Reviews

The Napa Valley's second annual Festival del Sole continued last Wednesday with another stellar performance by the Russian National Orchestra in Yountville's Lincoln Theater.

On a January morning a few years ago, I received a telephone call from an eminent professor of classical music. "Guess whose birthday it is!" he giggled. "No idea." His hint, "Your least favorite of the great composers!" caused me to reply, "Ah — it must be Mozart!" But the many pleasures of the first program of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, as well as advancing age, have changed my mind.

The world of music has several types of 22-year-old composers — brash, confident ones; shy, talented ones; and painfully insecure ones who look to the past and worry that they were born several generations too late. Last Thursday, the Carmel Bach Festival presented works by each of these types.

Time was when piano recitals would end with a rousing performance of a Hungarian rhapsody, an etude, or the Mephisto Waltz by Franz Liszt as a surefire way to bring the audience to its feet.

I don't know how many Danielle de Nieses there are, but I have already heard two of them. The first was a terrific Cleopatra in a remarkable presentation of excerpts from Handel's Giulio Cesare in Calistoga's Castello di Amorosa on July 14.

Although regional opera companies fulfill an important role in the American musical landscape, too often their limited resources and ambition cause them to cut corners and deliver cheap, amateurish productions. This is especially true of companies that try to mount reduced versions of monumental grand operas.

Friday evening’s concert by the Russian National Orchestra at the Lincoln Theater in Yountville was filled with pleasant surprises.

Jonathan Khuner, Berkeley Opera's artistic director, has long wanted to strip Verdi's Aïda of ancient Egyptian spectacle. Stage director Yuval Sharon was interested in making the composer’s story relevant to our times. In the opening performance of Aïda Saturday at the Julia Morgan Theatre, their successful collaboration was, in large part, fundamentally true to Verdi.

The sfSoundGroup continued to carve out an exciting niche for itself in its concert Sunday night at ODC Theater. Among all the area’s new-music ensembles, this group has evolved an aesthetic that most vividly brings to mind the Bay Area’s long history of experimentation and boundary-crossing.

You'd think that nothing could steal the thunder from the likes of Frederica von Stade, Sir James and Lady Jeanne Galway, and the Russian National Orchestra. But Friday the 13th brought a decidedly unmusical close to Festival del Sole's opening night in Napa.