Memo to DG

Kirsten Flag-schtadt as if German: no. It's more like Flah-stah. Ask a Norwegian.

Memo to Max Frankel

Calm down and don't take it so literally. It's fiction. And see Alex Ross, too.

Press Releases: Tell Me What You Think

If you get them....

• Love 'em? Hate 'em?
• Do you read them?
• Are they usually too long/too short/just right?
• What information do you care about in addition to who, what, when, where, ticket prices?

Comments or email would be great.

Dear Link Spammers:

I have now gotten several notices about my blog being "chosen" to be "featured" in some way on web sites that are obvious link farms - web sites created to persuade people to put different kinds of badges and so on on their blogs or web sites. This creates linkage that raises web sites in search engine rankings, or is hoped to do so.

Uh, please note that I work for Google. Asking me to cooperate in gaming search engines is not going to get you very far.

For Sale

I can't really afford this house....which is extremely spacious....but maybe it comes with a piano?

Fantasy Opera Elsewhere

Around the blogosphere:

• Alex Ross found a rather odd cartoon/music pairing on YouTube that's relevant. 
• Mark Berry at Boulezian has a great season of his own.
• Steve Morrison at Plentiful as Blackberries lists two superb seasons. 
• Zerbinetta at Likely Impossibilities chimes in with her own fantasies.

I detect a palpable longing for modernist and unusual operatic repertory. Opera houses and orchestras of the world: take note! The New York Philharmonic sold out three performances of Le Grand Macabre. You, too, can tap into the unmet desires of musical minorities. And yes, I'd settle for concert or semi-staged performances of just about all of the operas we've listed.

Compare and Contrast 20

Nixon in China finally reaches the Metropolitan Opera House. Anthony Tommasini and Martin Bernheimer report rather differently on the effects of amplifying the singers:

• Tommasini, in the NY Times: As with all his operas, Mr. Adams insisted that the singers wear body microphones. But even with amplification, the voices did not always emerge from the thick orchestration, with its synthesizer, two pianos, four saxophones and brasses aplenty.
• Bernheimer, in the Financial Times: And Adams' insistence on (over)amplifying the voices creates grotesque distortion.....[paragraphs later] The cast looked terrific, acted with ardour and, thanks to the microphones, sounded pretty awful.

Those comments are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and I'd suggest reading both reviews carefully. While Tommasini sounds like more of a fan of the opera than Bernheimer, read together the reviews aren't very far apart at all in assessing the particular weaknesses of the score. Their assessments of the singers are consistent. Tommasini is allowed a considerably larger word count than Bernheimer, who of necessity is terser and can't wax eloquent on what he does like. Importantly, he takes the space needed to note his own partial reassessment of Nixon.


I myself am curious about where each was sitting and what effect that might have had on the effects of the amplification. In the orchestra, of course, but where?


Readers of this blog know that I find it disappointing - okay, sometimes maddening - that Adams insists on the use of microphones. He has said himself that he doesn't care for typical operatic singing style, but he doesn't seem to get that amplifying the singers makes it worse for the audience and has a flattening and distancing effect on what the audience hears. I wish he would drop this and work differently with the singers.

Hot Air Music Festival This Sunday

Yes, opposite the Super Bowl! Wouldn't you rather hear some great contemporary and new music? For free? With lower blood pressure, too!

Hot Air is at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak St. at Van Ness Avenue in Civic Center. Directions are here.

Again, the lineup!

1:00pm             Reception, meet-and-greet with performers and festival organizers Matthew Cmiel and Kelsey Walsh in Room 512

1:45                  Triumphant Digitally Synthesized Fanfare To Hot Air Music Festival by Red Bennett

2:00                  Michael Gordon’s Industry, Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion and Osvaldo Golijov’s Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind in the Recital Hall

3:00                  Paul Bergel’s Winchester House of Mystery Suite and George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae in the Recital Hall

3:30                  Reception, meet-and-greet with performers, including the Mobius Trio and the Delphi Piano Trio (pending confirmation) in Room 512

4:00                  Music by Matthew Cmiel, John Russell, Derrick Spiva, Jr. and Christopher Porter in the Recital Hall

5:00                  Music by Louis Cruz, Pantawit Kiangsiri, Pierre Jalbert and David Gottlieb in the Concert Hall

                        Music by Anthony Porter, Luciano Chessa, Harry Whitney and Alden Jenks in the Recital Hall

6:00                  Music by Devon Farney and Stephen Hartke in the Concert Hall

                        Music by Clayton Moser, Aaron Pike and David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion in the Recital Hall

7:00                  Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union and Steve Reich’s Six Pianos in the Concert Hall

8:00                  Samuel Adams’ Tension Study No.1, Arvo Paert’s Spiegel im Spiegel and Dan Becker’s Gridlock in the Concert Hall

9:00                  Kajia Saariaho’s Pres and John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur in the Concerto Hall

There will be a TV available for watching the Super Bowl, too. 

Fantasy Opera, Season 3

Assuming I'm a billionaire, of course.

• Chin, Alice in Wonderland
• Mussorgsky, Khovanshchina
• Wagner, Rienzi
• Rossini, Guillaume Tell
• RVW, Sir John in Love
• Nicolai, The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Verdi, Aroldo
• Auber, Manon Lescaut
• Maw, Sophie's Choice
• Marschner, Der Varmpyr
• Blomdahl, Aniara (you can all look it up - I have the recording!)
• Rimsky, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia
• Smyth, The Wreckers
• Handel, Orlando
• Pfitzner, Palestrina

Yeah, maybe all three Falstaff treatments belong in the same season. And maybe I should schedule a Shakespeare season or the Trojan Wars season.

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.

Fantasy Opera, Season 2

Why not?

• Nielsen, Maskerade
• Verdi, Il Corsaro
• Carter, What's Next?
• Bellini, La Sonnambula
• Sessions, Montezuma
• Saariaho, L'Amour de Loin (I cannot believe I left this out of season 1!)
• Floyd, Susannah
• Janaceck, The Excursions of Mr. Broucek
• Meyerbeer, Robert le Diable
• Double bill: Busoni, Turandot (I am not making this up); Bartok, A kékszakállú herceg vára
• Leoncavallo, La Boheme
• Handel, Tamerlano
• Faure, Penelope
• Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust
• Boito, Mefistofele

If I Were a Rich Geek

Okay, I'm going to stop complaining - well, mostly - about opera seasons that don't match my admittedly peculiar, out-of-the-mainstream, interests, because I'm simply at the point where I've seen most of the Big Standards and I'm mostly interested in works I haven't seen, whether old or new. No opera company in the world is going to program the season I really want to see.

If I had managed to make a mint in my 14 years as a technical writer (someone I saw recently jumped to the conclusion that "works at Google" = rich, which is not at all the case, not if you started long after the IPO), I would so have an opera company. It's an extremely expensive proposition, even if you pay everyone a salary, say, $50,000/year. You won't get big stars to sing for that kind of money, though I expect that you could put together a good orchestra of freelancers and recent conservatory grads for a steady salary.

That said, if I were a rich geek, here's the opera season of my dreams:

• Ades, The Tempest
• Hoiby, The Tempest
• Birtwistle, The Minotaur (or one of his other operas)
• Reimann, Lear (which I did not see in SF in the 1980s)
• Britten - anything except Billy Budd
• Janacek, From the House of the Dead
• Berlioz, Les Troyens (would settle for Beatrice or Damnation)
• Weinberger, Schwanda the Bagpiper
• Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten
• Verdi, Falstaff (would settle for Les Vepres Sicilienne, the only middle or late Verdi I've never seen)
• Handel, any of the ones I haven't seen; there are plenty!
• Zimmerman, Die Soldaten
• Schreker, anything, even Gezeichneten, which I've seen
• Korngold, Die Katrin or Der Wunder des Heliane, because I have seen the Decker production of Die tote Stadt that's been making the rounds. There are even singers around who know Heliane!
• Monteverdi, Il ritorno d'Ulysse in Patria

Believe me, I know that it's impossible. Just putting on Frau and Troyens could bankrupt a company! Even my personal company of salaried everyone would have a tough time with learning and rehearsing that repertory, whiich takes in just about every style imaginable.

Definitely Falling

No sooner did I post my responses to Ivan Katz's article on the Met and San Francisco Opera than a press releases about SFO's audited financial statements appeared in my inbox. Here are the important points, with the ellipses denoting deleted paragraphs:

San Francisco Opera Association President George Hume today announced the Company concluded Fiscal Year 2009-10 (FY 10) with a deficit of $1,553,608 on an annual operating budget of $65,251,246..... 

San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley, the San Francisco Opera Board of Directors and the Company’s executive administration provided strong and vigilant fiscal leadership in this time of economic challenges resulting in an overall decrease of 3.6% in operating expenses. Despite these very substantial savings, the deficit reflects a decline in the Company’s operating revenue from $34,043,999 in FY 09 to $27,113,297 in FY 10, with income from ticket sales for the main season repertory falling from more than $24,000,000 in FY 09 to $18,656,120 in FY 10. Contributions to the annual fund were $36,334,341 from 9,000 generous donors....

As the national economy continues to plunge the arts into turmoil, the Opera’s executive staff and board are taking significant and meaningful steps to address the Company’s operational structure and financial obligations. The core issues include the modernization of the War Memorial Opera House’s antiquated backstage production capabilities; the consolidation of the Company’s disparate administrative, rehearsal, costume and scenic functions onto the War Memorial campus; a re-examination of the amount of opera repertory to be presented each season; a reorganization of the Company’s operating business model and its crippling fixed costs that is financially out of balance with the new economic realities; and the necessity to establish a more meaningful endowment that is four times the size of the Company’s operating budget.

What we can expect in the future: a shorter season, a switch to a stagione system from the current repertory system, an emphasis on modular sets and projections, and an attempt to reduce what union members get paid (that'll be the chorus, orchestra, stage crew, costumers, etc.). It is not going to be pretty, and I wonder what will happen to the company and its artistic standards.

The Need to Understand

Some of you know that in one of my other lives, I'm a martial artist. I started Dan Zan Ryu jujitsu in 1982 and I hold the rank of nidan (second degree black belt) in the style. A little over a year ago, I started Chen style Tai Chi: I need a style I can do in old age, and DZR is hard on the body, I've always wanted to study Tai Chi, and I've wanted to take classes with Sifu Alex Feng for a good long time.

When I started jujitsu, I was what you might call a talky student. Now, the jujitsu organization I've been in for all these years is talky; American martial arts instructors generally talk too much. In a traditional Japanese dojo - and you can see this in many or most Aikido dojos - there's not much talk. The sensei demonstrates an art, everybody does it or tries to do it. And tries and tries and tries. I'm not sure when students get to ask questions; the emphasis is very much on learning by observing and doing.

Anyway, I was a big talker. I asked a lot of questions when I was on the student end, I talked a lot when I was teaching. (In the school where I started, after you were okay'd on a set of techniques, you were given assignments to teach them to lower-ranking students, even when you were both beginners.)

This went on for a pretty long time. At some point in my practice, I heard the late, and deeply lamented, Professor Pat Browne say "Don't listen to what we say, watch what we do, because we'll lie to you and we won't even know it." This eventually sank in, to the point where my most frequent question became "Could I see that again?" I've asked that question at conventions, classes, and workshops with all ranks and with only black belts on the mat. I figure if I'm not sure what the instructor is doing, a bunch of other people also want to see it again.

I also spent a lot of time - a LOT of time - teaching at a school where the head instructor had great arts but wasn't much of a talker. I tried to STFU in part because it seemed only fair and only polite. This was someone I could talk rings around any day of the week, and because she was the school head, it would not have been right.

So when I started Tai Chi, I took my strong, silent persona with me. I'm a baby beginner, for one thing, even after a year, even though I am an experienced martial artist. But mostly I just wanted to learn by doing, and that means repetition. Do the set. Do the set again. Do it again. Repeat repeat repeat. When I'm learning a new movement in the form, I will ask to see it again, often several times, and occasionally I will ask Sifu Alex for clarification on something. That is a once every two or three weeks occurrence, because mostly I just watch him as closely as I can.

Repetition is the key. You learn martial arts with your body, not your head - believe me, I have seen people who were even more in their heads than I ever was, and who are fairly advanced students. It's just a fact of life that you have to get out of your own head so that you can feel what's going on in your own body and so that you can connect with others. Connection is important in both DZR and Tai Chi; in DZR you can do serious damage to your workout partners if you can't tell what's going on with them physically. For that matter, you can do serious damage to yourself by not knowing what's going on in your body, by not being able to anticipate without thought the effects of a particular choice.

There's a student in the school where I'm studying who has learned a few more elements of the set than I have. He likes to ask questions. Sometimes they're general questions, sometimes they're quite specific. But once he asks a question, there tends to be a discussion, with the instructor answering, more questions, and so on. A conversation. I'm usually standing thinking "In the time we're talking about this, I could do the set twice over, and that would be more helpful to me than this chatter."

He said something last night about needing to do this because his brain tells his body what to do. At some point, I might try to catch him after class and say something about my own experiences as a martial artist. I can't recall whether he's one of the people who knows about my past (Sifu Alex does...he trained in DZR for many years and we share a lineage). He hasn't yet learned that in the martial arts, doing precedes understanding. You do, and eventually you understand. Your body trains your brain, not the other way around.

The Sky Probably IS Falling

Over at the HuffPost, Ivan Katz has some things to say about the Met HD broadcasts and about San Francisco Opera. He starts out sounding as if he's going one way, then seems to go another. I'm not a regular reader of his column; my previous experience of it was his blast at the amount of money LA Opera lost on the Freyer Ring.

Yes, they did blow through a lot of money (note the $14 million bond the company issued to cover their debts); yes, there should have been more constraints put on Freyer, yes, they made scheduling mistakes. However, critics did not "largely detest it." I read strongly positive reviews from Mark Swed, Tim Mangen, Anne Midgette, and Brian at OutWestArts. I wrote one myself, because the one opera I got to was among the most engaging and interesting productions I've ever seen. Note that Katz didn't see any of the production himself, so he's relying on other, un-linked-to critics, and maybe the production photos.

But the current column goes into some areas I have thought about, and I have a few things to say about them. Briefly, you should take just about everything he says with a big grain of salt.

The first Met HD broadcast was in January, 2007, just about four years ago, meaning the planning was underway a year or two before that. Katz's claim that the Met has "reinvented itself on the fly" as a response to the economic downturn is not supportable; the planning started in 2005 or 2006, when a few people were very worried but well before the crises of 2008.

He speculates that the gargantuan Zeffirelli productions are being retired because of how they would look in HD broadcasts. Can he tie the retirements to any actual HD broadcasts? The Zef Traviata is gone, but there's no broadcast this year of the well-received new Decker production. The Boheme and Turandot productions: still around, but they're not being broadcast and they have already been in one HD broadcast each. I doubt they are going anywhere. [Updated following information kindly provided by a commenter.]

He's skeptical that the Met HD broadcasts are a money-making proposition. Well, let's do the math.

There are something like 1,500 theaters showing the broadcasts. Let's assume, conservatively, that each seats 100 people. I believe that number is probably closer to 200 or 250, but whatever. We're talking about a minimum of 150,000 available seats per broadcast. Friends who attend in various locations report sellouts and overflow; my local multiplex regularly opens a second theater for these broadcasts.

Tickets are priced around US$20. That's $3 million in ticket sales if 100 seats  are sold at 1500 venues. (Again, I believe that is conservative.) The Met splits the take 50/50 with the theaters, according to a reliable source I read, possibly Anne Midgette or possible a Times writer. There are 12 broadcasts this season, so we're talking about $36 million revenue, with $18 million to the Met.

I don't know what the production costs are for the broadcasts, but I see no way that the Met is not making a profit on the broadcasts. The equipment is paid for or is booked as a long-term capital cost. They're paying for camera crews and director and...the item I know nothing about....transmission costs. Still. I bet they're making money.

He speculates that all of this could change if the unions want a bigger slice of the pie. I do not think the unions will get their backs up about this, given the economy and the fact that the union contracts undoubtedly were already renegotiated to allow for these broadcasts.

He speculates that they want or have a monopoly on opera broadcasts. They're already failed at this; European houses are started to get some broadcasts via a different system. My local theater, the Grand Lake, has started carrying some of those.

Lastly, his view of David Gockley? Well, I've read the same Notes from the General Director that he has. I think Gockley might be telling the truth AND might be trying to 1) soften up the unions 2) get people alarmed.

I mean, if 12 families are producing 50% of donations, that is a problem. (Is it true? I should take a look at the donor pages that are published in every program and see if it could be. For one thing, what, exactly, does "12 families" mean? Is one of those families named "Hewlett"? In that case, there could be multiple revenue streams coming in, from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and from sundry family members. So "one family" might mean five or ten different donors.

 Katz talks about desirable efficiency; I see a revenue stream that could disappear all too fast, and that somehow isn't being expanded to the Bay Area's New Rich.

Who do I mean by that? If you look at the donor lists, you'll see a few names missing: Ellison, McNeary, Brin, Page, Schmidt*....somehow, the current generation of Silicon Valley multi-million....er...billionaires hasn't yet been roped in. One reason is that some of those folks prefer social justice and medical philanthropy to arts philanthropy, and perhaps that'll change over time.

But one of them is just interested in building boats and getting concessions from the City of San Francisco. I wouldn't expect him to be ponying up.

So there you have my thoughts. Is the sky falling? Well, it just might be. Gockley's various notes indicate a company with both current problems and long-term structural issues. I don't think Ivan Katz's analysis is at all persuasive. Take a look at the notes yourself, if you have San Francisco Opera programs around, and judge for yourself.

*The fine print: yes, I do work for Sergey, Larry, and Eric. If I had any influence with them, I'd use it.

More on Babbitt

More on the late composer:

• Steve Hicken unpacks a key element of "The Composer as Specialist."
• Read Frank Oteri's 2001 interview with Babbitt (h/t Alex Ross, who linked to it a few days ago).
• Alex links to Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer, a film about Babbitt by the late Robert Hilferty.
• Andrew Patner also discusses the film.
• Elaine Fine reproduces and quotes a touching letter to Bernard Zaslav from Babbitt.
• Elaine also posts the recording that Babbitt wrote to Zaslav about the (release, after 35 years in the can!) of  the Zaslav Duo's 1970 recording of a Babbitt piece.
• Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a personal obit.
• Tim also links to a fine Greg Sandow article about Babbitt, published in 1982. (Would that Greg were writing more of this sort of thing and spending less time advocating use of Twitter during concerts!)

Season Announcement Season: LAO, and Suddenly SFO's Season Looks Great

Placido Domingo announced the LA Opera 2011-12 season today. James Conlon must be tearing his hair out:

• Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (Company Premiere); Conlon/Jenis, Dyka, Semenchuk, Grivnov, Cresswell
• Mozart's Così fan tutte (Production New to Los Angeles); Conlon/Kurzak, Donose, Constantinescu, D'Arcangelo, Pirgu
• Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (Revival); Domingo/Machaidze, Grigolo, Miller, Kowaljow
• Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (Company Premiere); Conlon/Domingo, Martinez, Kowaljow, Secco
• Britten's Albert Herring (Production New to Los Angeles); Conlon/Shrader, Bonner, Mack, Bunnell, Michie, Miller, and others
• Puccini's La Bohème (Revival); Summers/Costello, Perez, Rucinski

Okay, Albert Herring is a rarity, except that Santa Fe had it last year, also with Alek Shrader, and Lorin Maazel is touring it to Berkeley this year. After the brilliance of the Freyer Ring and Conlon's Recovered Voices series...and the success of Il Postino....one can only shake one's head sadly and wish the company weren't in such a deep, deep financial hole. Sorry, Henry!

Good Enough for Them

H/T Brad DeLong:

Joshua Holland reports on libertarians who accept social services that you might think they would refuse on principle - such as Ayn Rand, who accepted Social Security and Medicare when the cost of treating her lung cancer might have bankrupted her. I'm sure she considered herself "deserving," unlike poor people who receive such services.

Milton Babbitt

The great modernist composer and teacher has died, age 94. His students included Mario Davidovsky and Stephen Sondheim; he knew and loved barroom piano as well as modern notational music. NPR has a remembrance and obit here.

I like his music a whole lot, myself, and, yes, I'm fine with the idea of new music that's written for other composers - or for people like me who like modernist music.

Update:

• Allan Kozinn has an informative and affectionate obit in the Times
• Alex Ross on Babbitt
• Anne Midgette has some words of remembrance

Scientific Literacy and Copy-Editing, NY Times Blogs Edition

A day or two ago, I happened to comment to friends that people understand science poorly in part because science journalism is often so bad. She's not a science reporter, but this morning, Lisa Belkin had a giant howler on the Motherlode blog:

In the year after an abortion, 15.2 out of 1,000 sought psychiatric help (defined as admission to a hospital or clinic), which was essentially the same as the rate of that group (14.6 percent) in the nine months before the abortion.

I posted a comment about it, because 15.2 out of 1,000 is nothing like 14.6 percent; it's 1.52 percent. I also noted that this was the second time that an error like this had appeared recently on the Motherlode blog. It's just plain embarrassing to see this multiple times. It is just not that difficult to tell what 10% is at a glance, and to tell whether you're looking at 15.2% or 1.52%.

My comment did not get posted, but the text was corrected to the following, without any correction notice:

In the year after an abortion, 15.2 out of 1,000 sought psychiatric help (defined as admission to a hospital or clinic), which was essentially the same as the rate of that group (14.6 per 1,000) in the nine months before the abortion. 

Does the Times have copy-editors? Are all of them innumerate? It's the kind of error that's in the first quotation above that contributes to scientific misunderstanding. And I really think there should be a correction notice on the posting.

And That's Not All

Hollywood Bowl 2011 has one or two other items worth catching, most notably the first of the bullet list:

• The amazing Kari Krikku in Magnus Lindberg's fantastic Clarinet Concerto, conducted by Joana Carneiro. (Could we not get a performance of this piece in the Bay Area? Please? I don't know if Krikku has a lifetime lock on performing it - he is splendid, as you can hear on record, and as I was lucky enough to hear last February in NYC - but we have a great principal clarinetist in the SFS.) Copland's Clarinet Concerto is also on the program - not with Krikku - as well as Appalachian Spring and Nielsen's Maskarade Overture.
• Yuja Wang in the Rach 3 with Tchaikowsky 5, Lionel Bringuier conducts
• Beethoven's 9th and the Choral Fantasy on the same program - whew! Raphael Fruhbeck de Burgos conducts.
• Olga Kern plays the Rach Rhapsody; Leonard Slatkin conducts a program that includes the Brahms 4th
• Philip Glass Ensemble in Powaqqatsi
• The Labeque sisters in the Poulenc concerto for two pianos, a charming and lovely piece

Gimme Those High Cs, Baby!

So, given the choice of Turandot performances, should I see fall's fully-staged Hockney production in San Francisco (which I've seen twice), with Irene Theorin (Nicola Luisotti conducting), or summer's Hollywood Bowl presumably-concert performance with Christine Brewer (Gustavo Dudamel conducting)? Hmmm!

Belated Comments

I just okayed three comments for publication for which I evidently did not receive notifications....or else I just accidentally published duplicates! Apologies, in any case.

Season Announcement Season: Carnegie Hall

Alex Ross notes that Carnegie Hall has announced its 2011-12 season, with a hat tip to MTT's Carnegie showing of his American Mavericks series. I'm personally pleased to see that the JACK Quartet is playing Ruth Crawford Seeger's string quartet.

If you live in the Bay Area, or if you're me, another item that might catch your eye as especially memorable is the news that Kaija Saariaho will hold the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair for the season.

If you want to see what's on offer in plain HTML, start here. The electronic version of the season brochure is, I'm sure, entertaining to view, but not on this slow and stupid old computer. (Note to web designers: you get the most flexible and usable designs when you assume that everybody has a slow and stupid old computer.)

Visiting orchestras include the Mariinsky, Philadelphia, Budapest Festival, San Francisco, American Composers, Metropolitan Opera, Minnesota, Atlanta, ORR, Baltimore, London Phil, Berlin Phil, VPO, Boston, St. Luke's, NYPO, and Cleveland. Recitals of note include singers Karita Mattila, Susan Graham, Ian Bostridge, and Matthias Goerne. (Be still, my heart.) Oh, and the pianist with Bostridge? THOMAS ADES. Also: plenty of great pianists and string quartets.

At KUSF

Janos Gereben writes:

The virtual demise of the mostly-elevator-music KDFC, self-described as "casual, comfortable... classical," is acceptable, the actual destruction of weird & wacky & amateurish KUSF is a pity.

But for listeners, there is a real practical-physical issue, which is bad well beyond matters of taste. 102.1 - now turning into rock or pebbles, who cares - has an ERP (effective radiated power) of 33,000 Watts, broadcasting from a 1000-foot tower. 90.3, which was KUSF and is now the "new KDFC" has 2,850 ERP, broadcasting from a height of 100 feet, and audible in a 10-block radius.

Now, besides the random single-movement programming, lots of "comfortable" flute music, and a ban of bothersome vocal music, KDFC also had broadcasts of the SF Symphony, and - lately - of the SF Opera. If you want to hear those in the future, better move to the Inner Richmond.

Then, there is the way the switch was handled. KUSF's Howard Ryan says: "They just came in and asked me to step out while there was a record on and shut the transmitter off. We weren’t even able to sign off or thank the community or let the listeners know what was going on. We were literally the last people to know." Classy!

Will KUSF's "rescue" of the Met Broadcasts when KDFC dropped them ("no interest in opera in San Francisco," says our marketing research), continue from the new KDFC? Unlikely, but it would be nice to be surprised.

And the Chron has a story about protests at USF.