The Best of 2025

Kang Wang as the title character

The Monkey King

San Francisco Opera

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO

 

SFCV published the writers' collective opinions of the best performances of the year. The Bay Area list is here. My five choices were these:

• Esa-Pekka Salonen's Mahler 2
• Poiesis Quartet at Noe Music
• The Monkey King at San Francisco Opera
• Pivot Festival, Carla Kiehlstedt's 26 Little Deaths
• Tartuffe, Pocket Opera

It was a tough call. Here's the rest of my long list:

• La bohème at SFO; a seriously great run, beautifully directed, with two terrific casts.
• MTT 80, a deeply touching celebration of the man.
  
• Parsifal at SFO
• Rigoletto at SFO
• Bluebeard's Castle at Opera San José
• Turn of the Screw at SFCM, better staged and conducted than what I saw at Santa Fe over the summer.
• John Adams third piano concerto, After the Fall, at SFS. I couldn't include the concert on my short list because the second half was (&)%$)_@_ Carmina Burana.
• Dalia Stasevska at SFS, in the Thorvaldsdottir cello concerto and RWV's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.
• Cabrillo Festival, Becoming
• Hello, Star at OP. Just a perfect 45 minutes of opera begging for a larger orchestra. A wonderful libretto, beautiful music, great direction on a tiny stage.
• Donald Runnicles and Irene Roberts at SFS

As you can see, I named four of the last six operas at SFO as among the best things I saw; Dead Man Walking was also superb. SFO had a stupendous year and in fact has been on a roll since the centennial season. Hats off to Matthew Shilvock and his team for this long string of artistic successes, which has also included a fair number of sellouts.

As for the flip side, I am going to pass on flagging concerts I found disappointing or wrong-headed. There's not much doubt that the worst event of the year was Esa-Pekka Salonen's departure from San Francisco Symphony after just five years as music director. He reinvigorated the orchestra's programming, led many great concerts, hired many terrific musicians, and thanks to the short-sightedness of the board and management, which couldn't figure out how to fund his ambitions for the future, he is gone.

• Joshua Kosman's picks
• SFCV Los Angeles writers' picks

A New Major Benefactor at San Francisco Opera

Jensen Huang, Lori Huang, and Matthew Shilvock

Photo: Kristen Loken / San Francisco Opera

Jensen and Lori Huang have made a multi-year commitment to donate $5 million/year to San Francisco Opera. If the names seem familiar, Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia, which makes high-performance chips that are in great demand to power artificial intelligence applications and data centers. Nvidia has been in the news quite a bit lately. The Huangs are very wealthy. They were also honorary chairs of the honorary committee for The Monkey King.

San Francisco Opera continues to succeed in cultivating prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, unlike most Bay Area arts organizations. You might or might not have noticed that Dr. William and Mrs. William M. Coughran are major donors at SFO, and if you did notice, you might or might not know that Bill Coughran was a senior vice president of engineering at Google. He's been on the SFO board for a number of years.

SFO has now commissioned two operas based on classic Chinese novels, additional demonstrations of why diversity and inclusion are so important to the arts. Both Dream of the Red Chamber and The Monkey King have been artistic and commercial successes; The Monkey King is utterly sensational and the company could have sold out a few more performances. In past seasons, Omar and El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego were also successfully artistically and commercially. This is why opera must include voices from all cultures.

After the jump is the press release from SFO about the Huangs' donation.

Museum Mondays

Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA

Sherry Ann Boyd, Piecer, Richmond, CA, 1990

Irene Bankhead, Quilter, Oakland, CA 1990

Routed West, BAMPFA 

Berkeley, CA

November, 2025

Click to enlarge

 

Friday Photo (A Bit Early)

At the grave of Hector Berlioz (December 11 1803 - March 8, 1869).

His wives Harriet Smithson and Marie Recio are also buried here.

October, 2018

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Anna Nicholson

Untitled (Log Cabin, Barn Raising Variation)

Routed West

BAMPFA, November, 2025

 

Frank Gehry

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

Well, damn, Frank Gehry has died. He was among the greatest architects of our time and certainly one of my favorites. There are few buildings I love as much as Walt Disney Concert Hall, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen; a wonder in design, with so much detail, constantly changing in the light, a Gesamtkunstwerke in every sense of the word, since he designed the building, a fabulously intricate building, down to the fabric used on the seats.

Oh, and it has magnificent acoustics, at least for the audience. I understand from someone who has been there that it can be difficult for the musicians to hear each other on stage. The acoustics aren't quite perfect: the last performances I heard there, in December 2024, were of Schoenberg's mighty oratorio Gurrelieder, which has an immense orchestra and a big chorus. A friend and I agreed that at the sonic maximum, the hall was slightly overloaded and the sound became blurry. Regardless, the hall is still a marvel.

Practically speaking, I have to wonder whether there are any implications to the possible renovation of Davies Symphony Hall, here in San Francisco, since his architectural firm is one of two listed on the project. Davies is acoustically mediocre and dull to look at. A renovation would cost around a half-billion  dollars, not the ridiculous $100 million that I've seen bruited about (see Geffen Hall in NYC for why $500 million is far more realistic).

He won't be buried at WDCH, but Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's Cathdral, London, applies equally to Gehry: LECTOR, SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE. ("Reader, if you seek a monument, look around.")

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

October, 2007

 

Friday Photo

Pelicans

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

(Click to enlarge)

 

Belated Museum Mondays

Emma Hall (1878-1949)

Detail of a Double Wedding Ring Quilt

Routed West at BAMPFA

November, 2025