Lookback 2024

What a year it has been, in every area that interests me. This post is both personal and professional.

Looking at my list, I see that this year I wrote 45 paid reviews, previews, and articles, up from 30 last year. Twenty-five were written after I retired. They sort out this way:

• Three previews, summer, holiday, and early 2025, all for the SF Chronicle
• Thirty-two reviews, some for SFCV, some for the Chronicle, some for both. This includes my review of the Eun Sun Kim film.
• Three big features and one small one.
• "Backstage at SF Opera" (SFCV)
• "The Scorekeepers," about music librarians, for SFCV
• Shawna Lucey & Opera San José, for Opera. It's available on line now, behind a paywall, and will be in print in their February issue.
• Featurette about the orchestra's role in the SFO Tristan und Isolde. SFCV and the Chronicle.
• I contributed to SFCV's 2024 round-up of best performances.
•  Five news articles, one for the Chronicle, four for SFCV.

In the last two years, I've discovered that my sweet spot is 1500 to 2500 words; I've written a bunch of features of that length and really like it.

The Good

• I retired from technical writing, after years on an unfulfilling project and multiple frustrations with so much at my former employer.
• I'm having a lot more fun with music writing than I'd had in years with technical writing.
• Joshua Kosman got to retire, and he's clearly having fun with puzzles, writing about classical music on his own schedule, and reading Trollope.
• San Francisco Opera's artistic (and probably financial) success. Yes, I'm making some assumptions / guesses about the money side of things, but from what I've been told and what I have seen, The Magic Flute and Carmen sold like hotcakes, whatever you thought of them artistically, and the artistic strengths of Innocence, Partenope, Ballo, The Handmaid's Tale, and Tristan und Isolde were clear. I'll probably have to do a separate post about Tristan because on balance it was the best, overall, of the seven productions I have seen live, and I want to substantiate that.

The Great Performances

• Chanticleer and Alkemie's Machaut program at the Berkeley Festival
• Erin Morley's fabulous recital
• Raehann Bryce-Davis's superb recital
• Innocence, SF Opera
• Partenope, SF Opera
• The Handmaid's Tale, SF Opera
• Tristan und Isolde, SF Opera
• Don Giovanni, Merola Opera
• Salonen Cello Concerto, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• Mahler 3, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• Erwartung and Ma Mère L'oye, SF Symphony (Salonen)
• All-Mozart program, SFS (Labadie, Lucy Crowe; I did not hear better singing this year.)
• Wild Up's two Julius Eastman programs
• Kronos Quartet 50
• The Daughter of the Regiment, LVOpera, two hours of frothy delight.

The Bad

• San Francisco Symphony's numerous institutional failures
• Alienating Esa-Pekka Salonen to the extent that he didn't renew his contract.
• Waving bye-bye to him as if it were no big deal.
• Going to the brink with the AGMA choristers.
• Cancelling the Verdi Requiem instead of talking.
• Not returning the musicians' pay to pre-pandemic levels.
• Apparently putting renovating Davies above the musicians, who are the orchestra.
• The shorter season; cancelled projects; cancelled tour.
• Threatening to ban a thirty-year patron who displayed a protest sign about Salonen.
• I repeat: letting Esa-Pekka Salonen go.
• San Francisco Opera is also having problems.
• The 2024-25 season is just six operas and three concerts. Don't count on next season being any better.
• The orchestra staged some kind of labor action on opening night.
• Their contract has been extended multiple times since then.
• Currently, the deadline is toward the end of May, meaning that unless there's a new contract before then, the summer season (La Bohème, Idomeneo, Pride Concert) could be affected.
• The company took a bath on the centennial season, losing $13 million.  It is genuinely shocking that the big donors didn't pony up enough to cover this deficit.
• There are 17 season substitutes this year, which is something around a quarter of the orchestra.
• The Bay Area music press lost yet another member with Joshua Kosman's retirement from the Chronicle. I love his newsletter, which I hope that you're reading, but it's not the same as having a consistent voice reviewing two to four times each week at the big local paper. It is not good that the Chronicle no longer has a full-time music critic, someone close to the vast panoply of organizations here and able to report on and review them with long experience and deep knowledge backing the reviews up. A decade or so ago, you'd have reviews of an important performance by Joshua, Georgia Rowe, Richard Scheinin, Janos Gereben, someone from SFCV, various bloggers, and occasionally out of town critics. The Mercury-News sent Rich to real estate; the East Bay Times and Merc have dropped regular reviews; a few bloggers have stopped writing or moved. SFCV is still here and for the last several months there has been a content-sharing arrangement with the Chronicle. It's just not good to have so many fewer voices weighing in on what's going on in the classical music scene.