours, which is shorter than Die Walküre typically runs.

Here are the reviews I've seen so far.

• Joshua Barone, N.Y. Times (gift link)
• Mark Swed, L.A. Times
• Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box
• Richard Ginell, SFCV
• Jim Farber, SFCV
• Harlow Robinson, Classical Voice North America
• Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International
• Matthew Richard Martinez, Bachtrack
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• David Bratman, Kalimac's Corner

Meanwhile....Joshua Kosman is in Berlin, seeing Donald Runnicles conducting Stephen Herheim's Ring at the Deutsch Oper Berlin. I might be just a little envious.

Wo bleibt Elektra?

Dover Score of Richard Strauss's Elektra

(Black background, white type, different beige and black graphical motifs running across the score above and below the text)

I was looking for my Elektra score yesterday, and panicked when it wasn't on the shelf where it should be, you know, with the score of Die Frau ohne Schatten. Also nowhere to be seen: the score of Salome, which I'd gotten used at the same time I bought the used Elektra score.

I did eventually figure out that they were on that shelf but tucked in at the very end invisible for various reasons (whew). I was reminded of a....dream? nightmare? I had a few years ago.

Somehow, I'd been pulled in at the last moment to conduct Elektra, and I was trying to figure out how to do this. The score I had was bizarre: two square volumes, maybe 10" x 10", in other words, nowhere near big enough to accommodate the opera's instrumentation. It calls for 111 instruments, the largest orchestra of any work in the standard operatic repertory. (Schoenberg's oratorio Gurrelieder calls for around 150!)

I was in a total panic – really – because I definitely don't know Elektra well enough to conduct it without, say, a year of study. On top of that, a friend was trying to talk to me about something completely different, and I was having to fend her off.

I think I woke up at that point.

 

Opera Parallèle 2026-27 Season

Opera Parallèle has a fascinating season planned for 2026-27. Here's the repertory and descriptions of the three operas they'll perform; full cast information will follow in August.

SALT & SEA – WORLD PREMIERE

November 14–21

The company’s 17th anniversary will open Nov. 14–21, with the world premiere of Salt & Spirit, a new theatrical work rooted in the musical traditions of the Gullah-Geechee people of the Carolinas. This evocative production draws on a rare collection of resurfaced Gullah spirituals from the late nineteenth century, reimagining ancestral songs through a contemporary theatrical lens that blends classical, jazz, and traditional influences.

 Developed and performed by tenor Victor Ryan Robertson and arranger/pianist Adrianne Duncan, in collaboration with Opera Parallèle Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel, Salt & Spirit brings these powerful songs into a richly theatrical world. Inspired by Robertson and Duncan’s song cycle, Gullah Meditations, this moving tribute to cultural memory, resilience, and storytelling honors the enduring spirit carried through Gullah-Geechee song.

The Gullah-Geechee people are descendants of enslaved Africans who worked on rice, indigo, and cotton plantations along the lower Atlantic coast. The unique nature of their enslavement on islands and in isolated coastal areas allowed them to retain many aspects of their ancestral culture in ways which are clearly visible in their contemporary arts, cuisine, music, and language.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY — WEST COAST PREMIERE

March 11–14, 2027

Following the company’s great success with Everest, Opera Parallèle is very pleased to be reunited with the creative team of composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer for their poignant opera, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, set for March 11-14, 2027. This West Coast debut will feature a newly created chamber orchestration by Ben Foskett, commissioned by Opera Parallèle.

Based on the true story of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, this powerful work explores resilience, memory, and the triumph of the human spirit. Following its 2023 world premiere at The Dallas Opera, the creative team sought to bring this story to more intimate settings, deepening the audience’s connection to Bauby’s journey. With this reorchestration for chamber ensemble, Opera Parallèle enhances the story’s authenticity and emotional impact, bringing Bauby’s voice even closer.

The opera follows Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, after suffering a massive stroke, is left with “locked-in syndrome”—fully conscious but unable to move or speak, except for blinking his left eye. Trapped inside his own body, Bauby embarks on an astonishing journey of resilience, dictating his memoir of 1997, letter by letter through blinks. The opera vividly captures his struggle, memories, and imagination, weaving an emotional and immersive musical tapestry that explores the force of individual courage and the victory of communication against all odds.

Opera Parallèle’s award-winning Nicole Paiement will be on the podium and highly praised Brian Staufenbiel will direct this new production. This two-act opera will be sung in English with English supertitles.

TAKING UP SERPENTS — WEST COAST PREMIERE

May 2027

Taking Up Serpents explores themes of faith, superstition, morality, kinship, and destiny with an eclectic folk-inspired score by critically acclaimed Indian American composer Kamala Sankaram, and an original story informed by librettist Jerre Dye's family roots in the Deep South.

From “one of the most exciting composers in the country,” (The Washington Post), Kamala Sankaram’s one-act chamber opera Taking Up Serpents, will have its West Coast debut following past productions at Washington National Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival and Chicago Opera Theater.

The story regards Kayla, a 25-year-old young woman who works at Save-Mart in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and gets a phone call from her estranged mother informing her that her father, a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal snake handling preacher, has been dangerously bitten by one of his snakes and lies dying in a hospital. Kayla’s journey home forces her to confront her troubled upbringing in this dramatic story.

Nicole Paiement will conduct the orchestra and singers in a new production created and directed by Brian Staufenbiel.

Belated Museum Mondays

Afrofuturism Display

Photos of works by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemison, Ytasha L. Womack, and others; a typewriter.

San Francisco Airport Museum

March, 2026

 

Friday Photo

Tristan und Isolde

Curtain Call Photo

Metropolitan Opera, NYC

April, 2026

 

Elim Chan, Music Director Designate of the San Francisco Symphony

Elim Chan

Cody Pickens, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

.

Big news from Davies Symphony Hall this morning: Elim Chan, 39, will be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony. She joins the orchestra immediately with the title Music Director Designate, and will become Music Director with the 2027-28 season.

Chan has conducted SFS three times, most recently in a program of excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Previously, she led works of Britten, Holst, Ogonek, Prokofiev, and more Tchaikovsky.

On June 5 and 6, she's leading this program, which I expect will be gorgeous:

• Felix Mendelssohn, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
• Hector Berlioz, Les Nuits d'été,  with Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
• Richard Wagner, Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
  
• Claude Debussy, La Mer

Get your tickets right now, because there will be a run on them any second. 

Chan will be the 13th music director of SFS, joining a lineage that includes such luminaries as Pierre Monteux, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her initial contract is for six years.

SFS will be by far the biggest-budget U.S. orchestra to have a woman as music director. Current female music directors elsewhere include Xian Zhang at the Seattle Symphony, JoAnn Falletta at the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Carolyn Kuan, who conducted The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera last fall, at the Hartford Symphony. Just across the street from Davies, Eun Sun Kim is the music director of San Francisco Opera. Added 5/22: Nathalie Stutzmann is music director in Atlanta, too.

The press release has these details:

In September 2027, Elim Chan begins her tenure as Music Director, leading the Orchestra in a minimum of 10 weeks of programming, including the Opening Gala and All San Francisco concert. From the 2028–29 season onward, she will conduct a minimum of 10 subscription weeks, as well as Opening Week, with an additional three weeks devoted to special projects such as touring and SoundBox.

A while back, Joshua Kosman wrote this in a review:

At intermission, a well-connected observer whispered unconfirmed rumors in my ear, which I unapologetically pass along, about the strong bond that’s been forming in recent years between Chan and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Philharmonic will need a new music director by 2026, when Gustavo Dudamel pulls up stakes and decamps to lead the New York Philharmonic.

Make of that scuttlebutt what you will, if anything. But Thursday’s triumph suggested that the orchestra could do worse — and that Chan’s next appearance in San Francisco is something to look forward to with unreserved excitement. 

Let's double and redouble that, now that Chan will be the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony.

Media round-up, with more to come:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle news report (gift link)
• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle opinion piece (gift link)
• Janos Gereben, SFCV
• Adam Nogourney, NY Times (gift link)

Museum Monday

Virgin and Child

School of Donatello

Raphael: Sublime Poetry

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

April, 2026

 

Belated Friday Photo

Plaque honoring Willa Cather

5 Bank St, NYC

May, 2016

 

Now We Know

Davies Symphony Hall

Home of the San Francisco Symphony

Back in December, 2024, when SFS was threatening drastic cuts in the Symphony Chorus's budget, an anonymous benefactor made a $4 million donation in support of the chorus, which allowed the orchestra to maintain the Chorus and pay for the 32 AGMA singers in the group.

Now we know who the donor was, owing to his NY Times obituary: the mathematician and computer scientist Dr. Peter G. Neumann, who specialized in computer security. I encourage reading the obit; the link is a gift link.

 

MTT Update

Michael Tilson Thomas

Photo by Brandon Patroc, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

My post on the occasion of MTT's death has grown by quite a bit since April 23, as I've located more obituaries and tributes to him. I think that every orchestra he conducted has posted a memorial to him; I saw tons on social media and didn't grab all of the links.

I want to note Mark Swed's Los Angeles Times article (now behind a paywall) and Tim Page's Washington Post obit (gift link has expired), which go into some detail about MTT's personality and, well, why there's a period in his life when he didn't have a music director job. He was impetuous and somewhat arrogant; Peter Pastreich's comments in my NPR obituary mention that in 1985, when SFS hired Herbert Blomstedt, MTT wasn't ready for the top job, but he was a decade later. 

 

Museum Mondays

Annunciation, by Raphael 

Raphael: Sublime Poetry

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

April, 2026

 

Friday Photo

See at a New York City Subway Stop

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

April, 2026

 

What I've Been Up To

Chevy Chase Rose

Mine is blooming right now.

I've had a few articles published recently besides the MTT obit.

• Silent Cinema, and Its Music, Returns to the Castro. I interviewed Anita Monga of the SF Silent Film Festival and four composers who'll be playing at the 2026 SFF. A fun article to write! The SFF started last night and I'm sure you can still get tickets to most or all of the shows.
  
• Hespèrion XXI Visits Worlds Old and New. Jordi Savall, Hespèrion XXI, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and various guests at Cal Performances. This is the second time I've seen Savall and Hespèrion live and the second time I have been disappointed. Their records are phenomenal, and I've read glowing reviews from 20 years back, but....their recorded greatness hasn't come through in live performances.
• An Earful of E: Víkingur Ólafsson Draws Connections Between Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert. The Icelandic pianist at Cal Performances. Before you comment or email me, yes, AP style for Icelandic names is apparently to use the full name on first use, just the first name on second, owing to Icelandic patrynomic naming. Related:
• Jeff Kaliss interviews Víkingur Ólafsson, SFCV. The pianist described the naming convention to Kaliss.
• Gabe Meline interviews the pianist, KQED

 

Museum Mondays

Green glass vase

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

November, 2013

 

Friday Photo

Buildings, Downtown San Francisco

April, 2026

 

Another Amazing Recital from Claire Chase

Claire Chase

Photo by David Michalek

The post title says it all: flutist Claire Chase was here the other week, playing another group of works commissioned through Density 2036, and it was all amazing. The only musician I can think of who combines this level of virtuosity with her sheer physicality and theatricality is the great soprano Barbara Hannigan, but if you know of others who do what Chase does, please mention those folks in the comments.

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle

Previously:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle (2017)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV (2017)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV, Pan

Cal Performances 2026-27

Cal Performances presents the West Coast premiere of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, an epic theater work that explores the stories of African soldiers in World War I, at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts Arena in Oakland Nov 12–15, 2026.

Photo: Stella Oliver, courtesy of Cal Performances

Cal Performances just announced its 2026-27 season, and as usual it's full of great performers and likely great performances. Here are some of the goodies:

• Attacca Quartet is Ensemble in Residence for the season. They'll appear in one concert with composer Caroline Shaw, and play Adams and Beethoven in another.
• The West Coast premier of a new work by William Kentridge, the Head and the Load. I missed The Great Yes, The Great No, and I won't miss this one. Cal Performances also announced a five-year initiative presenting Kentridge's works.
• Tribute to those pioneering minimalist composers who have round-number birthdays this year or next: Steve Reich, 90, Philip Glass, 90, John Adams, 80. Alas, no Meredith Monk, who turns 84 this year.
• Yannick Nézet-Séguin brings the Vienna Phil for three concerts centered around Mahler. I heard YNS lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in Mahler 6 last year and it was good, so I'm there. Also, there will be a rare chance to hear mezzo Elina Garança, who has never appeared with SF Opera and probably never will. Also Yuja Wang plays a Prokofiev piano concerto, and sure, I will hear her in practically anything and regret missing the Mahler Chamber Orchestra the other day.
• Mark Morris world premiere
• Il Pomo d'Oro and Joyce DiDonato in Dido and Aeneas and Carrisimi's Jephtha.
• Takács Quartet and Jeremy Denk in works of Mendelssohn, Gabriela Lena Frank, and César Franck.
• Judy Collins
• Tenor Ben Bliss
• Countertenor Iestyn Davies
• Mezzo Ema Nikolovska with guitarist Sean Shibe in Orlando Variations, which takes off from Virginia Wollf's novel.
• Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau in French Baroque music
• Soprano Lise Davidsen
• Luna Lab@10, a celebration of Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid's Luna Composition Lab, which mentors a wide range of female, nonbinary, and/or gender-nonconforming composers ages 13 to 18. The performers include the Friction Quartet, Dutt & Campbell Duo, and The Living Earth Show. They'll play music by various young composers, Mazzoli, and Reid.
• Audra McDonald.
• The English Concert, Handel's Alessandro
• More string quartets, more pianists, more dance companies.
• Not enough music by women, pretty sure the performers are a substantial majority male.

Museum Mondays

Raphael

From "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

April, 2026

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an immense and magnificent exhibition dedicated to the artist Raphael. I saw it earlier this month; it is so big that to see it all, you really need to go more than once. So many drawings, all worthy of a careful look!

The curators could not bring the artist's Vatican frescos to NYC, so there was a room set up with projections of the frescos on the four walls. I took the above photo in that room. The figure above is in the fresco called The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple. I believe that he is one of the youths assisting a horseman in driving Heliodorus from the temple.

What caught my eye is the lightness of the figure and the sense that he is hurtling through the air, with neither of his feel touching the ground. 

Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas visits Google

November, 2008

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

(I took many photos that day, but most of them are a little blurry because MTT was perpetually in motion.)

Knowing this day would come did not make it any easier: Michael Tilson Thomas, universally known at MTT, died last night at his home in San Francisco, nearly five years after a diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme. I am tremendously saddened by his passing and especially by his illness. I'd hoped he would have a long and happy retirement, guest conducting, composing, and dreaming up all sorts of wonderful things.

I wrote an advance obituary for NPR, commissioned the week he announced he had a brain tumor and updated many times since owing to his amazing survival. (Huge thanks to Steve Smith for commissioning the piece.)

While researching the obit, I turned up some numbers numbers that describe his sheer impact on the San Francisco Symphony, of which he was music director from 1995 to 2020:

• He conducted around 1,800 concerts with SFS, from 1974 to 2025.
• His first concert showed the shape of things to come: it included Mahler's 9th.
• During his tenure, SFS presented 41 world or U.S. premieres.
• He appointed about 60 musicians, conductors, music librarians.
• He led festivals devoted to Beethoven, Bates, Stravinsky; Yiddish theater and its impact on Broadway and American music; the Barbary Coast; Mendelssohn and Ades; Schubert and Berg; Sofia Gubaidulina; George Benjamin; Leonard Bernstein; Russian music, and more.
• He conceived SFSoundBox and helped found SFS Media, the orchestra's own record label, which was among the first of any U.S. orchestra. (The Louisville Orchestra, I have learned, started its own label in 1950.)

In addition to all of that, he made more than 120 recordings with a number of orchestras and was awarded 12 Grammys. 

He and his late husband, Joshua Robison, were very much a part of San Francisco, and MTT was loved throughout the city. The block of Grove that runs between Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House was renamed MTT Way in honor of him.

Be sure to check out the amazing collection of photos of MTT, Joshua, their beloved dogs, and more at his website.

On KQED's Forum, Alexis Madrigal spoke with Mark Leno, former California state senator and longtime friend of MTT and Joshua Robison, classical music critic Joshua Kosman, composer John Adams, soprano Julia Bullock, and conductor Donato Cabrera about MTT. You can listen to the archived broadcast.

Obituaries and memorials:

• Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle obit (gift link)
• Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, a beautiful appreciation (gift link)
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Joshua Kosman, The Gramophone, originally published in 2024
• Tony Bravo, SF Chronicle, a beautiful appreciation of MTT's life as a gay man and what he and Joshua Robison meant to gay people in classical music (gift link)
• Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle, From the Archive, about MTT's first SFS performance (gift link)
• Lisa Hirsch, NPR
• Janos Gereben, SFCV
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• Emily Shugerman, S.F Standard
• David Bratman, Kalimac's Corner
• Mark Leno remember his friends MTT and Joshua Robison, SF Standard
• Various tributes to MTT, S.F. Chronicle
• San Francisco Symphony remembers MTT
• Barbara Bogatin, SFCV
• Sharon Su, "What I learned from MTT"
• Mark Swed, LA Times (MTT as an Angeleno and California)
• Nardine Saad, LA Times
• Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise
• Elaine Fine, Musical Assumptions
• Chicago Symphony Orchestra, "Remembering Michael Tilson Thomas"
• Tim Page, Washington Post (gift link)
• Anthony Tomassini, NY Times (gift link)
• Hannah Edgar, NY Times (gift link), on how MTT worked with and developed young musicians
• P.J. Grisar, The Forward
• The Times, unsigned
• The Telegraph, unsigned
• Richard Fairman, Financial Times
• New World Symphony
• Amanda Rosa, Miami Herald
• Ronald Blum, AP
• Bachtrack, unsigned
• Leonard Slatkin
• Dave Hurwitz, Classics Today

Joshua Robison obituaries:

• Tony Bravo and Aidin Vaziri, San Francisco Chronicle, a heartfelt appreciation of MTT's husband, his partner of 50 years (gift link)
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• MTT's website
• London Symphony Orchestra

San Francisco Symphony 2026-27

Davies Symphony Hall

Home of the San Francisco Symphony

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Well, okay! San Francisco Symphony announced their 2026-27 season the other month – sorry, I am definitely behind in posting about recent events – and it is a good season, a return to the kind of adventurous programming we got used to during the long tenure of Michael Tilson Thomas (okay, there was a slump at the end, I know, I know) and the too-short tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Salonen will be back for what will be a fun program – it includes a new concerto for harp and percussion, by Rene Orth, to be played by principal percussionist Jacob Nissly and principal harp Katherine Siochi – and his influence is clear in a few other places during the season. That's because there are a bunch of big new works programmed or coming in the near future, and they absolutely must have been commissioned when he was music director. These include the Orth, a new violin concerto called How to Be a Bird, by the prodigiously gifted Gabriella Smith, and a future concerto for orchestra by Reena Esmail. 

There's plenty of good stuff in the season! In addition to works named above, I'm looking forward to seeing Metropolis with live orchestra on the very big screen at Davies.

The full season brochure can be downloaded as a PDF; you can also view or download the full season calendar.

• Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle.
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Janos Gereben, SFCV

 

La Belle et la Bête at Opera Parallèle

Chea Kang as Beauty, Hadleigh Adams as the Beast

Photo: Stefan Cohen

Opera Parallèle, March, 2026

A spectacular presentation of Philip Glass's amalgam of film and opera.

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Lily Janiak, SF Chronicle
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Caroline Crawford, Bay City News

Season Announcement Season

It's that time of year, and I will try post at least some analysis of orchestral seasons across the country and how they are doing repertory-wise, that is, dead white guys versus the rest of the world.

A preliminary note that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Classical Series is a disgrace: the season has works by 8 9 living composers, mostly guys, mostly white. They are Michael Abels, Mason Bates, Tan Dun, Philip Glass, Magnus Lindberg, Arvo Pärt, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Roberto Sierra, and Julia Wolfe. The rest of the season is dead white men, except for a short work by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, which I missed the other day.

Karina Canellakis and Jane Glover are the only women who are conducting. 

You can see all of the details on the handy CSO season grid. I wish every orchestra published a document like this!