Wednesday Miscellany

The annual San Francisco Symphony Winter Sale ends Friday; get your tickets to lots of hot events (Carey Bell plays the Nielsen clarinet concerto; Peter Grimes; the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings; Mahler's 3rd, with Sasha Cooke; Ton Koopman's Bach Family programs; Christian Tetzlaff in the Bartok 2nd violin concerto, etc, etc.) before it's too late....Switchboard Music Festival will be on Saturday, April 12, from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Brava Theater, 2718 24th in SF; their programming includes appearances by the Kronos Quartet, Mobius Trio, Grex, Gamelan X, Odessa Chen, Matthew Welch, Jordan Glenn and Michael Coleman, Splinter Reeds, The Operators, Dublin, Makeunder, and music by Anna Clyne, Julia Wolfe, Ryan Brown, and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. Tickets are a GREAT BARGAIN: $15 advance at switchboardmusic.com; $20 students/$25 general at the door....I'm mentioned in one of Steve Smith's contributions to the NY Times (classical) Playlist feature this week. Perhaps this will inspire me to finish a long-neglected posting about performances of Otello, live, on record, and on DVD, and why Martinelli is the only Moor for me....Stanford Live will host a live broadcast of Dallas Opera's production of Death and the Powers, an opera by Tod Machover, on Sunday, February 16 at 12:00p.m. The press releases notes that "Admission is free to the video simulcast but the public is encouraged to register in advance on the Stanford Live website at live.stanford.edu." Death and the Powers is conducted by Nicole Paiement, a great conductor and well known to opera audiences in the Bay Area; the cast includes Robert Orth and Joelle Harvey....Speaking of Paiement, Opera Parallele will present a tasty double bill on April 26, 27, and 28 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tiresias and Weill's Mahogany Singspiel....Die Fledermaus is the current Lamplighters' production at YBCA, with a new English libretto by David Scott Marley.