Thursday Miscellany

San Francisco Opera has appointed Daniel Knapp as director of production, a job where he'll be in charge of a budget of $22 million that is used for stage operations, production stage management, technical administration, scene construction, costume shop and wig and make-up services for all War Memorial Opera House stage productions, as well as concerts, recitals and special events. Read the press release here....Daniel Wolf has a great posting up about Alan Hovhaness, putting him in context as a sometimes-experimental composer working outside the New York/East Coast mainstream in a variety of styles. Be sure to click the link to the composer's Symphony for Metal Orchestra...Alex Ross had an article in The New Yorker last month discussing the trouble with Beethoven and several books about the composer....Care of Long Beach Opera, which is performing his Therese Raquin soon, meet composer Tobias Picker at the Colburn School of Music in LA, on Sunday, November 16, 2014, from 1:00pm to 3:00pm, in Thayer Hall. Colburn is across the street, more or less, from Walt Disney Concert Hall....Locally, Cal Bach has a December program called A German Christmas, which they perform on December 5-7 in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Berkeley...Magnificat performs Cavalli's Venetian Mass December 19-21 in Palo Alto, Berkeley, and San Francisco....On Sunday, November 23, Chora Nova performs Bruckner & Brahms at First Congregational in Berkeley.