Rebecca Liao has produced several classical music performances in the Bay Area. A lawyer by day, she is currently working on an essay collection about contemporary classical music theory.
The young violinist Ray Chen has made a global footprint that’s only getting larger, and he has the skills of a truly musical interpreter. In advance of his performance with S.F. Symphony for its Chinese New Year concert, he talks with SFCV.
It turns out the Bay Area has a legit klezmer band of its own. A concert titled “Klezmania!” will celebrate the holidays and Chanukah with traditional klezmer, Yiddish and Israeli folk songs, along with original klezmer compositions.
When Melody of China and Asian Improv Arts teamed up for “Shanghai Stories,” a concert of jazz and Chinese classical and folk music, exoticism brought a lacquered newness to familiar pleasures.
When I watched Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I waited to hear an iconic line to match the first film’s “Greed is good.” Gordon Gekko got teary, and I lost hope — until Bretton James (played by Josh Brolin) delivered the aphorism “Every man should have a mentor and a protégé.” Ironically, it is the completely well-intentioned San Francisco Academy Orchestra (SFAO) that acts on this fortune-cookie advice in its season-opening concert.
Minority groups have the unenviable task of celebrating their uniqueness while demonstrating that they have a great deal in common with everyone. Small wonder, then, that classical music and the LGBTQ community found each other. The partnership displays its accomplishments as the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony opens its season with the ever-popular Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
Thursday night’s concert at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts had all the markings of Bay Area fusion — a combination that works through pure juxtaposition, rather than synergy.
Back in the days when the piano ruled and recordings didn't exist, a lot of music for four hands (one piano, two players, as opposed to two pianos) got written or arranged for the home market.
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental sculpture Seven Heavenly Palaces gave birth to Ludovico Einaudi’s latest album Nightbook in an almost physical way. In 2006, Einaudi performed among Kiefer’s mythically imposing towers and subsequently wrote music inspired by the awareness and feelings of transcendence aroused by sitting at the comparatively tiny grand piano.
Have you heard? Barneys is opening up an additional store in the Mission District for more cutting-edge customers.
OK, I’m kidding. But the imprint of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the exciting Berkeley Symphony Orchestra concert coming up Dec. 3 is a lot like finding a stash of Balenciaga in an independent boutique.
