ArtsSF

BERKELEY,CA—The highlight of the Berkeley Symphony program the other night was, astonishingly, the surprise vocal encore running close to 10 minutes in length: The S.F. Girls Chorus singing a near-a-cappella work with mezzo obbligata,”Only in Sleep” by the Australian Eriks Esenvalds. If ever there was proof of the emergence of the creative female, it was in this mellifluous chorus for the girls as led by the SFGC director, Valérie Sainte-Agathe. How apt, the distaff triumph in this hot-and-cold evening focusing…

Read More Read More

STANFORD, CA—Could anyone doubt that classical music is the world’s true lingua franca today, drawing together four continents? Consider a Polish orchestra coming here on tour with a South Korean violin soloist who had studied at the Juilliard School, NYC, and Nicaraguan conductor with an Italian name. Playing music from Germany and the Czech Republic from different centuries. The Polish NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic made a rare swing through Northern California and played two home-grown specials plus the Brahms First. This…

Read More Read More

The bracing symphony concert lit up the night with inflammatory bookends, and sweet music in between. The meticulously planned S.F. Symphony concert featured a work from each of four centuries, as if to trace the evolution of classical music in the post-baroque era. The sweetest was the most famous musical birthday/Christmas gift of all time, Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” written for his wife’s dual celebration in 1870. It’s in pyramid form, starting and ending as if on cat feet, with a…

Read More Read More

At age 75, it was a colossal iron-man achievement. He conducted his own world premiere song cycle, added on the challenge of less familiar Mahler lieder and led a stirring program from start to finish. This task was approaching a musical version of a triathlon. Before it was out, you half expected him to join the Berlioz brass section, realign the chairs, or go dancing down the aisle in Ravel’s “La valse.” Yes, this is the outgoing leader Michael Tilson…

Read More Read More

ROHNERT PARK, CA—The unfinished Mozart Requiem got a refined performance, deserving of both the sellouts and the ensuing ovations. Clearly, in this first year leading the Santa Rosa Symphony, Francesco Lecce-Chong is fast earning his spurs as music director, exhibiting his finesse and his deft 18th-century styling. For once we avoided the excess romanticization encountered so often. The emphasis was clearly on clarity and articulation, achieved best with the instrumentalists. (The otherwise effective massed chorus of 75 or so singing…

Read More Read More

SAN JOSE—The composer Aram Khachaturian was in a quandary, which probably explains most of the shortcomings of his grandiose Piano Concerto. In the 1930s composing in the Soviet Union, he was very much under the thumb of the fearsome dictator Stalin, who unfortunately thought himself an outstanding music critic. The pressure to survive and not have to vegetate in the gulags forever led several Soviet composers at that time, including also Shostakovich, to write shallow, flashy music “of the people”…

Read More Read More

REDWOOD CITY, CA—If you want to hear the symphonic sounds of today, in summer you go to the Santa Cruz Cabrillo Festival. In the rest of the year, you’d do very well with the Redwood City Symphony, an (unpaid) community orchestra that bites off contemporary scores with relish, chutzpah and fearlessness. And an audience of some 250 can be counted on to turn out for their adventures, with senior citizens at the forefront in patronage, drinking in all those moderns….

Read More Read More

OAKLAND—In one of the adventurous Oakland Symphony’s boldest and most exotic ventures, half of the Nov. 15 program was devoted to Korean music which, though timeless in style, seems downright avant garde to Western ears. The centerpiece was Cal grad Jean Ahn’s concerto “The Woven Silk,” with soloist Soo Yeon Lyuh playing the two-stringed bowed haegeum fiddle, which resembles the Chinese erhu. The orchestral effects are difficult and unfamiliar, with swooping gestures, low trombone rumbles, and furious drumming. The restless…

Read More Read More

ROHNERT PARK, CA—Once again, widespread disruptions threw a monkey wrench into the Santa Rosa Symphony concerts, this time from the Kincade Fire. Once again, evacuations (for 180,000) and power cutoffs forced losing rehearsals, with one of the play-ins, believe it or not, held in a casino out of necessity. But, as in 2017, the plucky SRS sucked it up, bounced back, and gamely played a slightly curtailed program. The musical reprise toward restoring normal life, full-speed-ahead, proved both moving and…

Read More Read More