Freebie of the week: San Francisco Art Week, the annual celebration of the area’s rich collection of museums, galleries and other art venues, runs through Sunday with a tasty smorgasbord of special events and activities. Not everything in the lineup is free, but some things are. It’s a nice way to get acquainted with terrific galleries and exhibits without spending a dime.
The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood hosts a free opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday for “Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology,” an exhibition with wood sculptures, video and artificial intelligence, inviting visitors to reimagine “our past and collective futures.
At 11 a.m. Saturday at the di Rosa, the exhibit’s creators, Bay Area artists Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, will head up a free tour. On Sunday, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s free community day features an intriguing new exhibition, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings,” devoted to the influential Korean American avant-garde artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). Fun fact: Cha worked at the Pacific Film Archive as an usher and cashier in the early 1970s.
Also, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco offers free admission all week, featuring the exhibits “UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe,” and “Continuum: MoAD Over Time,” which celebrates the museum’s 20th anniversary. More information about these events and other exhibits is available at sfartweek.com.
‘Onegin’ again: “Eugene Onegin” is a 19th-century Russian novel written entirely in verse, but that’s not what makes it so brutal. Penned by Alexander Pushkin, considered one of Russia’s finest poets and authors, it’s about a man who rejects the love of a woman only to realize, too late, that he loves her as well. (Also, he kills his best friend along the way.) Considered a literary classic, it has been adapted into a Tchaikovsky opera, four movies and a 1965 ballet by John Cranko.
Americans may be most familiar with a 1999 film adaptation by Martha Fiennes that starred her brother Ralph Fiennes in the title role and Liv Tyler as the spurned lover. It received mixed reviews (Roger Ebert described it as “dead at its center”) and a limited release, but today it’s available on several streaming platforms.
San Francisco Ballet, however, is offering a fresh take. While it has performed Cranko’s version in the past, this week it presents the world premiere “Eugene Onegin” created by San Francisco Ballet choreographer-in-residence Yuri Possokhov and featuring a score by Ilya Demutsky and costumes by Oscar winner Tim Yip.
The full-length production, a collaboration with Joffrey Ballet, runs Friday through Feb. 1 at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Tickets are $35 to $575; go to https://www.sfballet.org.
Destiny calls: Fate comes knocking on the door again at the San Francisco Symphony’s concerts this weekend in Davies Hall, as the orchestra unrolls the famous dum-dum-dum DUM opening of Beethoven’s Fifth as the anchoring piece of the program. Preceding it are two works that are less familiar but bearing intriguing elements of their own.
Finnish guest conductor John Storgårds launches the concert with the U.S. premiere of his countrywoman Outi Tarkiainen’s musical meditation on labor and birth, “The Rapids of Life.” Written in 2023 shortly after she gave birth to her third child, the work depicts, in her own words, “the physiological delivery and its different stages, carried along by the ever-shifting waves.”
The concert continues with a rarely performed work by Dmitri Shostakovich, his Piano Concerto No. 1, from 1933. Initially conceived as a trumpet concerto, an idea the young composer abandoned after finding it a difficult instrument to write for, it comes off as a double concerto with ample opportunity for San Francisco Symphony’s super-talented principal trumpet player Mark Inouye to strut his stuff alongside Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a first-place prizewinner at the Chopin International Competition.
Performance times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and tickets, $50-$269, are available at sfsymphony.org.
A high point in the history of classical music is the theme of this weekend’s California Symphony concerts in Walnut Creek. Music Director Donato Cabrera leads “Schubert in Vienna,” a genre-blending affair illustrating how Vienna became the musical capital of the world. Cabrera, pointing to the popularity of wind instruments in the 19th century, has built a program centered around Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, “The Great,” in which the orchestra’s “harmonie” section (winds and brass) introduces all of the themes, from the opening horn call to the closing melodies of the last movement.
The concert also features instrumental sections of Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” arranged for wind instruments of the period. Complementing those pieces is Friedrich Gulda’s Cello Concerto, a quirky, iconoclastic piece in which the harmonie instruments backup the “Hendrix-like” lines of the cello. Nathan Chan, assistant principal cello of the Seattle Symphony, is the guest soloist.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Tickets are $25 (students) to $110 at californiasymphony.org.
A luminous program: The New Century Chamber Orchestra is joining students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for its next concerts and inviting rising young violinist Simone Porter to lead the collaboration, which they are dubbing “Enlighten Me.” As the title suggests, the theme is illumination of various sorts, including the natural and the cerebral.
The opening work is Andrew Norman’s “Sabina,” which was inspired by the awe the composer felt watching the sunrise from within an ancient church on the Aventine Hill in Rome, and the concert will conclude with Mozart’s ethereal Divertimento in F Major. The intervening pieces include the Bach Violin Concerto in E Major, which will put Porter at center stage; Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 9; Hildegard Von Bingen’s “O virtus sapientiae”; Juhi Bansal’s “Cathedral of Light” and Heinrich Biber’s “Battalia à 10.”
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Bing Concert Hall on the Stanford University campus and 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Tickets are $35-$80 at ncco.org.
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