About San Francisco Classical Voice

Our Mission

In an era of declining major-media coverage of the arts, the mission of San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV) is to enrich and support the diverse classical-music community in the Bay Area. Our online magazine aims to provide the highest-quality and most-complete source of information about events, from the smallest to the largest organizations, and to create an actively engaged online community of classical-music concertgoers, presenting organizations, artists, and funders. SFCV also aims to provide services of tangible value to its various constituencies and to achieve financial stability for the long-term.

SFCV fulfills this mission by offering reviews and previews of the Bay Area's wide range of classical music performances; insightful features from leading writers; news about the music scene; and the most complete calendar of events. Over the last nine years, SFCV has become a leading source of information to the Bay Area community and a model for other cities around the country.

SFCV serves the community in multiple ways:

Concertgoers: SFCV helps busy concertgoers with informed recommendations of what to see, commentary about where performing groups stand, and news and discussion of the ever-changing music world. We believe a well-written concert review, in particular, is one of the best mediums for engaging audiences in the experience: The music is brought back to life, the performance measured against a relevant standard, and the context revealed in greater depth.

Performers, Composers, and Presenters: SFCV articles are often the only reviews many organizations and individuals receive all year. We're also an important connection to audiences and a platform to build and maintain brand recognition. And our reviews and articles are used as a key validation of artists' and presenters' work to funders and audiences (just read their Web sites to see).

Foundations and Donors: We help funders learn about and independently evaluate the many performing arts groups they are asked to support. We also help them find the up-and-coming groups that show promise.

Without SFCV's coverage, audience members, performers, composers, presenters, and donors would be deprived of the opportunity to document and illuminate concert performances that can too often seem like an ephemeral experience. Nationwide, we are already living with less than half as much coverage of classical music as existed a generation ago. In the print media, the coverage of classical music, seriously reduced by the 1990s, has since been cut back to a mere token, and what exists includes only the major organizations and celebrity artists. With the long-term structural problems facing the newspaper industry, the mass-media discourse about classical music is threatened with extinction, as newspaper after newspaper cuts back or eliminates classical music coverage altogether.

We are at a critical point in which an alternative media model must be established to augment and in some cases replace coverage that media organizations once considered to be a vital public service to elevate and enrich a community's cultural life. It is SFCV's view that the diverse and highly active musical life here represents a complex ecology on which the health, the audiences, and the personnel of even the major organizations depend.

Our Story

In 1998, founding editor and former San Francisco Chronicle music critic Robert Commanday saw the need for an online publication that documents and illuminates the Bay Area’s thriving classical music community. Today, San Francisco Classical Voice covers hundreds of events throughout the region, in every classical music style and from presenters ranging in size from the largest institutions to the smallest ensembles.

From September 1, 1998, to July 17, 2007, SFCV has published, in addition to our weekly features, Music News, and Listening Ahead columns, 2,777 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 54 symphony orchestras (574 reviews), dozens of recital presenters (479 reviews), 46 opera companies (384 reviews), 100 chamber groups (339 reviews), 43 new-music ensembles and programs (290 reviews), 58 early-music ensembles (219 reviews), 46 choral groups (187 reviews), 17 music festivals (129 reviews), 25 chamber orchestras (107 reviews), six musical theater groups (18 reviews), as well as numerous world music groups (16 reviews), youth music ensembles (18 reviews), and other organizations (16 reviews). See our Archives to browse or search past articles.)

SFCV's regular writers are drawn from over 50 musicians-composers, performers, musicologists, and journalists, and are mostly assigned to reviews according their specialties. The magazine is published every Tuesday, by noon most weeks, via our Web site and companion e-mail newsletter. Each week, we reach over 13,000 unique visitors on average per month on our Web site and 2,000 subscribers via our free e-mail newsletter. Roughly 90 percent of readers live in the Bay Area, with the rest spread across the U.S. and the world.

SFCV is an innovative nonprofit model of public media that has sustained itself at a modest revenue base for nearly a decade. We have also helped other groups around the country to spread our innovative model. So far, Classical Voice of North Carolina, Classical Voice of New England, and others have received crucial assistance as they have started up.

Our Impact in the Community

Over the years dozens of organizations and readers have written in to extol SFCV's vital contribution to the Bay Area's musical life. A representative selection follows:

"We're thrilled that SFCV is available as a resource to the music community," says Tim Allen, president of Chamber Music Partnership (Left Coast Chamber Ensemble). "We cannot count on publicity or reviews from the newspapers. The more people who access SFCV , the better for all classical music groups."

"As the artistic director of a small chamber music series in San Francisco, I want to let you know what an important service you are providing with your Web site," says Karen Heather, president of Noe Valley Chamber Music. "[It] fills a very valuable niche in the cultural life of the Bay Area, especially for the smaller arts organizations."

"I find myself increasingly dependent on SFCV for quality reviews of not only smaller or less-known performing organizations and artists, but also major companies," says bass-baritone Tom Hart, a founding member of Chanticleer. "The difference in quality from the major paper is astounding."

"The world of classical music is where my soul gains nourishment and inspiration," says John Emmons of Oakland. "I read to learn more about music, learn more about listening to music, and to compare my experience of a concert with the reviewers."

"I read SFCV because it provides a service that is unavailable elsewhere," says a reader in Redwood City. "No one else is reviewing the types of music that I am interested in, in a comprehensive way that includes all types of music, and organizations of all sizes (not just the big guns in town). I have been a member of some of these smaller musical groups, and they deserve the attention because their performances are often top-notch. SFCV is the only one providing that attention and feedback."

"We are the smallest of small professional performing arts companies," says Marilyn Kosinski, founder and executive director of Oakland Lyric Opera. "On the rare occasions when editors have given us print space, our audience attendance has always increased considerably. When I bring this to the attention of various newspaper editor … I am told, 'Newspapers are not in the business of promoting the arts!'"

"This Web site, an innovative concept of taking music criticism and editorial beyond the local newspapers into cyberspace, is a most welcome, in fact, urgently needed, vehicle that benefits everyone in the music field," says Alexandra Ivanoff, former artistic director of Noontime Concerts. "Artists, presenters, ensembles, and agent/managers finally have what they need to fuel the live classical performance industry."