ArtsSF

BERKELEY—There’s been no composer quite like the French mystic Olivier Messiaen. He wrote long pieces on bird calls, on visions of Heaven, on memorable environments. He was a true believer in many areas, even in the whole-tone scale exploited by his countryman Debussy. Like Scriabin, Messiaen had synesthesia—the rare quality of seeing colors on hearing music, and vice versa. After hearing his immense, 92-minute tone poem “From the Canyon to the Stars,” I concluded that having the synesthesia gene would…

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BERKELEY—Mahler’s massive Symphony No. 5, heard here with the inspiring St. Louis Symphony the other day, is an extraordinary work, written during the creative euphoria of the Austrian composer’s recent marriage and honeymoon. Its long 68-minute musical path reminds me of a journey starting in a depressing, grimy industrial district (say, in Linz), and heading toward the dreamland of sunny Lake Worth, meandering through picturesque old towns (Hallstatt), bath resorts (Bad Ischl), and thriving vineyards, in anything but a crow-flies…

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BERKELEY—With her niche securely in place, Berkeley Symphony Music Director Joana Carneiro is diversifying the repertoire, presenting work of the two most prominent (active) European women composers this fall. There’s an audacity and imagination at play there, avoiding tired programs and rep duplications with other orchestras. Also her orchestra is sounding better than ever as she continues to hone the creativity, six years after her appointment here. The audacity was palpable when she led off with a dozen players scattered…

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I was about to write off the S.F. Symphony concerts this week until the guest maestra led a gorgeous and profound Sibelius Symphony No. 5 for a finale. The Fifth is a majestic century-old masterwork, full of the Finnish neoromantic’s distinctive Nordic coloration, achieved with instruments playing with enigmatic emotion in their lower register, festooned with somber French horns and soft timpani rolls. The podium guest was the glamorous young Susanna Mälkki (pronounced MELL-key), sending the music soaring heavenward with…

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Dispelling the Starch With the fluff and frills of the Gala opener out of the way, the San Francisco Symphony got down to business this week with a new work, and an East Coast conductor assisting the recuperating Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium. Clearly, both the SFS and the SFOpera had made an unaccustomed push toward new audiences via some Broadway programming—the opera actually opening the season in unprecedented fashion with the show “Sweeney Todd” instead of an opera….

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Polarities of Bates, Tchaikovsky OAKLAND—With a new name, new concertmaster and a couple of fast-rising artists, the orchestra under Michael Morgan made a splash opening its 28th season. This was the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the name now streamlined to Oakland Symphony, thus drawing a line all the way back to the latter’s inaugural back in 1933. That brings to mind the great era in the 1960s when the upstart and progressive O.S. stole the thunder from that far-better-heeled orchestra…

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Bold Semi-Staged ‘ThomasSolemnis’ at S.F. Symphony The audacity of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas is astounding, bordering on a touch a genius, as he dared to mount a semi-staged performance of Beethoven’s great Latin mass, the Missa Solemnis. It turned a church concert into a grand and vibrant spectacle at Davies Hall, which had to be reconfigured mightily to adapt to unaccustomed theatrical flashpoints. Controversy will surround this venture, of course, just as past stagings of church works like the…

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And SFS Tackling de Falla, Lethargically If you love classical music of Spain, you rush to the French composers. Enamored of the Iberian Peninsula, they gave us “Iberia,” “El Cid,” “Carmen,” “Bolero,” “Tzigane,” “Don Quichotte,” “España,” and myriad titles containing the word “espagnol.” The quasi-Spanish vein however has never been a strong repertory point of the S.F. Symphony, which took another crack at it this week under Charles Dutoit but served up merely a watered-down gazpacho. Two alluring works which…

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SFS’ Sensitive, Soulful Bartok & Mozart They put it all together, with inspiring sensitivity as never before. Pairing two repertory staples plus a new curtain-raiser is hardly news. But with the expert performances, the pindrop silence, and the sense of awe, this one proved one of the great symphony concerts of recent years. It was the San Francisco Symphony taking on one of the great 20th-century works, written by a dying man driven far from home by war: Bartok’s Concerto…

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It’s a Cynical Ill Wind, Blowing Very Well OAKLAND—Pulling off an enhanced concert version of Bernstein’s sprawling stage work “Candide” was a fitting season-ending achievement for the Oakland East Bay Symphony, with 11 solo singers plus chorus supplementing the orchestra. It marked the fitting cherry atop the 25-year OEBS stint of Music Director Michael Morgan, who had been a protégé of Bernstein himself more than 30 years ago. A large and enthusiastic crowd saluted this chameleon of a work, unlike…

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