David Bratman
David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.
Articles by this Author
If you’re a pianist — or any musician, really — who’s planning a CD containing multiple works, you can pick related pieces by the same composer and create an entry for the library shelf, or you can structure it like a recital, with a variety of compositions to show off your chops and keep the audience interested through a continuous playing.
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, as its name might suggest even to someone unfamiliar with it, is from Great Britain. To a concert at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Saturday, it came with Artistic Director Charles Dutoit, who is Swiss, and guest pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who is French. The music they played was by composers who were German and Hungarian.
The problem with being a fan of the music of dead composers is that they’re not writing any more of it. Take 
“I Like Ludwig” was the title that Music Director Benjamin Simon put on the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra’s New Year’s concerts this year, and he didn’t mean Ludwig Spohr. The concert, which I heard in Sunday afternoon’s performance at St. Mark’s Church in Palo Alto, offered two solid hours of the pure essence of heroic, midperiod Beethoven.
Most string quintets, other than Schubert's, don't get played often. The San Francisco Symphony Chamber Musicians have the personnel to do it. They will perform Mozart's K. 516 in G Minor and Mendelssohn's Op.
This San Francisco Symphony season seems to be the year for orchestrations of chamber and piano works. Two weeks ago, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas led Mahler’s string orchestra transcription of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. In March, he’ll reprise Henry Brant’s orchestration of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata for piano, a success here two years ago.
Is combining orchestral and chamber music in one concert the next new thing? I’ve already attended 
The stage at Dinkelspiel Auditorium was almost completely empty for the Stanford Lively Arts program on Sunday afternoon. It held just one man, one violin, one composer.
In its operning concert of the season for Stanford Lively Arts on Sunday afternoon at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, the St. Lawrence String Quartet gave the first performance of a new work by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960).
The Sphinx Virtuosi, whose performance on Wednesday was the first Dinkelspiel Auditorium concert in Stanford Lively Arts' season, is a conductor-less 18-member string orchestra of young professional players. It's sponsored by the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based nonprofit group whose purpose is to increase the participation of Blacks and Latinos in classical music.
The Cypress String Quartet is bringing in renowned cellist Gary Hoffman to help them play Schubert's masterpiece, the String Quintet in C Major. The Cypress foursome will also perform a Ravel string quartet, and Hoffman will display the suite for solo cello by Gaspar Cassadó, a pupil of the great Pablo Casals. Part of the San Jose Chamber Music Society series.
The Music@Menlo festival season is drawing towards a close, as the directors and administrators who introduce each concert never tire of reminding us. The final of the four Carte Blanche Concerts, on Wednesday at the Menlo-Atherton Center for Performing Arts, was originally scheduled to feature pianist Menahem Pressler, who had to cancel due to a family emergency.
The Music@Menlo chamber music festival focuses this season on Brahms. Its third regular program, at the Menlo-Atherton Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday (repeated from Stent Family Hall on Friday), was built around one particular 
David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.