Three Wise Men Carved altarpiece Victoria & Albert Museum, London November, 2019   ..read more

Cristian Măcelaru will be the next music director of the Cincinnati Symphony. His five-year term starts with the 2024-25 season, but he will be Music Director Designate during the first year. He's a good conductor, from what I've heard at Cabrillo. Note that he is occupied in various other places, but also he will be stepping down from one of his positions with the commencement of his Cincinnati appointment: Măcelaru holds the titles of Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival and Competition, Music Director of the Orchestre National de France, Artistic Director an ..read more

  Stained glass window honoring scientists who worked on behalf of the U.S. during WWII Prominent feature: an atom symbol, referring to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. Veterans Building, San Francisco April, 2017 ..read more

Davies Symphony Hall Photo by Lisa Hirsch Karina Canellakis is back at San Francisco Symphony this week, leading a program of Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel, to wit: Don Juan, Ravel's piano concerto for the left hand, Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung), and La Valse. This isn't anything like a full review. I am unusually run down at the moment, owing to the approaching end of an enormous project at work, and I am extremely glad I wasn't reviewing this program. Okay, if I had been taking notes, I could write a full and fair review, but as it is, what I can most use ..read more

Alex Ross has a post today about the notion of elitist pop culture, in which he quotes an article by Mark Swed this week and himself in 2014. Let me add a bit to the discourse: in 2006, I wrote about the cost of classical music and opera tickets for San Francisco Classical Voice. The article is gone from the SFCV web site, lost in a bad data migration, but the unedited version lives on at this blog. I quote (and when you read this bear in mind that these are 2006 prices): But what kinds of ticket prices result from these expenses? Here are some representative single-ticket prices for diff ..read more

Espresso Paris, 2018   ..read more

Birth of Gothic Sculpture Musée de Cluny, Paris October, 2018   ..read more

Ghost Sign Rue de la Butte aux Cailles Paris, 2018   ..read more

Both Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, are replacing their outgoing chief executives with people who come from their respective business schools. At Berkeley, Richard Lyons is the former head of the Haas School of Business. He replaces Carol Christ, a scholar of Victorian literature. At Stanford, Jonathan Levin, currently the dean of the Stanford business school, replaces Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who resigned after allegations of misconduct related to the authenticity of images appearing in his published research. I here note that Levin is a nepo baby; his father was president ..read more

Well, apologies: I didn't get to posting about Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony. Here are more updates, taken from comments to the previous update. Kahchun Wong becomes the new principal conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in 2024-2025. This was announced in June 2023. Christopher Franklin became the principal conductor of the Minnesota Opera in December, 2023. He was excellent in his appearances at San Francisco Opera, where I hope he'll guest conduct again. Lionel Bringuier is principal conductor of the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra, as of the current season. Peter Oundjian has b ..read more