230 stories from Chloe Veltman
It's interesting when two forces of good in a community find themselves in direct conflict with one another. How does the community judge which "good" gets precedent?I've been cogitating on …
Just finished reading Wendy Lesser's luminous book about Shostakovich's string quartets, Music for Silenced Voices. I recommend this to anyone who wants a starting point into the composer's …
Just returned from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I spent five days singing Mahler's Symphony No. 2 with the Festival Chorale of the Grand Teton Music Festival, hiking, biking, swimming and ge…
On Monday, myself and my regular group of theatre salonistas (Mark Jackson, Rob Avila and John and Kimball Wilkins, and Beth Wilmurt) produced the latest in our ongoing series of "theatre sa…
A smattering of brief thoughts regarding a weekend's culture-vulturing in San Francisco before I head off to deepest, darkest Wyoming for a week for the Grand Tetons Music Festival...1. BAN6…
In many musical partnerships, there's clearly a frontman or woman. But in the case of the collaboration between Americana singer-songwriter-instrumentalists Gillian Welch and David Rawlings,…
It's amazing what great theatre artists can manage to pack into a mere 75 minutes of stage action.Mark Jackson's tightly-wound and deeply affecting production of David Farr and Gisli Orn Gar…
Yesterday, while awaiting breakfast in a Tahoe City cafe, I was gazing up at a television screen on which a variety of young men with chiseled torsos were undertaking daredevil activities on…
What fealty does a freelance (arts) journalist owe to her media clients? What does an editor working from within a media organization owe a trusted freelancer?The media industry is changing …
I've been mulling over the ways in which the directors of Wagner's Ring Cycle and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (Francesca Zambello and Joel Sass, respectively) which I saw last week chose …
I'm barely pausing for breath after seven long but lustrous nights (well, six nights and one afternoon to be precise) of Bay Area culture. Here's a quick round-up:MONDAY JUNE 20 - Leading La…
I'd like to end the week by sharing this link from the composer John Adams' website. It contains the text of a terrific commencement speech which he gave last month at the Juilliard School o…
The San Francisco Opera's new Ring is in full swing.Although technically we're not quite halfway through Francesca Zambello's production in terms of hours spent in seats at the War Memorial …
It's been an interesting couple of weeks for impassioned feedback on pieces I've written about various arts events in the Bay Area. The variety of approaches and fury-levels prompts me to cr…
The chorus in which I sing garnered a gushy review from the San Francisco Classical Voice for this past weekend's pair of concerts devoted to contemporary Scandinavian repertoire.What amazes…
Fog and Smog, a San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles-based collective of composers, film editors, producers, designers, DJs, animators, photographers and other culture industry types has c…
When Glee premiered a couple of years ago, I was the Fox TV series' biggest fan. I watched the first couple of series avidly, and then my viewing dropped off. I got busy. And I just didn't …
Brief roundup as I'm nearing the end of a hectic week. 1. The Chorus America Conference is in full swing here in San Francisco. Everyone's talking social media. Tweeted my way through a disc…
A few days ago, Barbara Sachs Osher, the Honorary Swedish Consul General in San Francisco and a well-known philanthropist and chair of the Bernard Osher Foundation, hosted a dinner for the m…
Sometimes the reasons for experiencing a work of art can seem a bit random. But there's nothing wrong with that.I was in Los Angeles and at a loose end last night. Of the thousands of cultur…
People have been talking about how much they like the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris.I think people seeing the film in San Francisco are going to appreciate Allen's movie about the…
I spent the afternoon at Stanford University yesterday observing 20 of this year's Knight Journalism Fellows deliver short presentations on their visions for the future of journalism.As some…
What does a choral conductor do -- or indeed the music director of any ensemble do -- if he or she feels frustrated at the standard of the amateur chorus he or she is leading?Should she (OK,…
It's amazing how one's work can sometimes get co-opted by people who have such a strong point of view about something that it makes them blind to the actual words they read on the page.This …
Some brief thoughts on this latest and diverse weekend of culture-vulturing in the Bay Area...1. Campo Santo presents Denis Johnson's "Nobody Move": Intersection for the Arts recently decamp…
