Michael Zwiebach

Michael Kaiser, artistic head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is one of the more respected artistic administrators in America, as well as an inspiring speaker who is bullish on the arts. Here he talks with SFCV about the arts in crisis and the future of classical music.

San José-based Lyric Theater is taking a chance on a San Francisco venue: the Southside Theater at Fort Mason. They’re bringing a forgotten operetta, Leo Fall’s The Dollar Princess, which was a hit on Broadway in 1909 in an English revision.

New music collective sfSound comes to Old First Concerts this week. For all you adventurers out there who like an intellectual challenge, this is the antidote to the easy listening summer pops season you’ve been waiting for.

Fremont Opera opens its La traviata next weekend. Local they may be, but they’ve scored with their Violetta: Danielle Talamantes, an up-and-comer slated to understudy at the Metropolitan Opera this season. 

For years now it’s been obvious that the classical orchestral concert is in need of some rethinking for modern audiences. And no one has been more out in front of this issue than the S.F. Chamber Orchestra, which began its popularizing mission by giving all its concerts away for free. Its current music director, Ben Simon, has gone the full monty, trying out a variety of new ideas. Simon’s new venture, “You Gotta Hear This” at the Rrazz Room in S.F. is an expansion on his original ideas.

Composer and SFCV contributor Matthew Cmiel and director/ choreographer Wolfgang Thompson have put together an evening of music and words that sounds exciting in its mix of different approaches with works ranging from a choreographic work that uses Anne Sexton’s poems as a score, and a staging of a work by Elliott Carter.

There's a new choral group in town with a name that might make a PR consultant despair. The group is EUOUAE, is medieval shorthand for “saeculorum amen,” the last Latin words in the common doxology. It's a fit name for a group that, for it's first concert, is resurrecting a medieval mass that you find in history books but rarely in performance.

Michael Lawrence's BACH & friends documentary created a big
splash with the audience at the West Coast premiere that took place at
the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco last Wednesday evening.
Presented by San Francisco Classical Voice as a fundraiser for
the organization, the film about Bach's
impact on music and musicians was greeted with cheers, laughter, and
occasionally, stunned silence from the sold-out crowd.

San Francisco native and Julliard grad Wayne Lee returns to his old stomping grounds to join pianist Wayne Graber in a complete traversal of the Beethoven violin sonatas in three concerts, beginning on Friday July 19 at the Crowden School in Berkeley.

Jeffrey Thomas has the touch with Bach's B Minor Mass, a showcase piece combining all the facets of Bach's art into a gigantic musical fresco. Anyone who has heard the American Bach Soloists recording of the piece, with Thomas conducting, knows that the coming concert on Sunday is a must-see.