230 stories from Chloe Veltman
In these tough media times when the art of cultural criticism is being sidelined in favor of mass-eyeball-generating entertainment news and sports coverage, it's refreshing to come across Th…
Michael Scott Moore, the writer who preceded me as chief theatre critic of SF Weekly (Mike gave up the post at the end of 2004 to move to Berlin and I held it from then until the fall of 200…
The Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University's newest building devoted to the arts, is going to be an exciting addition to the west coast music scene when it opens in January 2013. The Kronos …
They might look like ants in the photograph I snapped on my iPhone from my faraway vantage point at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Hall last night, but the people standing on the stage are today's G…
A soiree devoted to people sharing their stories about Bay Area public transportation doesn't seem like it would be a hot ticket.But when MUNI Diaries, a web-based resource devoted to collec…
Percussionist Andrew Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews of The Living Earth Show, a chamber music ensemble based in San Francisco, have embarked upon an unusual project -- to build quarte…
I fell in love with the British baritone Christopher Maltman's voice when I was scouting around iTunes for a recoding of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel. That was about three year…
"Go, you wild bedfellow, you cannot soothsay." …
The atrium at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA, made for a fitting setting for The Intersection, an event which brought together thinkers and doers from a variety of disciplines to …
On last week's VoiceBox, composer and blogger Brian Rosen and I explored the theme of "badness" in vocal music. You can read Brian's accompanying blog post on the broadcast here.Towards the …
Richard Gingras, Head of News Products, Google, came to talk to my John S Knight Journalism Fellowship class yesterday. He's a thoughtful man, whose hangdog, droopy-eyed expression belies a …
The most palpable effect of "The Artist," Michel Hazanavicius' beautiful homage to the tail end of the silent cinema era and movie-making's uneasy transition to talkies, is that it makes the…
I recorded a VoiceBox episode on Friday on the subject of "terrible songs" in collaboration with Jim Nayder, the host of NPR Chicago's Annoying Music Show, and Brian Rosen, a Bay Area-based …
One thing England still does very well during the holidays in spite of competition from the end-of-year sales, is a vivid line in eccentric niche cultural traditions.I spent this Boxing Day …
Few urban environments in the UK offer such radical cultural contrasts as Margate. The seaside town located in the southeast of England which I visited today with my parents who live in near…
Gareth Malone is the British chorus world's answer to Jamie Oliver.What Jamie has done to revolutionize people's appetite for home cooking, Gareth has done to bring them together in song.I h…
On the similarities of two productions happening in close proximity to one another in Berkeley.After seeing of The Wild Bride at Berkeley Repertory Theatre a couple of nights ago (go see it …
How can the managers of arts organizations best control who gets press tickets to see their work?The manager of a theatre company in the Bay Area sent out an interesting email yesterday aski…
Chanticleer schmaltzes it up for the holidays with a riper soprano sound -- and it's good.The Bay Area-based, Grammy Award-winning men's vocal ensemble Chanticleer has got the holiday formul…
Could singing be a way to get horses to cooperate with humans?I hadn't heard of "Equine Guided Education" until I met Wendy Millet.Wendy spends half her life heading up the Woods Institute f…
Choral composers should look to Bach for inspiration.Earlier this week, I posted about why I feel that the choral arts, on the whole, are on a moribund track. I stand corrected for looking a…
As the holiday season kicks into full swing and choral music concerts abound, I am invariably reminded of why it is that the genre has so little street cred.Here are the problems as I percei…
Almost every journalist these days feels like their beat is the most likely to become extinct first. Is one species of journalism more endangered than another?At a panel discussion last nigh…
Bay Area-based chanteuse/guest blogger Pamela Rose is relieved to hear that Reese Witherspoon, star of the forthcoming Peggy Lee biopic, considers the jazz icon to be first and foremost a so…
My friend Phil Weglarz, a Bay Area-based arts therapist and allover creative genius, created a fascinating centerpiece for his Thanksgiving dinner table this year. I wasn't present at the ev…
