Jeff Dunn

Ah! The Cabrillo Festival finale: “To hear infinity in the Mission San Juan Bautista and eternity in 97 minutes” — such was the hope implied by its “in aeternam” moniker. William Blake reminded us that “the raging of the stormy sea and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the [inner] eye of man,” but that didn’t stop three of four featured composers from taking a direct shot at the concept.

If you head to iTunes, you can check out a great new recording of American compositions in the live DG Concerts series, for which John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his own work. It used to be that new classical pieces, if they got recorded at all, took years to get on a CD.

How in the world could the San Francisco Library lead the violist Pamela Freund-Striplen to a pool, “full of old fish, blind-stricken long ago ... revealed only by the croaking of consumptive frogs”? Like the best adventures, the path was circuitous, but the result was a highly imaginative program for her Gold Coast Chamber Players that absorbed lucky listeners at the Lafayette Library Community Hall Saturday night.

The audience was so racked with coughing fits, you’d think it was a sanatorium for consumptives rather than Davies Symphony Hall. Nevertheless, Gustavo Dudamel, leading the L.A.

For Music Director David Robertson, it’s his rubber-man upper torso and windmill arm gestures. For violin soloist Gil Shaham, it’s a puckish crouch that enables instant flitting between positions within an inch of the conductor, the first-chair violinist, or the front edge of the stage. Whichever parts of the anatomy they favored, upper or lower, both artists in doing so fired up St. Louis Symphony players and a San Francisco audience Saturday at Davies Symphony Hall to a fever pitch of performance and appreciation.

I’ve covered so many scrape-a-thon concerts of new music featuring the cello that I’ve almost forgotten what a gorgeous, melodious instrument it is. With cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han’s release (on the ArtistLed label) of four duos they commissioned, the lyrical cello returns with welcome suffusion.