Season Updates from San Francisco Symphony

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

S.F. Symphony has announced some additions and updates to the 2025-26 season. As I had expected, the additions are mostly holiday concerts and pop-oriented programs. The exception is the annual chorus concert, which will certainly be worth hearing.

Here are the additions:

• Celebrating Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Lyle Lovett and His Acoustic Group with the SF Symphony — Sep 13
• The Decemberists with the SF Symphony — Oct 10
• Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton — Nov 13–14
• HOLIDAYS: Christmas with the Count Basie Orchestra — Dec 3
• HOLIDAYS: The Holiday—Film with Live Orchestra — Dec 10–11
• HOLIDAYS: Frozen—Film with Live Orchestra — Dec 13
• HOLIDAYS: A Charlie Brown Christmas—LIVE! — Dec 21–22
• Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY — Mar 17
• San Francisco Symphony Chorus Concert — May 31

The balance of the updates are after the break, but I see that once again I will be querying the orthography of a work to be performed: Jennifer Higdon's oft-performed orchestral work in memory of her brother is properly blue cathedral, not Blue Cathedral. (Previously: the correct orthography for Esa-Pekka Salonen's work for clarinet and orchestra.)

Inquiring Minds Want to Know....

.....why the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and San Francisco Classical Voice all think they know better than the composer how to style the title of a particular work?

• Those publications all styled Esa-Pekka Salonen's recent work for clarinet and strings as Kínēma.
• The San Francisco Symphony program note, Salonen's publisher's web site and the title page of the score style the work as kínēma. (I believe that it was italicized in the SFS program.)
• The SFS program page listing the works on the program capitalizes the K.
• Below is a screen shot from the publisher's web site.

• Below is a screen shot of the first page of the score.

I submitted my linked review with the title in all lower case. If I were guessing about this, some kind of amorphous style guideline about capitalizing titles, although since TNY and the Chron enclose titles in quotation marks and SFCV (more correctly, SORRY TNY and Chron) italicizes titles, there's no ambiguity that's resolved by capitalizing a work title against the composer's styling.

UPDATE, December 5: There were several updates to this post on the 4th. SFS communications responded to my query with ""kínēma (lower case) is correct, and based on Esa-Pekka’s note and the score."

Awaiting the Correction.

An opera company I won't name just made an entertaining error in the email announcing their 2017-18 season. And I can tell you exactly what happened, too.

The email announces four operas. One of them is by a composer who is also represented in this year's repertory. The header area of the announcement names Opera A, which will be done next year. The body of the email, with details about each of next year's operas, lists Opera B...which is in the 2016-17 season.

I'm pretty sure that they used last year's season announcement as a template and somehow didn't update all of the text in the body of the email. The composer name was the same, the costumes might be interchangeable (depending). The link in the header goes to the 2017-18 season, the link in the body goes to 2016-17.

The moral of the story is that your mailing list management program contains a feature that allows you to send drafts to yourself and anyone else you think should proofread outgoing email before you send it to the thousands of email addresses on your mailing list. You should use this feature liberally.

I obviously don't know exactly what happened; maybe someone inadvertently skipped that step or maybe someone thought they were sending the email to 10 people rather than the whole mailing list. But I spotted the error about 2 minutes into reading the email, and probably a few other recipients did too.

Why You Need the Serial Comma

Found in the NY Times:

He lived in the village of Malverne in Nassau County with his wife, Patricia Ann Norris-McDonald, the mayor of the village and his caregiver.

How many people does the subject of the sentence live with? In theory, it could be as many as four:

1. His wife
2. Patricia Ann Norris-McDonald
3. The mayor of the village
4. His caregiver

If I were the editor of this article, I would query the writer, but I believe that he lives with one person. If that's the case, I'd rewrite it as follows:

He lived in the village of Malverne in Nassau County with his wife of X years, Patricia Ann Norris-McDonald, who is the mayor of the village and also Mr. McDonald's caretaker.

I admit that it's clear from context that Ms. Norris-McDonald is the subject's wife. Still! Avoid ambiguity.

Production Error

Found in today's San Francisco Chronicle pink section on page 3:

Here is an enlargement of the critical section:

The program listed for May 12-14 is Pablo Heras-Casado's program from April 20, 22, 23 (Rameau, Haydn, Biber, Beethoven), although the Don Juan part in diaplay type on the left is correct for the dates on the right.

Here is the complete program for May 12-14.....some of which is list on a full-page ad on page 7 that has the conductor's name too:

Juraj Valcuha, conductor

Prokofiev, Suite from The Love for Three Oranges

R. Strauss, Don Juan

Webern, Im Sommerwind

R. Strauss, Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

I understand that my frequent calling-out of this kind of thing looks like unnecessary nitpicking to some of my readers. A production error such as this is expensive on its own - a display ad in the Chron's pink section can't be cheap, even with frequent-advertiser discounts. You don't want to waste the money! And it makes it that much harder for customers to buy tickets, because they don't have correct information about what is playing when. 

More personally, having an eye for a typo comes in handy when you find one in a letter your lawyer's office wrote and is about to mail out.

Ouch.

I opened the season brochure for Symphony Silicon Valley and found a program called Prokofiev & Sinfonietta, but the composer of the Sinfonietta was listed as...well, see the scan:

Janácfi? What? 

The description sure sounds like the great Janacek Sinfonietta: blazing brass, indeed. The piece calls for 4 horns, 9 trumpets in C, 3 trumpets in F, 2 bass trumpets, 4 trombones, 2 euphoniums, and a tuba.

Aaaaaand the web site has it right: Janáček. Looks like the graphic designer didn't know a hacek from whatever the heck is over the c in the brochure - but how many people did this little goof get past to make it into print?

That said, I'm putting this concert on my calendar. Whatever the Martinù is, I'll enjoy it; I'll enjoy the Prokofiev, and hey, you don't get to hear the Sinfonietta very often owing to the cost of hiring all the extra brass.

Somebody Caught This Before I Could Report It.

A correction posted at the NY Times, at the bottom of a fascinating story about the discovery of human remains at Jamestown, Virginia:

Correction: July 28, 2015 An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly, on second references, to Sir Ferdinando Wainman and Sir Thomas West. They are Sir Ferdinando and Sir Thomas, not Sir Wainman and Sir West.

I was surprised that "Sir Wainman" and "Sir West" got through. It is not common knowledge that certain British titles take the title holder's first name, not last, but I figured that the Times's copy-editors would know this. For example, Dame Gwyneth Jones is referred to as Dame Gwyneth, not Dame Jones.

Proof-Reading Redux

I got asked a while back about my "obsession" with typos and so on. Well, sometimes typos have expensive consequences: here are a few examples at Mental Floss. I have a memory, but cannot run it down, of legal papers settling a dispute that were filed and finalized with a typo that reduced a very large award by 90%, as well.

It's also true that I have a strong professional interest in accuracy. I really don't want some piece of expensive equipment damaged or a software installation hosed because I screwed up in a document.

Here's a comparatively minor example from the Times, an error in the obit for trainer Allen Jerkens:

Although known to fans as the Giant Killer, Mr. Jerkens, not given to hyperbole, preferred the more simple tag Chief, as he was called by track insiders. His horses won more than 3,800 races and garnered nearly $1.3 million in purses.

So I would hope that those numbers would raise the eyebrows of anyone who knows something about horse racing: 1.3 million divided by 3,800 = $342 and change. That won't keep a racehorse in oats and a barn for a week, and I sent email to the author alerting him to the issue. It's now been corrected, and Jerkens's horses' correct winnings are actually around $104 million, a much more impressive number.

I give the Times a break on this kind of thing; it is impossible to be 100% accurate in a fast-paced production environment where you publish a small book's worth of material on a daily basis. It's harder to give breaks to, for example, an opera company whose professionally written and produced program notes identify Liu, the seconda donna in Turandot, as a mezzo-soprano role.*

Updated: I fixed a typo.
Update 2: I added some snark.

* I'm looking at you, San Francisco Opera. This was a couple of bring-ups ago.

Why We Need Proofreaders

Received in the mail, a fund-raising letter over David Gockley's name and signature. Somewhere in the bowels of the War Memorial Opera House, someone is grimacing, and it's not over the missing serial comma, either:

We were able to present a superb roster of performers that day, all of whom will grace our main stage this fall. What a line-up! Thomas Hampson, Brandon Jovanovich, Brian Mulligan, Heidi Stober, Ramon Vargas and the powerhouse soprano Dolora Zajick, as well as our own recent Adler Fellow Brian Jagde. San Francisco Opera is one of the few opera companies in the world that can deliver that kind of star power in one place at one time.

The Times Does It Again

You would almost think their music reviewers and editors are unaware of the existence of the Metropolitan Opera Archive. Here's a screen shot of a Vivien Schweitzer gaff, before they read my email and perhaps correct what she wrote; it's on the fourth page of an article called "Tomorrow's Valhalla:"

Of course, Audrey Luna's agent and publicist may beat me to it.

Doesn't Anybody Bother to Edit this Stuff?

And don't they know anything about music? Found in the Times compendium of classical music box sets and books:

• "...a former British businessman." No, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, actually, he's a British former businessman, unless he gave up his citizenship when he retired from the business world.
• "....composers like Julius Korngold, Ernst Krenek and Franz Shrecker." Corinna, that would be composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, not his father Julius, the music critic.

Oh, TIMES!!!

Found in an article about the new recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

Among the others on an unusually star-studded list of 16 recipients was Oprah Winfrey, the television entrepreneur; Dean Smith, the Hall of Fame college basketball coach; Bayard Rustin, the civil rights campaigner; Sally Ride, the astronaut killed in the Challenger space shuttle crash in 1985; Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Watergate-era editor of The Washington Post; Daniel K. Inouye, the late senator from Hawaii; Loretta Lynn, the country music singer; and Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer.

Are there no editors, fact-checkers, or even people with memories at the Gray Lady? Dr. Ride died last year of cancer, as the Times reported. I hope the author of the Medal of Freedom article didn't get the above from a White House press release.

Update: The Times has corrected this to "Sally Ride, an astronaut who was the first American woman in space." Thank you.

OMG!

Seen in the NY Times: an umlaut!

I thought their style guide was based on hot type (or something) that didn't have diacriticals, but there it is, in an article about the Nobel laureates in medicine:

The Karolinska Institute in Stockholmannounced the winners: James E. Rothman of Yale University; Randy W. Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley; and Dr. Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University.

So why doesn't Osmo Vänskä rate his own umlauts?

Annals of Copy-Editing

Found in Leitmotive, the quarterly journal of the Wagner Society of Northern California:

In a photo caption on page 11, Jon Vickers.

In running text on page 16, John Vickers - five times.

Not Exactly a Contest, But...

...I invite you to imagine what LA Opera's "English translations" of the Albert Herring libretto might be:

The Decline of Copy-Editing

You have to wonder:

• China Mieville's novel Kraken uses it's where its is clearly meant, just a few pages in. GROAN.
• Mary Roach's Packing for Mars apparently never got a full read-through from someone who was paying attention, including the copy editor she thanks in the acknowledgements. There's a person who is introduced 2/3 of the way through the book, then again maybe 50 pages later. I caught it, but no one else did. Perhaps if there had been an index??
• Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is written rather breathlessly, works much too hard for dubious analogies (just state the facts, doc!), and in several places seems to repeat itself within a page or two. What?

Copy-Editors Wanted, Voice Type Edition

Which prominent member of the Four Saints cast was listed as a voice type completely at odds with every other mention of the singer I have seen in the last decade?

Annals of Proofreading and Stupidity

The NY Times's writers and editors have a problem distinguishing between "libertarian" and "liberal." Found on page two of the obituary for Warren Christopher:

After earning degrees at U.S.C. and Stanford’s law school, Mr. Christopher won a clerkship with the libertarian Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, during which he helped draft book chapters.

Quoth Brad DeLong: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Personal to the NYPO's Web Editors

Pssst: the headline refers to a composer named "Nielson," the body text to "Nielsen." The body text is correct. I have a screen shot, too.

The Shame, the Shame

The Brandeis Justice, for which I once wrote reviews, issues a correction:

An article in Arts incorrectly identified the opera Madame Butterfly as a spin-off of the musical Miss Saigon. Miss Saigon is actually a spin-off of Madame Butterfly. (Apr. 13, p. 19)