San Francisco - Alison Bing [22]
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MUSIC
You’ll have to excuse San Francisco DJs if they seem a little schizophrenic: it takes an extremely eclectic collection to cover SF’s varied musical tastes. Classical, opera and bluegrass have weathered earthquakes, fires and fickle audiences in San Francisco. In the alleyways of Chinatown, you can still hear the heartstring-plucking sounds of Chinese zithers and the boom of drums practicing for lion dances, and the Mission brings on the big, brassy fanfare of salsa and Latin ska bands. Music that started here never really went away, so you can hear it all: folk music and bebop that were the soundtrack of San Francisco in the ’50s; ’60s psychedelic rock and alt-rock; disco anthems that emerged from ’70s bathhouse club culture; and electronica and DJ mash-ups that put all those mainframes and Moog machines sitting around in Silicon Valley to use in the ’80s and ’90s. Today you can take your pick – The Arts and Nightlife chapters for more on the music scene.
Classical Music & Opera
The San Francisco Symphony has rated among the finest interpreters of classical music since conductor Michael Tilson Thomas was wooed away from the London Symphony Orchestra to take up the baton here in 1995. Thomas’ innovative programming combines American and Russian composers, full-throttle Mahler and Beethoven, and some genuinely odd experimental music. These days, even the obligatory Mid-Summer Mozart and holiday Sing-Along Messiah crowd-pleasers seem somehow fresher. New York critics grouse that their city’s renowned music scene now seems comparatively staid, and they’re right – on the bright side, they can always load up on San Francisco Symphony CDs at Amoeba. Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony record regularly, producing several Grammy-winning recordings and a number two hit in the Billboard charts with S&M, an album recorded with San Francisco heavy-metal powerhouse Metallica.
The San Francisco Opera is the USA’s second-largest opera company. But while New York’s Metropolitan Opera is larger in size and reputation, SF takes big, bold risks. You’d never guess San Francisco’s opera roots go back to the 19th century from its more avant-garde productions, such as Dangerous Liaisons, Harvey Milk and Dead Man Walking. The company has seen its share of megawatt divas: Leontyne Price made her debut here and performed with the company during the 1950s, and the recent recurring favorite is Renée Fleming, whose dulcet tones you may recognize from more than a dozen CDs and The Lord of the Rings movie soundtrack. The latest excitement is new musical director Nicola Luisotti, who hails from Puccini territory in Tuscany and worked at Venice’s fabled La Fenice before conducting breakthroughs at the Met and London’s Royal Opera. His first order of business in SF: resurrecting Puccini’s California Gold Rush opera The Girl of the Golden West, with star tenor and anointed Pavarotti successor Salvatore Licitra. After drastic public funding cutbacks, the company has been forced to scale back its programming, but to broaden the audience, tickets are now available for $50, among the lowest-priced anywhere in the opera world.
Rock
Fire up those lighters, but don’t go calling for ‘Freebird’ as an encore. The San Francisco rock of choice lately is preceded by the prefix alt-, as in ‘alternative to radio pap.’ At Mission, Potrero and Polk Gulch venues and free music extravaganzas like the Mission Creek Music Festival, bands new on the scene earn their following the old-fashioned way: throwing down onstage like they’re auditioning for a spot in heaven next to Joe Strummer (late, great front man of the Clash and pantheistic San Francisco rock idol). Metalheads need no introduction to the mighty Metallica, the perpetually hard-rocking innovators and triumphant survivors of a genre slowly smothered in the ’80s by its own hair and binding