San Francisco Classical Voice

Look at the rest of the visiting offerings, and you can't help but be overawed; but what's more impressive is what we already have here. Just to highlight a few:

• Janssen Todorov and William Corbett-Jones doing all the mature Mozart violin sonatas in four programs, at SF State. (See their events listing.) If you haven't taken these sonatas seriously as music, go hear some. I haven't heard the Todorov/Corbett-Jones duo yet, but the very fact that they've programmed essentially all the later sonatas suggests to me that they are people who, so to speak, "get" the music. Whereas Hilary Hahn (returning at the end of October with another half-Mozart recital) doesn't understand it at all.
• Magnificat (see their site here), which is quickly cornering the 17th-c. niche in the Bay Area (What? There's a 17th-c. niche? Who knew?). Their programs this year mine the same mostly-Italian vein that Warren Stewart has worked for some years: Carissimi in September, Monteverdi in November, Rovetta in December. If some of the composer names are unfamiliar, don't let that put you off. This is stunning stuff, and they do a marvelous job with it.
• Left Coast Ensemble (their season programs can be found here) — not exactly a "new music ensemble," but a flexible, mixed chamber ensemble with a strong new-music bent — their upcoming season is, well, fantastic. There aren't many ensembles that would dare do the underexposed music of more than one century at a time. But here are, for example, Dvorák's F-minor Trio and Ligeti's Second Quartet sitting together on a program (12/6). Wow, say I.

On the solo-keyboard front, a variant of the story plays out. At the major presenters you find the usual guests (e.g., Lang Lang, on 11/13, via Cal Performances) and a few surprises (e.g., Rudolf Buchbinder, 10/10, also Cal Performances, and Daniel Barenboim, via the San Francisco Symphony's Great Performers Series); but then you look over the schedule and discover that — for example — Sergey Schepkin, a man who made himself an unexpected reputation as a Bach pianist via a bunch of recordings on a very small record label, is giving a recital December 3rd at San Francisco's Old First Church: Bach's Second Partita, Kreisleriana, and Pictures at an Exhibition. That is the sort of program that will tell very clearly what the man can or can't do. And it isn't on a major presenter's series, but on one largely under-covered and, for that matter, under-populated given the overall quality. (See Old First Concerts for an idea of what else is happening there; it bears watching!)

On the vocal front, the major presenters win. If there's a single must-hear vocal recital this fall, it's Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes in Schubert's Winterreise (Herbst Theater, 10/25; presented by San Francisco Performances). Unfortunately, the exigencies of publishing a journal that goes live late Monday night mean that I probably won't hear the must-hear recital. But the rest of you have no excuse. Go!