Religious mysticism has inspired composers throughout music history, from Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century to James MacMillan in our own time, by way of Wagner, Messiaen, and many others.
As announced, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s visit as part of the American Orchestras series marked the return of the great orchestra after a 15-year absence, a chance to assess its state after five years under James Levine, and an opportunity to hear two recent works by important American composers.
When James Levine withdrew from the Metropolitan Opera’s fall season, a series of dominos fell in the musical world, including the scheduled appearance of Fabio Luisi to conduct four performances of the Verdi Requiem with the San Francisco Symphony.
The wind quintet repertory gets little exposure in the world of chamber music, where string quartets and piano-plus-strings are the ensembles most likely to be programmed — and it’s not as though dozens of first-rate wind quintets evangelize for that repertory.
San Francisco Symphony, under Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, closed out its regular season with a run of performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. At the first performance of the series, Thomas had not yet succeeded in conquering this thorny work’s many challenges, and the concert was further hampered by the surprising variability of the soloists. Overall, the performance suffered from a general lack of cohesiveness and an inability on the conductor’s part to adequately clarify the structure of the Missa and its individual movements.
Gustav Mahler died a century ago, and this year, orchestras everywhere are playing his works. Here in the Bay Area, we are lucky to have Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, who have given us greatness on top of greatness in Mahler as they recorded his symphonies and orchestral songs over the last few years. Saturday night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 — often called the “Resurrection,” though not by the composer — was yet another triumph.
Osmo Vänskä’s guest conducting stints at San Francisco Symphony have almost always featured slightly offbeat programming — a symphony by Aulis Sallinen or Carl Nielsen, a short work by Kalevi Aho — and last week’s concert, heard Thursday, was no exception. A beloved warhorse, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, was joined by the premiere of Thomas Larcher’s Red and Green and by Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A London Symphony.
The Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená has recorded and performed music ranging from Bach, Handel, and Mozart to Berlioz, Debussy, and other French composers and to 20th-century composers from her native land such as Janáček and Martinů.
Johannes Brahms and Alban Berg, great Viennese masters, make a good pairing, and San Francisco Symphony brought them together for its Thanksgiving week concerts. The well-thought-out and well-executed program never quite caught fire Friday evening, for reasons difficult or impossible to determine. It might have been the chill draft blowing through Davies Symphony Hall, the traffic that delayed some of the musicians’ arrival (and thus the concert), or the effects of the intended 6:30 p.m. starting time.
Back in 2001, when Pamela Rosenberg arrived as general manager of San Francisco Opera, her plans included an ambitious survey of the major operas of Hector Berlioz and Leoš Janáček. With the economic downturn and Rosenberg’s departure from the company, only one opera by Berlioz and three by Janáček made it to the stage of War Memorial Opera House. Now, in the fourth year of David Gockley’s tenure, the company has finally gotten to The Makropulos Case, Janáček’s penultimate opera, in a coproduction with the Finnish National Opera.
Henry Purcell, composer of some 800 cataloged works, never wrote an opera titled The Witch of Endor, so the question arose as to what, exactly, Urban Opera would be performing over Halloween weekend. The answer turned out to be something perhaps closer to a masque than an opera, a number of works by Purcell and others assembled for a performance equal in musical brilliance and theatrical flair to the company’s inaugural production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have a long history of successful and seemingly idiomatic performances of French music, and thus Saturday’s program, advertised as “French Classics,” looked both appealing and promising. Alas, that promise was not wholly fulfilled until the second half of the concert.
On Friday, Old First Concerts presented the premier concert by EUOUAE, a new chorus whose membership is drawn from many of the Bay Area’s professional and semiprofessional choirs. Formed and directed by Steven Sven Olbash, EUOUAE performed the rarely heard Messe de Tournai, a musical milestone in that the 14th-century Mass is the first-known complete polyphonic (multivoiced) Mass collected in a single manuscript.
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, opened at San Francisco Opera on Thursday night with a thrilling, deeply moving performance that bodes extremely well for the full Ring to be presented in June 2011.
The British composer Thomas Adès has been writing intricately structured and colorfully orchestrated music for nearly two decades now. Before he became a composer, though, he trained for a career as pianist, and he has the formidable technique and deep musicianship of a great player.
New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current program, titled “Serenades and Dances,” bookends a pair of shorter, lighter works around a core of two large-scale mainstays of the standard repertory, Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. Big kudos are due Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, for her programming and musical leadership, because on Thursday, at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, all four works got top-notch, absorbing performances, with the Britten lifted to greatness by the brilliance of tenor Brian Thorsett and horn player Kevin Rivard.
The San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music concert on Sunday marked George Benjamin’s third and last appearance as the Phyllis C. Wattis Composer in Residence. He was represented on the program by two works, Viola, Viola; and Piano Figures. Both are superb additions to their respective repertories. (See SFCV’s recent feature on the composer.)
Religious mysticism has inspired composers throughout music history, from Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century to James MacMillan in our own time, by way of Wagner, Messiaen, and many others.
As announced, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s visit as part of the American Orchestras series marked the return of the great orchestra after a 15-year absence, a chance to assess its state after five years under James Levine, and an opportunity to hear two recent works by important American composers.
When James Levine withdrew from the Metropolitan Opera’s fall season, a series of dominos fell in the musical world, including the scheduled appearance of Fabio Luisi to conduct four performances of the Verdi Requiem with the San Francisco Symphony.
The Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená has recorded and performed music ranging from Bach, Handel, and Mozart to Berlioz, Debussy, and other French composers and to 20th-century composers from her native land such as Janáček and Martinů.
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera of 
