San Francisco, CA USA
Written by Sason Bishope Parry
The San Francisco Symphony has never been afraid to push boundaries, but with SoundBox, it has quietly built one of the city’s most daring and forward-thinking performance platforms. For over a decade, this 21+ immersive series has transformed a cavernous, warehouse-like space adjacent to Davies Symphony Hall into something altogether different.
Part nightclub, part experimental art lab, part symphonic playground. SoundBox is not a concert in the traditional sense. Massive projection screens spill animated visuals across concrete walls. A powerful Meyer Sound surround system envelope the room with club-level clarity and volume. Musicians move freely through the space. Bars glow in the shadows. The atmosphere is dark, sensual, mysterious, and undeniably fun. Its where classical excellence collides with contemporary edge, and where the Symphony allows itself to get weird in the best possible way.
On Friday, February 6, SoundBox unveiled one of its most adventurous offerings yet. Dream Awake, curated by violinist Alexi Kenney, was an immersive, genre-defying journey that lingered in the body and mind long after the final note faded. From the moment you stepped inside, it was clear this was no ordinary evening. Rather than distinct stops and starts, much of the music flowed continuously, one work bleeding seamlessly into the next. Performers drifted through the audience. Sound, light, and movement blurred together. You weren’t just watching the performance. You were inside it.
Kenney transformed the Zellerbach A rehearsal space into what felt like a living, breathing psychedelic dreamscape, tracing an emotional arc that moved from disorientation and tension toward calm, clarity, and release. The program featured works by Kurtág, Xenakis, Ligeti, Norman, and Riley, with Kenney at the center as soloist. He was joined by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, conductor Radu Paponiu, and an exceptional group of SF Symphony musicians, including percussionists Jacob Nissly and Stan Muncy, and violinists Raushan Akhmedyarova and Jeein Kim, among many others.
The experience unfolded like a psychological passage through the night. What began as the uneasy, visceral confusion of waking life gradually descended into something darker and more primal, a shadowy dream-state filled with tension and intensity. Audience members described it as surreal, visceral, and mesmerizing. At points during the performance, certain sections, particularly Ligeti, leaned on intensity, but intensity was part of the spell. Sky-high glissandi, tunneling scales, and sensuous, searching textures created moments of wild fear and frenzy, balanced by passages of startling beauty and restraint.
Visually, the night was just as transportive. Fiery mandalas, solar flares, and abstract forms pulsed across the walls, deepening the sense of a shared hallucination. Performers glided through the space, at times appearing above the audience, including Kenney himself, who delivered portions of the performance from an overhead catwalk. The collaboration with designers Kritzeck and Larsen ensured that sound and image were never competing, but instead working in hypnotic lockstep.
As the program moved toward its conclusion, the chaos began to soften. The nocturnal intensity gave way to warmth and light, like the slow emergence of dawn. The final moments felt like a sunrise made audible. You could feel the room exhale. When the last notes dissolved, people lingered, buzzing, glowing, visibly changed by what they had just experienced. Dream Awake didn’t just entertain. It recalibrated.
This was SoundBox at its most fearless and refined. A reminder that when classical music is allowed to breathe, move, and dream beyond tradition, it can feel as alive and electric as anything happening in the cultural underground. Definitely one for the memory. And the books.
For more info on SF Symphony go to: www.sfsymphony.org
For more on Soundbox go to: www.sfsymphony.org/Discover-the-Music/SoundBox
