Another Amazing Recital from Claire Chase

Claire Chase

Photo by David Michalek

The post title says it all: flutist Claire Chase was here the other week, playing another group of works commissioned through Density 2036, and it was all amazing. The only musician I can think of who combines this level of virtuosity with her sheer physicality and theatricality is the great soprano Barbara Hannigan, but if you know of others who do what Chase does, please mention those folks in the comments.

• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle

Previously:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle (2017)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV (2017)
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV, Pan

Cal Performances 2026-27

Cal Performances presents the West Coast premiere of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load, an epic theater work that explores the stories of African soldiers in World War I, at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts Arena in Oakland Nov 12–15, 2026.

Photo: Stella Oliver, courtesy of Cal Performances

Cal Performances just announced its 2026-27 season, and as usual it's full of great performers and likely great performances. Here are some of the goodies:

• Attacca Quartet is Ensemble in Residence for the season. They'll appear in one concert with composer Caroline Shaw, and play Adams and Beethoven in another.
• The West Coast premier of a new work by William Kentridge, the Head and the Load. I missed The Great Yes, The Great No, and I won't miss this one. Cal Performances also announced a five-year initiative presenting Kentridge's works.
• Tribute to those pioneering minimalist composers who have round-number birthdays this year or next: Steve Reich, 90, Philip Glass, 90, John Adams, 80. Alas, no Meredith Monk, who turns 84 this year.
• Yannick Nézet-Séguin brings the Vienna Phil for three concerts centered around Mahler. I heard YNS lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in Mahler 6 last year and it was good, so I'm there. Also, there will be a rare chance to hear mezzo Elina Garança, who has never appeared with SF Opera and probably never will. Also Yuja Wang plays a Prokofiev piano concerto, and sure, I will hear her in practically anything and regret missing the Mahler Chamber Orchestra the other day.
• Mark Morris world premiere
• Il Pomo d'Oro and Joyce DiDonato in Dido and Aeneas and Carrisimi's Jephtha.
• Takács Quartet and Jeremy Denk in works of Mendelssohn, Gabriela Lena Frank, and César Franck.
• Judy Collins
• Tenor Ben Bliss
• Countertenor Iestyn Davies
• Mezzo Ema Nikolovska with guitarist Sean Shibe in Orlando Variations, which takes off from Virginia Wollf's novel.
• Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau in French Baroque music
• Soprano Lise Davidsen
• Luna Lab@10, a celebration of Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid's Luna Composition Lab, which mentors a wide range of female, nonbinary, and/or gender-nonconforming composers ages 13 to 18. The performers include the Friction Quartet, Dutt & Campbell Duo, and The Living Earth Show. They'll play music by various young composers, Mazzoli, and Reid.
• Audra McDonald.
• The English Concert, Handel's Alessandro
• More string quartets, more pianists, more dance companies.
• Not enough music by women, pretty sure the performers are a substantial majority male.

Museum Mondays

Raphael

From "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

April, 2026

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an immense and magnificent exhibition dedicated to the artist Raphael. I saw it earlier this month; it is so big that to see it all, you really need to go more than once. So many drawings, all worthy of a careful look!

The curators could not bring the artist's Vatican frescos to NYC, so there was a room set up with projections of the frescos on the four walls. I took the above photo in that room. The figure above is in the fresco called The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple. I believe that he is one of the youths assisting a horseman in driving Heliodorus from the temple.

What caught my eye is the lightness of the figure and the sense that he is hurtling through the air, with neither of his feel touching the ground. 

Michael Tilson Thomas

Michael Tilson Thomas visits Google

November, 2008

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

(I took many photos that day, but most of them are a little blurry because MTT was perpetually in motion.)

Knowing this day would come did not make it any easier: Michael Tilson Thomas, universally known at MTT, died last night at his home in San Francisco, nearly five years after a diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme. I am tremendously saddened by his passing and especially by his illness. I'd hoped he would have a long and happy retirement, guest conducting, composing, and dreaming up all sorts of wonderful things.

I wrote an advance obituary for NPR, commissioned the week he announced he had a brain tumor and updated many times since owing to his amazing survival. (Huge thanks to Steve Smith for commissioning the piece.)

While researching the obit, I turned up some numbers numbers that describe his sheer impact on the San Francisco Symphony, of which he was music director from 1995 to 2020:

• He conducted around 1,800 concerts with SFS, from 1974 to 2025.
• His first concert showed the shape of things to come: it included Mahler's 9th.
• During his tenure, SFS presented 41 world or U.S. premieres.
• He appointed about 60 musicians, conductors, music librarians.
• He led festivals devoted to Beethoven, Bates, Stravinsky; Yiddish theater and its impact on Broadway and American music; the Barbary Coast; Mendelssohn and Ades; Schubert and Berg; Sofia Gubaidulina; George Benjamin; Leonard Bernstein; Russian music, and more.
• He conceived SFSoundBox and helped found SFS Media, the orchestra's own record label, which was among the first of any U.S. orchestra. (The Louisville Orchestra, I have learned, started its own label in 1950.)

In addition to all of that, he made more than 120 recordings with a number of orchestras and was awarded 12 Grammys. 

He and his late husband, Joshua Robison, were very much a part of San Francisco, and MTT was loved throughout the city. The block of Grove that runs between Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House was renamed MTT Way in honor of him.

Be sure to check out the amazing collection of photos of MTT, Joshua, their beloved dogs, and more at his website.

On KQED's Forum, Alexis Madrigal spoke with Mark Leno, former California state senator and longtime friend of MTT and Joshua Robison, classical music critic Joshua Kosman, composer John Adams, soprano Julia Bullock, and conductor Donato Cabrera about MTT. You can listen to the archived broadcast.

Obituaries and memorials:

• Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle obit (gift link)
• Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, a beautiful appreciation (gift link)
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Joshua Kosman, The Gramophone, originally published in 2024
• Tony Bravo, SF Chronicle, a beautiful appreciation of MTT's life as a gay man and what he and Joshua Robison meant to gay people in classical music (gift link)
• Lisa Hirsch, NPR
• Janos Gereben, SFCV
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• Emily Shugerman, S.F Standard
• David Bratman, Kalimac's Corner
• Mark Leno remember his friends MTT and Joshua Robison, SF Standard
• Various tributes to MTT, S.F. Chronicle
• San Francisco Symphony remembers MTT
• Mark Swed, LA Times (MTT as an Angeleno and California)
• Nardine Saad, LA Times
• Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise
• Elaine Fine, Musical Assumptions
• Tim Page, Washington Post (gift link)
• Anthony Tomassini, NY Times (gift link)
• Hannah Edgar, NY Times (gift link), on how MTT worked with and developed young musicians
• P.J. Grisar, The Forward
• The Times, unsigned
• The Telegraph, unsigned
• Richard Fairman, Financial Times
• Amanda Rosa, Miami Herald
• Ronald Blum, AP
• Bachtrack, unsigned
• Leonard Slatkin
• Dave Hurwitz, Classics Today

Joshua Robison obituaries:

• Tony Bravo and Aidin Vaziri, San Francisco Chronicle, a heartfelt appreciation of MTT's husband, his partner of 50 years (gift link)
• Gabe Meline, KQED
• MTT's website

San Francisco Symphony 2026-27

Davies Symphony Hall

Home of the San Francisco Symphony

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Well, okay! San Francisco Symphony announced their 2026-27 season the other month – sorry, I am definitely behind in posting about recent events – and it is a good season, a return to the kind of adventurous programming we got used to during the long tenure of Michael Tilson Thomas (okay, there was a slump at the end, I know, I know) and the too-short tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Salonen will be back for what will be a fun program – it includes a new concerto for harp and percussion, by Rene Orth, to be played by principal percussionist Jacob Nissly and principal harp Katherine Siochi – and his influence is clear in a few other places during the season. That's because there are a bunch of big new works programmed or coming in the near future, and they absolutely must have been commissioned when he was music director. These include the Orth, a new violin concerto called How to Be a Bird, by the prodigiously gifted Gabriella Smith, and a future concerto for orchestra by Reena Esmail. 

There's plenty of good stuff in the season! In addition to works named above, I'm looking forward to seeing Metropolis with live orchestra on the very big screen at Davies.

The full season brochure can be downloaded as a PDF; you can also view or download the full season calendar.

• Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle.
• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle
• Janos Gereben, SFCV