Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
Datebook is the San Francisco Chronicle’s guide to arts & entertainment in the Bay Area, combining award-winning news with a curated events calendar.
Where to enjoy Handel’s ‘Messiah’ this holiday season
Nov 27, 2024 · Editor's note: This story has been updated with concerts for the 2024 season. Every year around December, the same set of cultural rituals gets repeated, depending on your performing art of choice. For ballet fans it’s “The Nutcracker” that marks the holiday season, for theatergoers it’s “A Christmas Carol,” and for classical music lovers, nothing says Christmas like performances ...
Review: ‘Wicked’ is the best movie musical in years | Datebook
Nov 19, 2024 · You’ll notice “Wicked” does not rely on the quick cuts and digitally enhanced or downplayed vocals of those other movies. “Wicked” shows big groups of people, including the lead actors, dancing in unison while being shot from multiple angles.
Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen keeps S.F. Symphony on course in
Oct 5, 2024 · With his signature flair for the theatrical, Shostakovich ups the ante in the concerto’s linked third and fourth movements. As Salonen and the Symphony laid the groundwork for the Passacaglia’s variations, Shoji offered a nostalgic glance, both melodically and temperamentally, back toward the Nocturne.
Four years before Grateful Dead’s birth, lyricist Robert Hunter was ...
Oct 9, 2024 · The concepts of “lost” and “found” take on a different meaning when glimpsed through the cosmic prism of the Grateful Dead. Recognized today as one of history’s seminal rock groups, the band and its timeless lyrics and epic live jams have birthed a fan base of Deadheads that’s remained utterly devoted to the group for 59 years and counting.
Review: A surprising and riveting fourth novel closes out Southern ...
Oct 18, 2024 · The Southern Reach Trilogy was a huge success for VanderMeer. But it also, and purposefully so, left many questions unanswered. That is where “Absolution” comes in: It acts first and foremost as a stand-alone, but also as a new way to enter the trilogy.
A sweet celebration of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, still moving
Jan 24, 2024 · For a guy who’s never stopped moving, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has put down a vast and world-shaping web of musical roots. A master of folk blues and various fingerstyle and flatpicking guitar idioms, he’s the direct link between American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, with whom he apprenticed and toured as a teenager in the early 1950s, and the legendary Bob Dylan, whose early sound ...
The hidden struggles behind S.F. Opera’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’
Oct 16, 2024 · Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” is well known for the challenges it presents for singers, particularly those in the title roles. In any generation, only a few dramatic sopranos and heldentenors have had the right voice types and sheer stamina for this long and complex opera about doomed lovers.
Review: S.F. Opera taps into the transcendent power of ... - Datebook
Oct 20, 2024 · Review: S.F. Opera taps into the transcendent power of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ Richard Wagner’s epic of love and death comes to glorious life in a dramatically sung production led by Music Director Eun Sun Kim.
Impressionist Mary Cassatt’s modernity takes center stage
Oct 12, 2024 · And about those famous images of maternity and children: They are the ones that really make my senses activate. The painting “Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child” (1880) showing a woman with a blond toddler on her lap, and the pastel “A Goodnight Hug,” seemingly depicting the same woman and child embracing (1880), practically vibrate with the graphic zigzag of the walls behind them.