ArtsSF

The San Francisco Symphony’s two favorite 73-year-olds made music in what the audience regarded more as entertainment than concert. The stars were in conjunction when violinist Itzhak Perlman and his friend, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, collaborated on several works, both classical and movie, in the SFS season-opener gala Sept. 5. Of special interest were a sextet of former Perlman violin students  shouldering some of the performance burden alongside the master, all seven joining in a wild and woolly fiddle-faddle…

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We’re not the world leaders in music education, but we’ve evolved rather incredibly in concert maturity. Between the two world wars Grandma would proudly attend the afternoon musicale concerts at a Washington, DC club and rave about the Pilgrim’s Chorus or the Strauss waltz she had heard. It was virtually the only classical music in the nation’s capital apart from the symphony with its mediocre conductor, playing in a huge hall. One of the musicians later reported that at the…

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Nearly a month at the S.F. Symphony’s season end is currently devoted to music and artists from Finland and Russia, blending new and old congenially. The last of these shone the spotlight on the versatile and resourceful pianist Daniil Trifonov, 26, in that legendary knuckle-buster, Rach3 (Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto). Trifonov is a unique figure, reveling in such supreme virtuoso tests, a man smiling the whole time where others might well resort to a Rasputin-like scowl. He offers an amiable…

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The dearth of Russian opera in these parts has been addressed, not by the S.F. Opera but rather the S.F. Symphony. And it’s high time. For the most candid view of Russian culture, tumultuous history and power-grabs, there’s no better place to start than Mussorgsky’s gloom-and-doom opera “Boris Godunov,” launched a century and a half ago. Despotic rulers, the poverty-stricken mobs of the oppressed, the focal role of religion, they all feed into this epic nationalist drama having no hero,…

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A symphony program featuring exotic Eastern-European moderns, substitutes and  women-at-the-forefront provided a late-season highlight at the San Francisco Symphony, where the street might still be resounding from the unaccustomed claps and cheers of both musicians and audience. And once again Susanna Mälkki was on the podium, clearly a strong prospect to be the S.F. Symphony’s next music director, with a big IF: provided she could be wrenched away from the current podia of Los Angeles, Helsinki and the Metropolitan Opera in…

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ROHNERT PARK, CA—After 12 years, the Santa Rosa Symphony is bidding au revoir, or perhaps adieu, to Music Director Bruno Ferrandis. Never one to skimp on challenges, the French conductor programmed the fiendishly difficult 81-minute Mahler Ninth Symphony—an apt adieu for the composer himself—along with a contemporary concerto. In this go-round of the  Ninth of 1910,  for all but the first movement I’d give glowing reviews. The rustic country dance of the second movement went spiritedly, rowdy enough to contrast…

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There he was in a full-body resonant thrill, something never witnessed in some 10,000 concerts I’ve attended. His whole body trembled ecstatically as he raised his vehemently shaking fists on high during the ocean-swell ovations for the Mahler Fifth just concluded. No, not a seizure. Just an energized attack of great classical music. With his departure a bit more than two years away, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, 73, realizes that each time may be his last leading that composition…

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