Whitney George's The Curious Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Composer Whitney George has what she calls a Gothic chamber thriller, The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, playing in New York City from June 10 - 13. It sounds like a lot of fun, if you like that kind of thing, which I do, and I wish I could go!

It's at the Shiner Theater of the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture; the four performances include a matinee.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday performances at 7:30 p.m.

Saturday performance at 1:30 p.m.

Tickets start at $40.

18 Bleecker Street  New York, New York, 10012

Buy tickets

 

Exciting Times at Davies

Davies Symphony Hall, S.F.

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Exciting, yes, in good and not so good ways. Perhaps most importantly, I interviewed San Francisco Symphony music director designate Elim Chan for SFCV the day the announcement of her appointment went out. Yes, you could say that I'm happy about this! She is an excellent conductor and I think will be a good fit with the orchestra and the city. She was also a lot of fun to talk to. (I never interviewed Michael Tilson Thomas or Esa-Pekka Salonen, her immediate predecessors, which I greatly regret.)

The day after, Cristian Mǎcelaru led the orchestra in an incendiary performance, including Embers, by Tyler Taylor, winner of the Emerging Black Composers Project award, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1, with Simon Trpčeski, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." Trpčeski is not only a terrific pianist, he is a classy guy: he dedication one encore to Elim Chan – who was in Loge A with SFS CEO Matthew Spivey – and the other, which included associate concertmaster Wyatt Underhill, to MTT.

I also reviewed conductor laureate Herbert Blomstedt's program, which consisted only of Mahler's Symphony No. 9, and which turned out to be an unfortunate occasion. Blomstedt arrived in S.f. in a sufficiently exhausted state that he spent several days in the hospital, with David Robertson taking over rehearsals. By the day of this concert, he had recovered enough that, it seems, he insisted on leading the last rehearsal and conducting the concert.

It did not go well. He was escorted in a wheelchair to the podium, where several people helped him onto the podium and the piano bench from which he was conducting. During the third movement, he started listing to the right and it appeared he might fall off. The music stopped; the helpers came out; they swapped the bench for an armchair. The music went on, but it was scary for the audience (and I'm sure the musicians) and not entirely clear how in charge of the performance Blomstedt was. 

He withdrew from the remaining two performances, which Robertson conducted, and has subsequently withdrawn from scheduled performances in Sweden, which Alan Gilbert led.

There was a lot of discussion about Blomstedt on Facebook, both before and after the concert, by members of the public and members of the orchestra. This kind of situation – reviewing a concert where a performer is very old, or ill, or merely getting to the end of their career – needs to be handled carefully. If the performer is a Herbert Blomsted, who is nearly 99 years old, or a Michael Tilson Thomas, who performed after surgery for a brain tumor, their performances are occasions, not just concerts, and should be reviewed with that in mind.

I attended most of MTT's post-diagnosis performances, and, well, were they the best performances I heard from him? Mostly not – but it didn't matter, because they were as much about who he was and what he meant to the audience as about the quality of the performances. Similarly with any performances by Herbert Blomstedt, an honored and much-loved past music director of the orchestra.

 

A Tale of Two Opera Houses

War Memorial Opera House

View from the Stage

Photo courtesy of the War Memorial

If you read this blog, you know that my home opera house is San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House. The WMOH opened in 1932 – yes, there's a significant birthday coming up; watch for a nice funding raising campaign* – and seats roughly 3200 people in sections called Orchestra, Box, Grand tier, Dress Circle, Balcony Circle and Balcony.

In the photo above, you can see that the orchestra is fairly deep and there's a significant overhang of the box level over the back of the orchestra. In the level above the boxes, the Grand Tier is in front, then, across an aisle, the Dress Circle rises above it.

Above that, there's the Balcony Circle, and behind it, the Balcony. 

For marketing and sales purposes, each of the levels is subdivided in various ways, to provide different price points depending on the desirability of the seats.

Metropolitan Opera House

View from the Stage

Allegedly Opening Night, 1966

The photo above is New York's Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966. The Met seats 3800 people across six similarly named levels, but each named level gets its own separate physical tier. The Orchestra is extremely deep, with the back of Orchestra level a lot farther from the stage than the back of the WMOH orchestra level is from the stage. 

At the Met, the Parterre level houses the main box level, though, interestingly, every level up to the Balcony has boxes along the sides of the house. So, the Met levels are Parterre, Grand Tier above that, Dress Circle above that, Balcony above that, and waaaaay up there, the Family Circle. I do not have height measurements for the interior of the two houses, but the Met's Family Circle, and probably the Balcony would be above the roof of the WMOH.

Basically, any time you're in one of the tiers, even the $$$$ boxes, you're farther from the stage at the Met than at the WMOH.

I recently took in the Met's productions of Tristan und Isolde and Innocence, sitting in the Family Circle for my first Tristan and the Dress Circle for my second, in the Dress Circle for Innocence. I bought my own tickets, because, without a paid review, it was not clear when I asked for them that I would be able to get press tickets. 

Hoo boy, the sheer size of the house created quite the distance, physical and emotional, from what was happening on stage.

For Innocence, the Met used Simon Stone's production, which was created for the 2021 Aix-en-Provence world premiere, and which has been used by the commissioning opera companies. The Met was a "sponsor" of the production, and I admit, I don't know exactly what that means.

It's the production we saw in San Francisco, the one with the giant rotating set; I attended the dress rehearsal and opening night (I can't recall what I did with my subscription ticket), then watched a performance from backstage and wrote about it for SFCV. 

Everyone sang well, but I was shocked at how little impact the singing actually had. I've seen the Danish bass Stephen Milling several times and he's always been magnificent, pulling off such feats as stealing the show while singing Hagen in Götterdämmerung. But here? It could have been any good bass on stage; there was nothing like the dramatic or vocal impact Milling brings to everything he does. I was far more moved by Kristinn Sigmundsson in SF.

So, this was the last time I'll be up in the tiers at the Met; in the future, no matter the cost (if I can't get press tickets), I'll be in the orchestra somewhere, where I'll be able to actually connect with the music and singers.

More about Tristan, eventually.

 

Museum Mondays

Puff Quilt with Tobacco Sacks

Annie Crawford

Routed West, BAMPFA 

Berkeley, CA

November, 2025

Click to enlarge

 

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.