Calendar Notes

The SF Symphony announced their 2007-08 season this week, and it was a little controversial. For the first time(?) the SF Symphony will be giving a free concert in San Jose, which has rankled some of the local California Symphony musicians who worry that such an appearance will syphon off some of their audience. It's all a bunch of bull, of course. The SF Symphony has been making appearances in the South Bay for years, and is considered by most people to be every bit as local as the California Symphony, but a free concert does stir things up a bit.

I don't care about any of that. When the season was announced I, like most people who are interested in such things, immediately searched the list of soloists to see who would be making an appearance this year. In fact, I was most interested in one particular soloist, and lo and behold, there she was.

So yes, the good news is that Julia Fischer will be playing Sibelius with Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. The bad news is that she will be making that appearance in Europe as part of the Symphony's late summer European tour. No date has been given but odds are I won't be hopping aboard a 747 just to see it. Deborah Voigt and Yefim Bronfman are also appearing with the Symphony on that tour, so it appears she's going to be in good company.

But wait, lucky for us Fischer will also be making a Bay Area appearance in November as part of the Symphony's Great Performer Series. These are a series of performances held throughout the season, each featuring some of the classical music world's, well, "great performers." The 2006-07 season features names such as Garrick Ohlsson, Murray Perahia, Christoph Eschenbach, Susan Graham, etc..., and it looks like they will bringing in more of the top players for 07/08, including the aforementioned Julia Fischer.

Unfortunately, she won't be appearing with MTT for her American performance, but will be playing with Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic instead. Still sounds good to me, and she'll be playing Beethoven as well, the same piece that was named one of the 10 best performances of 2006 by ionarts. Looking forward to that one.

And one more bit of Julia Fischer news. The lineup for this summer's Aspen Music Festival (registration required) was also announced this week, and it looks like she'll be appearing there too. No suprise since it seems that just about everybody in the music world manages to make it out to the Aspen Festival, and this year that will include jazz and pop artists as well. Fischer will be performing the Violin Concerto by Nicholas Maw, which I'm completely unfamiliar with but understand was written for Joshua Bell. In fact it's available on Rhapsody so maybe I'll give it a listen. Hmmm, is it worth a trip to Colorado? Nah, I'll just wait for November.

Well, that's all I've got tonight. Really I just wanted an excuse to post more pictures. Aren't you glad you stopped by?