As Director of Artistic Planning for the San Francisco Symphony, Spivey will work closely with Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas in setting the Orchestra’s artistic direction and act as a member of the executive management team. He will oversee programming for the Orchestra’s 31-week subscription season, recording projects, commissioning programs, tours, festivals, and provide artistic direction for the SF Symphony’s 200+ concerts and presentations each season. The San Francisco Symphony serves one of the largest concert-going and music education audiences in the U.S.That means that he's the guy to complain to when we get a season that looks like this.
Festival Opera, stepping out of its usual habitat in Contra Costa County, will visit Oakland with an interesting double bill next month: Gustav Holst's Savitri and Jack Perla's River of Light. They'll be performed November 14-15, 2015, at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center Arts, 388 9th Street, Oakland, CA. Both chamber operas will be sung in English. For more information, visit www.FestivalOpera.org. Yes, I'll be thinking about the fact that they're staging a pair of operas, composed by white men, about India.
4 comments:
re Alex's observation on the performing arts in America, I just want to note that if you visit the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, you can walk up the Henry Mancini Staircase into the Ralphs/Food4Less Auditorium.
Oy vey. But at least Mancini was a musician.
Yeah, Disney Hall is a riot of naming opportunities. In the garden pretty much every marble floor tile has a name on it, in a variety of fonts (no idea if this correlates with the amount of the donation).
But I tend to give them a pass, for two reasons. First, it was extremely difficult to raise the approximately $270m the place cost, and years of fundraising were required. If a little narcissism is the price of this, so be it.
And second, all those names are pretty discretely displayed: in the main lobby the big donors are listed on two walls in shiny steel on a matte grey background -- you can't even make out the lettering unless you stand at just the right angle to catch the light reflected off the steel.
And so far there are no names on the urinals. We can be grateful for small favors.
I think that there are nameplates on a fair number of seats at Davies, which cost $25 million to build back in the late 1970s. I don't blame the creators of Disney one bit myself, knowing what it was like to get it built.
Also, Disney is dead, unlike the loathsome Koch.
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