Ragnar left Sweden to join the SF Symphony as Chorus director in March this year. And did we throw a welcome party for him? Did we ring his door with a cauliflower casserole and a bottle of wine to ease his arrival in the neighborhood? Nope. Nada. We must have been booked when he threw his housewarming or something, but so far, search for him here and you'll find only one single measly hit. Luckily......

We made much about Philip Glass turning 70, and not of a single peep when John Adams turned 60 this past February. Aw. We feel bad, since the contemporary composer lives in Berkeley, and he is ours, so to speak. (Gothamist can claim Glass. If they want.) Actually, back then, Adams conducted the SF Symphony in the US premiere of his Flowering Tree to celebrate his big six-oh.Sadly, we were out of town, then. But......

The high cost of seeing quality entertainment in the Bay Area. ...

Third opera in November, third reaction from the audience at curtain rise. After the enthusiastic applause for La Rondine's shiny marble sets after the bleak and silent shock of Macbeth's hole-in-the-wall sets, we got the giggles after catching sight of The Rake's Progress' opening oil field. The patrons were willing to entertain an oil well and a 1950s Americana re-setting that dramatically differs from Stravinsky's original 18th Century,even though they were a tad skeptical.......

Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, the day where big retail shoppers traditionally break even for the year! Traditionally considered the biggest shopping day of the year! Is it retail therapy? ....Or is it kowtowing to the gods of capitalism and binding the workers who long to be free? Well, if you're heading out to Union Square today but feel kind of guilty about it, you can at least make yourself feel a little better......

We caught the symphony on Thursday for a really cool program: Mostly Ives, with a Mendelssohn violin concerto squeezed in between for good measure. Those quicker than us with their opinions found the concerto rather pedestrian. But it's such a delicious yet cloying confection that even under the the jurisdiction of a particularly uninspired interpretation, is still satisfying. And the soloist, 22yo Sergey Khachatryan, did spark some fireworks in the final movement. In the program......

Earlier this month we mentioned that The Decemberists' five-night engagement at the Fillmore was canceled. It was going to be the highlight of our week, but we guess tofurkey will just have to do. This week, our picks are Travis who are playing with Maximo Park at the Fillmore tomorrow night. Friday night at the Fillmore, The Drones (listen to "Shark Fin Blues" here) are opening for Band of Horses, an indie-rock band based......

SFist Grace checks out a sneak peek of the new P.T. Anderson movie, There Will Be Blood. There will also be: greed, husksterism, rage, isolation and open-handed brawls. The Castro Theatre recently hosted a sneak preview of this film, which is slated for limited release in mid-December. Based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson's latest film features Daniel Day-Lewis as David Plainview, an unpredictably violent and spiritually aimless oil-baron-in-the-making. Shot in the desolate......

So foul and poor a play we haven't seen. At least, not during this San Francisco Opera season. That is, until now: behold, the vile production that is Macbeth. It's easier to count the things that went right, because there were so few: Thomas Hampson (fan), the Adler fellows, and Raymond Aceto, who all more or less shine. The rest, sadly, was pretty awful. You know you're in for a long night when you're forced......

Angela Gheorghiu, the diva, made her SF Opera debut on Wednesday evening, in Puccini's La Rondine. That she made it onstage was somewhat of an accomplishment; she just had been fired from a production in Chicago for missing rehearsals. She was attending her husband, French tenor Roberto Alagna, concert at the Met, it seems. (Alagna's claim to fame has been walking off the stage at La Scala in the middle of Aida, after being booed.......

Tonight, for one night only, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be featuring two sneak previews of Dirty Country, a highly entertaining documentary about the underground world of raunchy music, directed by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, founders and hosts of the Found Footage Festival, which sold out four shows at the Red Vic last month. Dirty Country, which won the Audience Award at this year's South By Southwest, is part of Yerba......

We were phoning Marielle Labeque, one half of the Labeque sisters piano duo virtuosos, and being our French selves. We said: “We can talk in French, if you are not afraid…” Right away she interrupted: “No, I am not afraid.” We meant: “if you’re not afraid we’ll screw up the translation” but the attitude was fitting: there’s a definitive fearlessness in the Labeque sisters. We can see it from the engaged way they perform, from......

Mission hipster haven, Ritual Roasters, is hosting a stellar art event organized by curator/painter/illustrator extraordinaire, Sacha Eckes. The show runs through December 2nd and features artists Timothy Buckwalter, Bill Dunlap, Sacha Eckes, Nancy Mizuno Elliott, Christopher Jernberg, Alexis Mackenzie, Paul Madonna (whom we interviewed in May), Mike Monteiro, Fred Rinne, Brion Nudah Rosch & Ifton Schlinger and Micke Tong. Each artist has created about three pieces of art, which have been framed in white,......

Found Magazine's inexhaustible founders, Davy and Peter Rothbart, will be at Berkeley's Pegasus Books tonight and at SF's The Dark Room on Thursday night for Found's "There Goes the Neighborhood Tour 2007." We're excited to see what's in Davy's trunk of "sparkling, brand-new finds" and be privy to Peter's songs based on notes from Found #5, aka "The Crime Issue." The Bay Area marks the halfway point in the bros.' "65-city, 36-state, 3-month rampage!" Found......

We went to see The Magic Flute for Family on Saturday. Namely, we went to see Honey, I Shrunk the Opera. From 3h15, it got reduced to a lively 2 hours. And it got translated too, because there aren’t too many kids ages six and over who speak German around here. Looking for something to illustrate this post, we found this YouTube clip below: an excerpt of the current run of The Magic Flute. It’s......

Because we are no good at doggerel, we are going to decline what would otherwise be an extremely tempting way to write up this post and not write it in rhyming couplets. That's right -- local theater troupe Rhyme Time Theater is presenting Race Is A Lie, a play about race relations in the SFPD. Written in rhyming iambic pentameter. (To refresh you from high school English class, that's a sentence with the pattern da-DUM......

We caught Phil Setzer, the violinist for the Emerson String Quartet, being driven down between performances in Santa Barbara and Orange County. We hope it was in a stretch limo, as these guys have won eight Grammy awards and critical acclaim everywhere they go. They are the only chamber music group to ever win a best classical album grammy, and they even got two. So they better travel like the rock stars they are. They'll......

Pierre-Laurent Aimard will play Beethoven's piano concerto No. 3 with the SF Symphony Thursday at Flint in Cupertino, and Friday and Saturday at Davies, led by 33yo Swiss conducting prodigy Philippe Jordan. The pair will go to New-York in December to perform the same piece with the NY Phil, and you can find a little video clip of Pierre-Laurent describing the concerto here. So you now can picture him and his delightful French accent when......

Kurt Masur proved why he is a conducting legend. We caught him leading the SF Symphony on Thursday night, and, even at 80, the man can conduct. Yep, eighty year old. He looks so not octogenarian we thought it was a typo in the program, until we found a list of celebrations for his big birthday this year. But who cares about his age: he is not working on the senior tour, he is still......

This past Wednesday was New-Yorker night in Civic Center: the classical music critic, Alex Ross was promoting his new book at Herbst theater, and we attended the production of the Magic Flute designed by Gerald Scarfe, who regularly illustrates the magazine. Scarfe toned down his usually acidic satirical pen (see the sample from his website that we put after the jump) to cook up sets that are humorous, and respectful of Mozart’s intent. The set,......

We were super-excited when we got the chance to talk with Alex Ross, the New Yorker's resident classical music critic (and blogger). Ross's writing has profoundly affected the way we think about music and music writing in all its genres and forms, and his twin enthusiasm for new classical music of the 21st century along with his deep love of the profoundly musical Icelandic pixie that is Björk always liven up our weekly periodicals reading......

You all know SFist Wendy's a living goddess too, right?? It only takes 32 perfections to become a goddess in Nepal -- sounds simple, right? Hardly. But Sajani, the eight year-old goddess who stole our heart in the movie Living Goddess at DocFest last weekend, fit the bill. Sajani is one of three such goddesses in Nepal, Buddhists girls believed to be inhabited by Hindu goddesses. Sajani was chosen at the ripe age of two......

More bad puns on Philip Glass’ name! Appomattox, which we rose our Glass to, was not the end of our wall-to-wall Glass coverage. The Glass is not full, we haven’t hit the Glass ceiling yet, ha. Take tonight. There’s a cool concert at Herbst Theater, presented by Other Minds, an organization devoted to new music: Dennis Russell Davies and his partner, Maki Namekawa, playing music for two pianos from Philip Glass, but also J.S Bach......

Now this is why we love DocFest so much! Eat At Bill's is a completely charming love letter to the famed local organic Monterey Market in Berkeley and its perpetually-cheery (and perpetually-free-sample-eating) owner Bill Fujimoto. The movie's set up in a series of small vignettes -- from the hotly-anticipated arrival of cherry season, to a tour of the back room where the chefs get first pick of the boysenberries and mesclun, to a tour......

Who better to compose an opera on the repetitive forces which govern human nature than Philip Glass! There is no better match to write about the immutability of the human soul, as the theme begs for an insistent ostinato in a minor key, of course. His score is one of the strong points of Appomattox, which had its premiere on Friday night: it is distinctly Glass-ian, but integrates elements and influence contemporary to the civil......

We love it when events combine movies and music! So check out The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio, a documentary about the creation of a multi-ethnic world music orchestra from Italy. Diverse residents of the Piazza Vittorio neighborhood in Rome banded together and created the multi-ethnic world music orchestra in an attempt to save a historic movie theater from destruction. The movie then follows the orchestra's unlikely rise to success and the various musicians' stories.......

All of you YouTube addicts out there are probably familiar with many of the "absoludicrous"* found video clips from Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett's touring Found Footage Festival (*Mr. T makes an appearance in the "Celebrities Who Teach" series). The critically-acclaimed event will be in San Francisco tonight and tomorrow night at the Roxie Red Vic at 7:15 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. and this Sunday at the Parkway in Oakland for a 5 p.m.......

The Mission's an interesting place to screen a movie about gentrification, filmed from the eyes of the gentrifier -- so there was certainly no shortage of things to think about at last night's showing of New Urban Cowboy for DocFest at the Roxie. New Urban Cowboy is a documentary about Michael Arth, a kind of hippie-dippie former resident of Santa Barbara who moves to the small town of Deland, Florida, near Orlando, and more......

Someone told us a story of a famous pianist who believed in bringing culture to the people, and went to a factory in Italy to give a lecture in front of a piano. He started to talk about Schoenberg, and after a few minutes, a voice rose from the audience: "Shut up, and play!" Ok, he said, and sat down at the piano, playing the Schoenberg piece. The voice rose again: "Rather, talk!" András......

Sean Penn isn't the only person who was captivated by the Chris McCandless story (first made popular in the Jon Krakauer book, "Into The Wild," and now a major motion picture directed by Penn, promoted on Oprah, and playing at a theatre near you.) In the early '90's Chris McCandless abandoned all his worldly goods, took on the name Alexander Supertramp and embarked upon a Thoreau-esque adventure trekking around North America, ultimately perishing in an......