This week: Filmmaker Joslyn Rose Lyons spotlights Oakland stories; Dr. Veronica Jow bridges dance and medicine; softball star Nina Pototo shines; and we honor lives well lived — Federal Glover, Rob Reich, and Dorothy Fisher Anderson.

Ahead of the big weekend headlines, we’re shining a light on Bay Area people making an impact — through creativity, service, leadership, everyday care, and now, in a new addition, through the legacies they’ve left behind.

Spotlight: Joslyn Rose Lyons

Born and raised in Oakland, Joslyn Rose Lyons is an award-winning director, writer, and producer known for telling powerful stories grounded in community, culture, and resilience. Her work includes the Emmy-nominated Showtime Sports documentary STAND and music videos for Bay Area legends like Too $hort and E-40, as recently reported by NBC Bay Area.

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Her newest film, The Masquerade, features an all–Bay Area cast and crew and explores how time changes a community — and how people hold on to their dreams through those changes, according to KQED. “It’s a love letter to time,” Lyons says, “and to the resilience of Oakland.”

She’s also a founding member of Make It Bay, a film collective focused on uplifting Oakland’s culture and economy through local storytelling. Other members include Kamau Bell, Rafael Casal, Ryan Coogler, and Stephen Curry.

As the site Canvas Rebel reports, Lyons says she’s driven by a simple idea: storytelling matters when it helps people feel seen. “Success,” she says, “isn’t just about the spotlight. It’s about what sticks with you. It’s about what you pass on.”

Through her films, her collaborations, and her community work, Joslyn Rose Lyons is helping shape what’s next for Bay Area arts — and doing it her own way.

Also Notable:

Dr. Veronica Jow, "Rave Doctor"

Dr. Veronica Jow is a Bay Area physician who combines her medical expertise with a deep passion for movement. As the official doctor for the San Francisco Giants and a longtime raver and festival-goer, she brings a unique perspective to injury prevention and performance care. After noticing the toll dancing was taking on her own body, she began developing resources to help others stay healthy — from online warm-ups and injury prevention classes to personalized fitness plans. Today, Jow is known for her work supporting both elite athletes and the city’s dance community, helping people stay active, resilient, and injury-free. [Broke-Ass Stuart]

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Nina Pototo, Lowell High Softball Standout

Since joining the city’s free Softball Academy program, Lowell High School sophomore Nina Pototo has become one of the city’s rising athletic leaders. A three-year participant in the academy’s year-round programming, she earned a varsity spot as a freshman and led her team with a .432 batting average. Off the field, she advocates for equity in sports through leadership and mentoring. This summer, she’ll represent San Francisco at the Elite Development Invitational in Kansas City — training alongside top athletes and coaches from across the country. [SF Recreation and Parks]

Lives Remembered

Federal Glover (1955–2025)

Federal Glover, the first Black supervisor in Contra Costa County’s 150-year history, died on May 18 at age 69. A lifelong Pittsburg resident and former city councilmember, Glover was elected to the county Board of Supervisors in 2000 and served District 5 for nearly 25 years. He was known for his steady leadership and deep commitment to equity, directing resources toward underserved communities in East County and the Carquinez Strait. Glover championed youth programs, public health, and transportation access, and helped guide the county through periods of major demographic and environmental change. After a life-threatening illness in 2015, he returned to office with characteristic quiet resolve. Glover died at a hospital in San Francisco following a brief illness. His legacy is visible in the civic fabric of the region he served with devotion and care. [SF Chronicle]

Rob Reich (1977–2025)

Rob Reich, the beloved Bay Area composer and multi-instrumentalist known for his accordion and piano performances at Zuni Café, died unexpectedly on May 15 while visiting Orr Hot Springs in Ukiah. He was 47. A cornerstone of San Francisco’s live music scene, Reich was the longtime bandleader for Circus Bella and a regular at venues from Davies Symphony Hall to Bird & Beckett Books. Equally adept at jazz, klezmer, chamber music, and experimental sounds, he was known for his warmth, versatility, and deep musicality. His final Circus Bella score will debut posthumously in June. [SF Chronicle]

Dorothy Fisher Anderson (1925–2025)

Dorothy Fisher Anderson, who died in March at age 100, lived a life defined by service, art, and intellectual curiosity, as Palo Alto Online reports. Born in Madeira and raised in New York City, she was shaped by Depression-era resilience and a progressive Jewish upbringing. After earning degrees in sociology and social work, she became a clinical social worker, supporting WWII veterans and at-risk children in the Bronx. A longtime Palo Alto resident, she raised three children, traveled widely, and returned to psychotherapy later in life, including play therapy from her home office. A sculptor, opera lover, and avid tennis player, Anderson celebrated her 100th birthday surrounded by family on the Stanford campus, where she had lived since 1968. [Palo Alto Online]

Image via Joslyn Rose Lyons on Instagram

Previously: Notable Humans: How Lisa Truong’s Help a Mother Out Changed Public Policy

This seems to be a first: The San Francisco Symphony is threatening to ban a regular attendee who held up a profane sign at a concert, written in Finnish, to protest the impending departure of musical director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Maybe you haven’t been following the upper-crust drama surrounding San Francisco Symphony losing their musical director Esa-Pekka Salonen over what seems to be some budgetary infighting. Would the story interest you more if audience members were holding up vulgar, curse-word signs at symphonic concerts to protest the departure of the acclaimed and highly respected Finnish-born conductor?    

Salonen is still the conductor and musical director for the remainder of his contract, which runs into 2025. But a new report in the Chronicle describes a June 21 concert with a significant amount of grassroots patron backlash directed at the SF Symphony Board of Directors. The Chron notes that “Musicians and patrons have voiced concerns over the symphony’s direction and management through fliers and leaflets distributed inside and outside the concert hall.”

Above we see one of them, in which one woman in the audience is holding a sign that says “Fuck the Board,” per retired Chronicle classical music critic, Joshua Kosman. And the Chronicle adds that the woman holding the sign has been threatened with being banned from the concert hall in the wake of this frankly very amusing incident.

“SF Symphony patrons tonight with a message of support in Finnish for Esa-Pekka Salonen,” Kosman posted to Twitter/X. “Naively, I imagined this must read ‘Please Stay.’ Google Translate informs me it means ‘Fuck the Board.’”

For whatever it’s worth, SFist tried translating the same message and we got the result “Damn the Board.” Either way, the sentiment seems similar enough.

And that very Board of Directors seems to have noticed, and sent the woman a sternly worded letter. “Displaying of any signage inside Davies Symphony Hall is not permitted,” SF Symphony’s senior director of operations Andrew Dubowski said in the letter. “Should this conduct occur again, you will be subject to further disciplinary action, up to and including removal from Davies Symphony Hall and/or suspension of privileges to enter and attend activities of the San Francisco Symphony.”

In fairness, social media posts indicate there has been some previous holding up of signs in the audience in support of Salonen. But admittedly, the other signs are much less salty, and simply say things like “Stay.”

The Chronicle hunted the woman down. She is Oakland resident Laura Leibowitz, and she’s been attending the SF Symphony regularly since 1991. And she does not seem remorseful about being the troublemaker behind this particular dust-up.

“The problem with ‘Stay’ is that’s not really an option for Esa-Pekka. The board is preventing him from realizing his artistic vision, so he is moving on,” Leibowitz told the Chronicle. “I wanted to put the blame where it properly lies, with a spin of cleverness. I wanted to make sure it was clear.”

This silly story may even stay in the headlines even longer. Leibowitz says she’s reached out to the ACLU, and if that goes somewhere, she could find herself being something of a sympathetic cult-hero figure.

Moreover, these messy fan protests are likely to continue. According to the SF Symphony’s calendar, Esa-Pekka Salonen is scheduled to still be conducting performances through June 14, 2025.  

Related: SF Symphony Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen Is Parting Ways With the Orchestra, Possibly Over Finances [SFist]

Image: The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven's "Symphony No 3" at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday night, April 4, 2018. (Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images)

An interview with pianist Stephen Hough and a review of Opera Parallele's US premiere of composer Tarik O'Regan's Heart of Darkness.

British pianist Stephen Hough performs tonight a recital of Debussy and Chopin presented by SF Performances. A frequent visitor on this shore, Stephen has played half a dozen recitals here, and has appeared about as many times with the SF Symphony, which he'll join next February in Saint-Saens' piano concerto #5, Egyptian. Stephen is famous for being the first classical musician ever to receive a McArthur genius grant in 2001, for being openly gay and Catholic, for having a painting exhibit in London, and for writing an entertaining blog for the Telegraph. Most of these accomplishments don't help playing the trills or arpeggios, but do make for an inquisitive and creative interpretation of the music. Stephen talked to us from New York City, where he lives several months each year.

SFist: Your program will feature Chopin and Debussy. In a blog post describing the program, you wrote that Chopin was a classicist and Debussy a modernist. Could you elaborate?
Stephen: There were both Romantic composers, but Chopin is always concerned with form. He does not like excesses, he's dismissive of the crazy things that were going on at his time. He favored composers like Bach or Mozart and focused on the structure of the pieces, as a vehicle for passion and great expression. The Ballades illustrate this perfectly. Debussy is a romantic, as an individual who expresses emotion. But he's looking to modernize. Things happen in the moment. You ask yourself: is there a reason for this? There is no reason.

Is Chopin still influenced by the classical style, and the sonata form?
Stephen: There is something in the first and fourth ballade that are related to classical sonata form indeed. It's not as explicit, you just sense it. There is a first subject, a second subject, you don't exactly have arecapitulation, but you just have someone who's very attentive to the beauty of structure. It's like in a building or a novel. When you read certain writer, you get this sense of proportion. What happens at this point happens there, you look at it and you see a unity. These ballades, none is more than ten minutes, yet you listen to something much bigger in its structure. Debussy does not write with this unity in the classical sense. Of course, he has a unity of the idea. He's definitely not writing sonatas. In "Evening in Grenada," he's creating an atmosphere. And part of creating this is taking unexpected turns, cutting and pasting in random order. He paints a sultry evening, you feel the heat and smell the perfume of Andalusia. Then come in two bars of guitar playing, and it's quite clear Debussy means a guitar just being heard. He's creating an atmosphere. It's unthinkable of Chopin to throw such changes of mood and deliberate distortion. It's very modern, something that ushers in the 20th century. Debussy works a little bit like a movie: He will splice things together in unusual combination. Whereas Chopin goes from the beginning to end in one piece.

Listening to your piano arrangement of "My Favorite Things" , we hear the shimmery arpeggios of Debussy or the voice leading of Chopin.

Stephen: I supposed that's true in a way. These two composers are the quintessential composers for the piano. Chopin began everything for the modern piano, of course. Anyone writing will have some echo of both of them. Whoever invented the wheel, all of us need to pay homage to the man or the woman, we can't do without them. Those were 30 years ago. Lots has happened since. For the last several years, I've been writing more seriously, 3 piano sonatas, song cycles, masses, orchestral version of mass released. I was doing those transcriptions, I had began in my 20s, I didn't have time to compose. I was just writing small transcriptions. Now the cello concerto is out, the cello sonata is coming out this month. It's written for Steven Isserlis who is a very good friend."

What did you do with the McArthur genius prize money?
Stephen: I made a studio for myself in London where I can practice. It's something that will be useful to me for the rest of my life. Those of us that live in cities like San Francisco, New York, or London, there are always neighbors involved." But shouldn't they be happy to have a world class musician playing next door? "I don't like to know that the people can hear. Just like if you're writing words, you don't want someone reading over your shoulder. I find it very intimidating. Every single second of a piece, every sound, pedaling, rubato, texture, nuance, all this needs to be experimented with. Practicing is experimenting. and seeing where the music will go, discovering how you will sing that piece."

Like Jeremy Denk (another McArthur genius/pianist/writer!), you seem to enjoy writing about the music and to provide intellectual insights. Is it a requirement to understand the music in that intellectual dimension?
Stephen: The most emotional pianist ever was Alfred Cortot, a 20th century pianist. When Horowitz went to study with him, Cortot asked him for every piece, to bring a written analysis. Every piece! Many of us would not be so sure of how to do this. So that emotion and analysis can't go together is not really true. The more you understand where the harmonic tension are happening, the more you can bring out that emotion. If you don't, you might miss a lot of deeper emotion, especially talking about Chopin, Brahms. Intuition is very important of course, you can't be a brain box and play music, music goes to the very soul, so much is primarily about emotion. It's a little bit like performing. I hear people play with very poor technique, but all this musical expression coming out. If you physically can't play the notes, you can't bring it out. You don't need to be able to write an essay. But for Beethoven, you can't play it and have no sense of how it's put together.

Just like everyone at the Creamery, you did an iPhone app.
Stephen: I had nothing to do with the technical side, the company was in touch with me for the music only. We did the Liszt sonata, I was playing the piece, and they filmed it, and added a commentary that goes with it. I have no plans for another one. What I like about this, you feel the internet is going for lowest common denominator. Not here, this was going very deeply into this one piece of music. There is enough for someone who knew nothing in classical music. You can build on and build on. It takes no more space than your iPad does.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness has been set to opera before: look no further than the movie adaptation of the novel, Apocalypse Now, and its famous use of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries to depict how people get drunk with the power they've been granted. Opera Parallele's production of Heart of Darkness, an opera by composer Tarik O'Regan and librettist Tom Philips, goes back however to the novel's roots: deep into colonial Africa and with an intimate music score that sheds light into the characters but no one won't confuse for Wagner. For one, it's a chamber orchestra with fewer musicians than in a single Wagner brass section! Opera Parallele has been taking chances in introducing new works to its San Francisco audience, and with Heart of Darkness, they found a gem.

The libretto is indeed very faithful to the book, with plenty of text excerpted literally from Conrad's prose, as we checked afterwards. Of course, it had to be condensed into a seventy minute show with no intermission, with the choice of what to emphasized influenced by Orson Welles' turning the book into a radio drama. The book/opera tells the story of Marlow's trip up the river in Central Africa to meet with Kurtz, who has been collecting ivory for the Company by plundering his territory in a barbaric manner. It opens off with Marlow (sung by Isaiah Bell) describing Kurtz not as a blood-thirsty tyrant, but as a "remarkable man." O'Regan extend this line into a lengthy lament that connotes all the ambiguity of situation: It's not happy, punchy, but rather sad and melancholy, the music of a missed opportunity.

O'Regan's music inventively support the action, using percussive rhythm throughout, with most of the melodic lines for the voices rather than the instruments (percussion, woodwind, strings, harp, and celeste) who provide sparse eerie textures and punchy interjections. Maestro Nicole Paiement led deftly, bringing the different atmospheres to life with sharp colors.

The staging made heavy use of video projections (by Frederic Boulay) to fill up the scene at the Z Space, both on a large back screen and on the floor. And on the audience members who were lucky enough to sit on both sides of the action. These donned white ponchos to appropriately reflect the light, and they had to sit with huge elephant tusks that looked quite cumbersome. We get it: we're all complicit in Kurtz' unspeakable actions. He's acting on behalf of the Company, who is happy to look the other way as long as he delivers the ivory. And Marlow can't find in him to condemn Kurtz. Therefore: society is on stage too, carrying the ivory. It's well-meaning, but as staging goes, that bit did not work; it was the only faux-pas in Brian Staufenbiel's excellent direction which does a lot with only a few items, going clearly back and forth between the present day on the Thames, and the long time ago in Central Africa.

The performers had no trouble filling up the space, with special mention to Bell of course, but also Aleksey Bogdanov as the boilermaker, Thomas Glenn as Harlequin and Shawnette Sulker as the river woman, and the soul of the country that's being raped. Philip Skinner was a rather subdued Kurtz, and ok, he's gaunt and thin and dying, but that's opera, where no one has ever ran out of breath, even for their last one.

It appears that noted SF Symphony musicians have had a change of heart when it comes to major league sports and proper respect, care of this shot showing harpist Douglas Rioth pulling a Kaepernick.

During the 2013 Giants season, if you recall, San Francisco Symphony musicians protested salary negotiations by being real shitty toward the Giants. This treasonous act was almost unforgivable.

FILM: During a time in which the military is desperate for new recruits, unless you're openly gay, Ask Not exposes the tangled political battles that led to the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy and examines the societal shifts that have occurred since its 1993 passage. Current and veteran gay soldiers reveal how the policy has affected them during their tours of duty as they struggle to maintain a double life, uncertain of whom they can trust.

6 p.m. // Koret Auditorium, SF Main Library (100 Larkin St) // free

SALON: Tonight's salon, Coping With The New Economy, marks the start of a brand-new, bi-weekly series at Samovar's Hayes Valley location. Some of the finest Bay Area minds in finance, spirituality, technology, entrepreneurialism, self help, and the environment are brought together in an interview/forum format, moderated by Samovar owner Jesse Jacobs and events associate Jennifer Sauer (author of The Way to Tea: Your Adventure Guide to San Francisco Tea Culture).

7 p.m. // Samovar Tea Lounge (297 Page St) // $12

MUSIC: The New Century Chamber Orchestra's Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg premieres a new violin concerto by featured composer Clarice Assad at Shadows and Light. "The orchestra leads a journey through sweet dreams and nightmares, from the lighter tones of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Borodin’s Nocturne to the terror of Bernard Herrmann’s gripping Psycho Suite. The pinnacle of the evening is Mats Lidstrom’s string orchestra arrangement of the overture to Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, a hilarious opera of love and revenge."

8 p.m. // Herbst Theatre (401 Van Ness Ave) // $32

SF Symphony guest conductor Fabio Luisi did his best last week to steal the thunder of violin megastar Joshua Bell. He opened the program with a tone poem by Richard Strauss, Don Juan. Tone poem means a symphonic little piece which tells a story, and, more often than not, said story is rather hard to follow: the instrumental language of an orchestra, as powerful and evocative as it is, is still open to multiple conflicting interpretations. To each their own daydream. Not with Luisi's Don Juan: after a crisp, brilliant opening that said, here comes Don Juan, he does not fuss around, Luisi and the SFSO delivered a sexy, lush rendition of the piece. It was a propulsive, erect, fanfare-ish opening. The strings (and Barantschik in particular) were seductive, the brass blended with the orchestra. A oboe playfully riffed on a snake charmer melodic line.

We did smile, though, when a dialogue erupted between a flute and cello (quite explicitly a female voice and Don Juan), climaxing with panting sighs from the flute. (Is there such thing as PG-17 classical music?) Luisi himself stood slightly hunched forward, as if to step his body slightly ahead of the beat, to push the piece forward. The piece interrupts itself with a silent pause before the final coda, and the program notes mention the death of Don Juan. But with such a sexy rendition, we're sure it was only a petite mort.