Arthur Bloomfield

A few articles back I was trumpeting the good marksmanship of SFO boss Kurt Herbert Adler in hiring strong, interesting conductors. Surely none of his finds was better than Niksa Bareza, a Croatian with excellent credentials (Scala, Bolshoi, Vienna etc.) who studied with the great Hermann Scherchen, pillar of Westminster Records’ wonderful catalog in the … Read more

After sampling another batch of historic broadcasts, Arthur Bloomfield our guest commentator (and historian of the San Francisco Opera) writes: When the Adler Years were settled into their cruising altitude back in the 1970s  there was usually a frisson when that earlierday auteur director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle came up with a new production. And there were … Read more

Our guest commentator (and historian of the San Francisco Opera) Arthur Bloomfield writes: Time to review another of the protein-rich San Francisco Opera seasons from the final years of Kurt Herbert Adler’s long reign as the company’s all-seeing general director, that veritable eagle of Van Ness Avenue. Listening again to the 1979 broadcasts, where to begin? … Read more

Here is the fifth in Arthur Bloomfield’s occasional series of Time Machine trips into the world of opera three or four generations ago, focusing on the conductors’ art. As Maestro Fausto Cleva once said on the Met Opera Quiz, in answer to the question “Who is the most important person in an opera performance?”, “The … Read more

As we said at the end of our first installment on the 1978 season (see Arthur Bloomfield – Dropping in On the Final Adler Years at the San Francisco Opera: The Spirit of ’78) Kurt Herbert Adler, the SFO’s general director, came down from his office, momentarily withdrawing his fingers from numerous administrative pies, to conduct … Read more