Stationery Store Blues

Moleskine journalist's notebook

Hardcover, 8" x 5.5"

Over at The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross has a plaintive post about changes to the Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2, a vital tool in his life.  The post includes a funny/sad video by Adam Savage, which I urge you to watch in full. Savage does not comment on one change, a new, blunter font used on the pencil itself, but I noticed.

I don't use this particular pencil, but of course I have a personal stationery tragedy. Sometime during the pandemic, Moleskine discontinued the classic journalist's notebook, which had a flip-over hard cover. I didn't go to j-school and never worked at a newspaper, so when I started reviewing, I found a notebook I liked to write in rather than using cheap reporter's notepads. I have not yet been in a situation where such a notepad would be useful, such as pursuing some unwilling public figure while trying to get them to comment on an unpopular subject. In such a circumstance, I'd probably be trying to get my phone in front of their face anyway.

I don't care about reviews telling me that there are notebooks with better paper than the Moleskine. I miss that notebook and learned it had been discontinued too late to try to buy up available supplies. 

It's true that Moleskine makes a miniature version of the flip notebook, but it is seriously too small to be useful to me either for concert notes or interview notes or reading notes. I have used the lined classic Moleskin as well, but my handwriting is not good and even though I am right-handed, I worry about smudging notes of already dubious readability during a concert. There's much less risk of that with a flip notebook. 

Moleskine also makes, or made, a soft-cover full-sized reporter's notebook, and one year I accidentally bought one of them. I took a look at it yesterday and saw that its first use for music-related notes was a season-announcement press conference at SFO. The first note reads:

- Pat, Pat, Pat, and Pat

Clearly, this was the press conference for the 2013-14 season; as announced, Patricia Racette had four roles in three operas. After Dolora Zajick dropped out of Dolores Claiborne, that became five roles in four operas.

After some investigation into alternatives to the journalist's notebook, I wound up using a soft-cover notebook that is sturdier than a reporter's notepad but smaller and much less stiff than a hardcover. It is intended to be used as a landscape-orientation sketch notebook, but I use it in portrait orientation. Nonethless, I miss the Moleskine notebook and wish they'd bring it back.

San Francisco Symphony Auditions

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

San Francisco Symphony has a number of auditions coming up.

• Associate principal horn and assistant principal / utility horn. Two positions. This reflects the impact of hiring Diego Incertis Sánchez as principal horn: the principal should have input into hiring to fill the vacancies, because the principal will have a concept of how the horn section should sound and thus helps choose players who will create that sound.
• Associate principal bassoon. This position has been filled for the last year by former principal bassoon Stephen Paulson, so it appears he will be retiring from the orchestra after 48 years in that position.
• Section cello (multiple positions), perhaps reflecting retirements that haven't been announced yet.
• Section viola

 

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
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center

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

 

Ars Minerva's Ercole amante

Sara Couden and Nina Jones in Antonia Bembo’s 

Ercole amante (Photo: Valentina Sadiul)

Between The Monkey King and Gautier Capuçon's cello recital, I saw Ars Minerva's world premiere staging of Antonia Bembo's 1707 opera, Ercole amante. I'd previous written a preview for the Chronicle and SFCV, and Ars Minerva has a strong track record with its revivals of forgotten works, so I was particularly looking forward to it.

Well, you win some and you lose some, and this was, alas, not quite there. To start with, in the first act, the orchestra sounded ragged and underrehearsed. (Things were tighter and livelier in the second act.) To continue, the opera, which was heavily cut, wasn't as good as I'd thought it would be, based on my interviews with company founder Céline Ricci and music director Matthew Dirst. There were fewer arias and more recitative than I'd expected, and the latter got rather tedious in the first act.

I should have listened to the (also heavily cut) recording made from the 2023 concert performances by Il Gusto Barrocco, to try to get some sense of what the opera is like; possibly they made different cuts from Ars Minerva's, since the latter company made some cuts based on what they could reasonably stage.

Lastly, there was an unfortunate vocal hole at the center of the opera: Zachary Gordin, Ercole, who sang the entire opera bare chested and bare legged, dressed in sandals and a gold skirt, has very impressive musculature, but a somewhat less impressive voice. He looked great and was fine dramatically, but the opera would have worked better with a more commanding baritone in the title role.

The other singers were good to excellent (Aura Veruni and Melissa Sondhi as dueling goddesses; Kindra Scharich as Ercole's long-suffering wife, Deianira; tenor Max Ary as Ercole's son Hyllo sounded uncomfortable at the very top of his range but was otherwise fine; Lila Khazoum as Hyllo's fiancée; Sara Couden as a page; Nina Jones as Deianira's servant; Nick Volkert in several roles). Ricci's staging was funny and did everything it needed to with a tiny number of props. I loved Entropy's projections, which were based on Baroque stage design and various paintings.

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Lisa Hirsch, preview, SFCV and S.F. Chronicle

Friday Photo

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

 

Secret Handshake

Stones of Stenness

Orkney, UK

June, 1982

Photo: Lisa Hirsch

"The Orkney archipelago possesses a singular aura—luminous, changeable, dreamlike."

Alex Ross, The New Yorker, Nov. 24, 2025

 

More Monkey King

Kang Wang as Sun Wukong

Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's The Monkey King

Photo: Cory Weaver / courtesy of San Francisco Opera

I want to call your attention to Tony Bravo's wonderful article about The Monkey King and puppeteer / designer Basil Twist. I'm adding this to the media round-up, but it would be very easy to miss there.

 

Museum Mondays

Hattie Mitchell

Detail of a quilt documenting her trip to France in 1906

Appliquéd and embroidered, 1906-08, 1914

Quilted and finished, 1930

Routed West at BAMPFA

November, 2025

 

Friday Photo

Cormorants

Elkhorn Slough

October, 2025

 

Gautier Capuçon, Gaia

Jérôme Ducros, piano and Gautier Capuçon, cello

Photo: Kristen Loken, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

 

Let me start these comments on Gautier Capuçon's Gaïa concert, held on Sunday, November 18, with a quizz: how many times do my notes for the program, which included 17 works (16 programmed, one encore), say "too many arpeggios" or "hmmm, scales", or something like that? *

The concert was more varied than the question might imply, and of course, if you've got a string instrument to compose for, with those four tempting strings, it's an obvious strategy. The concert was not like being stuck in phone booth with Philip Glass and a cello, but a surprising number of the composers took advantage of this particular strategy.

Would I have liked more variety? Yes. Not only were there too many arpeggios in total, but every one of the works was in a kind of anodyne tonality, with only a couple of composers pushing the harmonic envelope in any way. Reader, what I really longed for was something by Carter or someone like him: spikey, angular, atonal, to break the sense that the programming looked at just one part of a vast harmonic universe.

With this recital, Capuçon launched the publication of his eponymous new recital CD, which consists of commissioned works inspired by nature and humanity's relationship with the planet. The program started with a slightly terrifying video of the cellist playing in various hazardous locations in the French alps. I mean....I wonder about the size of the crew it took to get him and his cello and the belaying equipment and cameras up there, even though you see him hiking through snow with his cello case strapped to his back. I'm also wondering which instrument he took up there with him. I kinda hope it was a carbon-fiber cello, not one of his precious wooden instruments.

The video accompanied the first work on the recital, Max Richter's Sequence for Gaïa. You can see it here. (Be sure to read Joshua Kosman's take on the program, which is um shorter than this.)

One other thing I would have liked to be different: the program started at 7 and had no intermission. I figured it would last 90 minutes, tops. But Capuçon introduced each group of two or three works from the stage. The intros were remarkably similar! [Composer] is my great friend and s/he cares so much about nature and the planet! I estimate that this added 20 to 25 minutes to the program, and nope. Just don't do this. Thank everyone at the start and leave it at that.

A few of the pieces stood out: composer/pianist Gabriela Montero's Sur le lac du Bourget sounded like a jazzy 20s song. Olivia Belli's Tàmâr Méthüshelä had a lovely piano part (let me here praise pianist Jérôme Ducros, whose quiet virtuosity made him a superb recital partner). I liked works by Abel Selaocoe and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who came on stage to play a cello duet with Capuçon and wrote him a beautiful cello line. The young cellist Quenton Blache had a standout work as well.

Kudos to the group of cellist from the SFS Youth Orchestra and especially principal Melissa Lam, who also played a duet with Capuçon. But this recital was too much of a muchness. 

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Colin Ziegler, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Jeff Kaliss, SFCV (artist spotlight)

* Looks like six, to my surprise. Sure felt like more at the time.

San Francisco Opera Premieres The Monkey King

 

Kang Wang as the title role in The Monkey King

Members of the San Francisco Opera Chorus

Puppetry designed by Basil Twist

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of SF Opera

The Monkey King opened last week at San Francisco Opera, and hoo boy, we have a series of well-earned raves by everybody who was there. My friend Rob remarked afterward that he wasn't sure whether it was a great opera, but it is certainly a great show. I think the music is excellent, but there is so much going on visually that the music isn't the first thing you'll remember about it.

The run of performances is completely sold out; I've been checking multiple times a day, and there are maybe five tickets total available right now. This is astounding; it's too bad that SFO has no record of adding performances, not, at least, since the first run of Dead Man Walking 25 years ago.

You can, however, catch the livestream for $25 on Tuesday, Nov. 18 or watch the stream on demand from Sunday, Nov. 23 at 10 a.m. to Tuesday, Nov. 25 at 10 a.m.

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• Joshua Barone, NY Times 
• Heidi Waleson, WSJ (includes a review of Parsifal)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box
• Thomas May, Opera Now
• Caroline Crawford, Local News Matters
• Elsa Tranter, Classical Voice
• Charlise Tiee, Opera Tattler
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
• Yoshi Kato, preview, SFCV and SF Chronicle
• Tony Bravo, SF Chronicle, fabulous feature on the puppets and scenery

Museum Mondays

Annunciation

Giovanni dal Ponte 

(Giovanni di Marco)

c. 1425

 

Friday Photo

Pelican

Elkhorn Slough, CA

October, 2025

(Click to enlarge)

 

Poiesis Quartet

Poiesis Quartet

Photo by Eden Davis

Before the pandemic, my friend DB had twice gone to Banff, in Canada, to attend the Banff International String Quartet Competition. BISQC, as its known, has taken place every three years since 1986, and a number of prominent quartets have won or placed in the competition, including the Hagen, Lark, St. Louis, Ying, Miró, Belcea, and Castalian.

I'd considered attending, but it wasn't going to be possible this year for either myself or DB. But the BISQC conveniently livestreams all of the competition rounds and then archives the performances, making it possible to sort of attend from afar. It is true that even with a good sound system or smart TV, it's not really the same; you won't hear the sound that's in the concert hall or feel the energy there.

So I proposed that DB and my friend BH watch what we could and compare notes over Zoom when we could. This worked out extremely well. DB and I are in the Bay Area, while BH is in Philadelphia; it wasn't too onerous to figure out meeting times, and we could watch the livestream or archived performances. (If you want to see any of the performances, start here.)

There were nine generally excellent string quartets in the competition; a tenth withdrew before the competition. (From that quartet's web site, it looks as though they might have disbanded or been faced with a major problem of some sort.) The competition is held in multiple rounds, as follows:

• 21st century and Haydn round. Playing Haydn is a real test of any performer's ability to catch the composer's grace and wit, whether the performer is a pianist, conductor, or string quartet.
• Romantic round
• Canadian commission round. Every quartet plays the same work, having received the music at the same time and given the opportunity to work with / consult with the composer. This year's commission was Kati Agócs's very beautiful Rapprochement.
• Beethoven/Schubert + 21st c. round
• Finals. Each quartet performs a program of its own choosing.

There was really no doubting the skill and musicianship of these groups, though I confess that I did not much like the artistic choices made by the Quatuor Magenta.

So, to make a long story short, the Poiesis Quartet, formed at Oberlin and currently studying at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, won the competition as a whole and also won the Canadian Commission Prize for their performance of Rapprochement. 

Where the Poiesis obviously stood out was in their performances of 20th and 21st c. music, but they also played a magnificent Brahms Op. 67, the only Brahms heard in the entire competition,  if I'm remembering this correctly. DB said it was the best single performance of a Brahms quartet in his experience.

Where this is all leading to: the Poiesis made their San Francisco debut this past Sunday, at Noe Music, a great venue for chamber music. Their program included several works from their final round:

• Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, Pisachi
• Brian Raphael Nabors, String Quartet
• Kevin Lau, String Quartet No. 7
• Sky Macklay, Many, Many Cadences
• Sergei Prokofiev, String Quartet No. 2

What can I say? The Poiesis plays a lot of intense music, with astonishing focus and intensity, filling the smallish venue with full-bodied sound. Their focus came across in the livestreams, but the sheer intensity of their playing didn't.

Their sheer confidence, in themselves and each other, astounded me; their unanimity of thought and execution is amazing. Are they mind-readers?

Each of the pieces on their program, except the Prokofiev, is from the 21st century; Kevin Lau's 7th is a Poiesis commission. The works cover a wide range of styles and take both technique and wit to play.

Sky Macklay's Many, Many Cadences is just what it says, a nearly unending series of cadential phrases covering the full range of each instrument in the quartet and mostly going at a breakneck speed. It definitely takes a sense of humor, as well as great timing, to play well. It is funny, too, if you understand what's going on, plus there's a funny moment built in.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate's Pisachi incorporates music from a Pueblo Buffalo Dance, a Hopi Buffalo Dance, and a Hopi Elk Dance. It is lovely, delicate, transparent by turns, elsewhere more intense (everything Poiesis plays isn't totally balls-to-the-wall). Tate himself is Chickasaw and his program note say that it's his "intent to honor his Southwest Indian cousins through classical repertoire."

I'm in fact not going to be able to characterize each of the works, so I will mention that you can hear the Poiesis Quartet at Stanford Live in May. The program is similar to this, but swapping Haydn for Nabors.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• DB at Kalimac's Corner

San Francisco Opera: Der Ring des Nibelungen Returns in 2028

 

Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund) and Karita Mattila (Sieglinde)

Act 1, Die Walküre

June, 2018

Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera

Yesterday, San Francisco Opera announced the return of Francesco Zambello's production of Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, for its third bring up. It'll be on stage at the War Memorial Opera House for three cycles in June, 2028, under the baton of music director Eun Sun Kim.

The company also announced casting for the three biggest roles:

• Baritone Brian Mulligan sings Wotan
• Soprano Tamara Wilson sings Brünnhilde
• Tenor Simon O'Neill sings Siegfried

Prior to 2028, there will be performances of Das Rheingold in the summer of 2027 and Die Walküre in fall, 2027. Those are subscription performances. There will also be single performances of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung in the late spring of 2028, just before the full stagings. Why? Well, at that point it will have been a decade since the previous production, and getting this monster on stage is complicated. There's been lots of turnover in the critical production crews (lighting, stagehands, costume, wig, makeup, etc.) and in the orchestra and chorus. The extra performances ensure that the full cycles will be at their best. 

Ticket prices haven't been announced yet. They'll go on sale to certain donor levels in October, 2026, then to other donor levels and the general public in 2027. 

Read all about the Ring at the San Francisco Opera web site.

Reporting:

• Joshua Kosman, S.F. Chronicle
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills

San Francisco Opera: 2026 Adler Fellows

 

War Memorial Opera House

San Francisco Opera has announced its 2026 Adler Fellows. I saw the big Merola concert in August and hoo boy, it must have been tough to decide on which singers to admit to the Adler program. Congratulations to these talented young singers.

First-year fellows:

• Sadie Cheslak, mezzo
• Brian Cho, pianist
• Alexa Frankian, soprano
• Sophia Gotch, soprano
• Gabriel Natal-Báez, baritone

Second-year fellows:

• Mary Hoskins, soprano
• Ji Youn Lee, pianist
• Olivier Zerouali, baritone

Third-year fellow:

• Thomas Kinch, tenor

SFS New Principal Horn

Diego Incertis Sánchez

Spanish horn player Diego Incertis Sánchez has been appointed principal horn of the San Francisco Symphony. He'll join the orchestra in January, two years after Robert Ward retired following 43 years with the orchestra, 16 of them as principal horn.

Incertis Sánchez, 28, is currently the principal horn of the London Symphony Orchestra and previously held the same position with the Philharmonia Orchestra. (I can't tell if he held that position when a certain Esa-Pekka Salonen was chief conductor of the Philharmonia.) This is Salonen's last hire from his all-too-brief tenure as music director of SFS, where he hired many new musicians, including the new principal and associate principal flutes, principal cello, associate and assistant principal clarinets, associate principal concertmaster, and more.

Joshua Kosman's article on the appointment discusses the reasons Incertis Sánchez is relocating. I would like to add that while London and San Francisco are both very expensive cities, orchestral musicians in London are paid much less than their peers in the major U.S. orchestras.

This appointment leaves three openings in the horn section: associate principal (formerly held by Mark Almond, now the principal horn of the CSO), assistant principal (formerly held by Bruce Roberts, who retired), and utility horn (formerly held by Daniel Hawkins, now the principal horn of the Dallas Symphony). 

Tom Jacobs has also written about this appointment.

 

Museum Monday

St. Anthony of Padu

Pau Vargas, 15th c.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

April, 2025

 

Hansel und Gretel at Opera Orlando: Two Free Performances on Nov. 8

 

Opera Orlando Hansel und Gretel

(photographer not credited)

Gingerbread on stage? Must be Englebert Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel, one of my favorite operas (I love it pretty much unreservedly), though honestly it is terrifying and very much reflects widespread hunger in Germany at the time it was composed.

Regardless, Opera Orlando is offering two free performances tomorrow, Nov. 8. Here are the details:

FREE performances of family-friendly Hansel & Gretel

WHEN: Saturday | November 8, 2025 at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

WHERE: Grand Avenue Neighborhood Center

800 Grand Street | Orlando, FL 32805

TICKETS: Email Info@OperaOrlando.org

Sung in English.

Maybe it's been cut ("reimagined") as only four characters are mentioned in the press release. (Hard to believe they're omitting the Sandman and Dew Fairy, but what do I know?) Regardless, here's the cast, which includes a mezzo witch! I have seen it only with a male witch:

• Alexandra Kzeski as Gretel 
• Mezzo-soprano Ruoxi Bian as Hansel
• Mezzo-soprano and education director Sarah Purser as the Witch
• Baritone Logan Tarwater as the Father

Friday Photo

Cherry Blossoms

Washington, DC

April, 2025

 

Still More Music Director Updates

Apparently I started this in late July, then managed to forget all about it. Here we go. There's some big news here.

• Jakub Hrůša will succeed Semyon Bychkov at the Czech Philharmonic. Bychkov's tenure there concludes in 2028.
• Australian conductor Ingrid Martin will become assistant conductor of the Detroit Symphony in September, 2025.
• Pola Benke becomes assistant conductor of the Pacific Symphony on August 1, 2025.
• Leonard Slatkin will be artistic advisor to the Nashville Symphony for three years, as they search for a new music director.
• Patrick Summers to step down from Houston Grand Opera at the end of this season (2025-26), after 27 years as their music director.
• James Gaffigan to succeed Patrick Summers at Houston Grand Opera. He'll be music director designate for 2026-27, then becomes music director in 2027-28.

New updates (major thanks to reader Geo. for most of these!):

Open positions:

• San Francisco Symphony, with the departure of Esa-Pekka Salonen
• Orchestre Philharmonique of Monte-Carlo, in August, 2026 , when Kazuki Yamada leaves
• National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada, in 2026 when Alexander Shelley leaves.
• Symphony Tacoma when Sara Ionnides leaves in 2026
• Boston Baroque, when Martin Pearlman leaves.
• Berkeley Symphony, when Joseph Young leaves.
• Milwaukee Symphony
• New Jersey Symphony, when Xian Zhang leaves at the end of the 2027-28 season.
• Ulster Orchestra, when Daniele Rustioni leaves
• Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, when Daniel Harding leaves
• Oslo Philharmonic, when Klaus Mäkelä moves on in 2027
• Orchestre de Paris, when Klaus Mäkelä moves on in 2027
• Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, when Santu-Matias Rouvali leaves in 2025
• Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra because of the departure of Lorenzo Viotti in 2025
• Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, because of the departure of Lorenzo Viotti in 2025
• Dutch National Opera, because of the departure of Lorenzo Viotti in 2025
• Bergen Philharmonic
• Phoenix Symphony
• Cleveland Orchestra, as of June, 2027
• Lahti Symphony, when Dalia Stasevka leaves.
• Antwerp Symphony, with the departure of Elim Chan.
• Paris Opera is currently without a music director.
• Nashville Symphony, when Giancarlo Guerrero leaves.
• Deutsche Oper Berlin, when Donald Runnicles leaves.
• Rottedam Philharmonic, when Lahav Shani leaves.
• Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the start` of the 2026-27 season, when Gustavo Dudamel leaves for NY.
• Teatro Regio Turin: Open now with departure of Gianandrea Noseda. The Teatro Regio has not named a new music director.
• Marin Symphony
• Vienna Staatsoper, when Philippe Jordan leaves at the end of 2025.

Conductors looking for jobs (that is, as of the near future, or now, they do not have a posting). The big mystery, to me, is why an orchestra hasn't snapped up Susanna Mälkki. Slightly lesser mystery: Henrik Nanasi, whose superb Cosi fan tutte is still lingering in my ears.

• Ken-David Masur
• Joseph Young
• Kirill Karabits
• Marc Albrecht
• Markus Stenz
• Esa-Pekka Salonen, if he wants such a position again
• James Conlon, if he wants such a position again.
• Dalia Stasevska (though her contract at Lahti has been extended by a year)
• Elim Chan
• Kirill Karabits
• Tito Muñoz 
• Andrey Boreyko
• Osmo Vänskä
• Susanna Mälkki, who left the Helsinki Philharmonic at the end of 2022-23.
• MGT (apparently does not want a full-time job, as of early 2022)
• Miguel Harth-Bedoya (seems settled in at Baylor)
• Sian Edwards
• Ingo Metzmacher
• Jac van Steen
• Ilan Volkov
• Aleksandr Markovic
• Lothar Koenigs
• Henrik Nanasi
• Philippe Jordan, eventually
• Franz Welser-Möst, if he wants such a job

And closed:

• Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra appoints conductor, harpsichordist, solo bassoonist, and Olivier Award winner Peter Whelan, as of the 2026-27 season
• English National Opera: Andre de Ridder becomes music director in 2027
• Antwerp Symphony: Marc Albrecht becomes chief conductor in 2026
• Teatro Regio Turin: Andrea Battistoni became music director this past January
• Residentie Orchestra, The Hague: Jun Markl is now chief conductor, after Anja Bihlmaier finished her 4 years there
• Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra: Andre de Ridder will leave in 2027 to go to ENO
• Teatro alla Scala: Riccardo Chailly leaves at the end of 2026. Myung-Whun Chung begins at the start of 2027
• Norwegian Radio Orchestra: Holly Hyun Choe becomes principal conductor in January 2026
• Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie: Marzena Diakun becomes chief conductor in 2026
• Delaware Symphony Orchestra: Michelle Di Russo becomes music director this fall
• Korean National Symphony Orchestra: Roberto Abbado becomes music director in January 2026
• Domingo Hindoyan will be the next music director of L.A. Opera
• Iván López Reynoso is the new music director of the Atlanta Opera
• Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, with the appointment of Markus Poschner
• Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España, with the appointment of Kent Nagano
• Eugene (OR), with the appointment of Alex Prior
• Utah Symphony, with the appointment of Markus Poschner.
• Bournemouth Symphony appoints Mark Wigglesworth as Chief Conductor (some time ago).
• Colorado Symphony appoints Peter Oundjian, effective with the 2025-26 season.
• Pacific Symphony appoints Alexander Shelley to succeed Carl St. Clair, starting with the 2026-27 season.
• Milwaukee Symphony, when Ken-David Masur leaves at the end of 2025-26.
• Seattle Symphony, with the appointment of Xian Zhang as of the 2025-26 season.
• Edward Gardner starts as music director of Norwegian National Opera this season,
• Sarasota Orchestra: Giancarlo Guerrero has been named music director, as of 2025.
• Hong Kong Philharmonic: Tarmo Peltokoski becomes music director in 2026.

Older closed appointments