Michelle Dulak Thomson
Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.
Articles by this Author
CD REVIEW
May 31, 2011
In Washington State, the Icicle Creek Piano Trio makes its repertoire sound natural, but almost too easy.
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May 17, 2011
SFCV's longtime expert on all things stringed highlights seven fantastic new recordings by star violinists, including a few surprises.
More "Hi-Fi Violinists: A Bouquet of New Recordings" »CD REVIEW
May 5, 2011
Composer Gabriela Lena Frank, a master miniaturist, presents colorful chamber works drawn from her Peruvian heritage.
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April 26, 2011
Smaller-scale oratorios that Bach repurposed are sung vibrantly by the Retrospect Ensemble, and wonderfully recorded.
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April 5, 2011
The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili takes listeners on a mesmerizing tour of the Soviet and post-Soviet musical landscape, with seraphic stops and sights along the way.
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March 29, 2011
Stunning performances of 13th-century English music are Trio Mediaeval’s latest offering, music so perfectly blended that it almost hurts.
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March 22, 2011
More Brahms is always a good thing, as proven on an impressive new recording by cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Awadagin Pratt.
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March 15, 2011
A new CD release of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, is an often lovely, often puzzling performance — sometimes innocently affectionate, sometimes seeming to be making historical points in a way that aren't necessarily beneficial.
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February 22, 2011
It’s pleasing for a great orchestra to record the standard repertoire; but it’s more exciting, from an audience perspective, for it to record something you’ve not had the opportunity to hear before. The San Francisco Symphony’s recent release is not only an artistic triumph but emblematic of priorities rightly ordered.
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February 8, 2011
Classical musicians don’t ordinarily record “albums” now; they record works. But Musica Pacifica’s Dancing in the Isles is an album.
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January 18, 2011
A new performance can make you re-imagine a piece you thought you'd known cold: Two new discs, by the Pavel Haas and Artemis Quartets, remind me of that. And what the two groups share is extraordinary technical crispness coupled with tenderness and intelligence; the ability to refresh and renew.
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January 11, 2011
It’s not often that we get to hear such a large body of new music, developed over a long time, by one composer and played by a single ensemble. No one could listen to Lisa Bielawa's two-CD set and not marvel.
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January 4, 2011
By design, chamber music can be performed anywhere. Bay Area musicians like to perform it everywhere. Here, SFCV’s premier chamber music maven takes on the task of winnowing down this gorgeous superfluity to just five (well, and a few more) hot tickets you can’t afford to miss.
More "Up Close: The Five Best Chamber Concerts for Spring " »CD REVIEW
December 28, 2010
Composer Rodolphe Kreutzer — pretty much off the public’s radar, but very much on the violin student’s — is brought to life in a fantastic CD by Axel Strauss thanks to his incredible nimbleness in both hands and one utterly lovely cantabile.
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November 30, 2010
A new CD from the New Century Chamber Orchestra is designed around Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, and bracketed with Barber, Mahler, and live recordings. Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and her orchestra have every right to be proud of it.
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October 19, 2010
It’s a rare Pulitzer Prize winner in music who can boast a major-label recording of the winning work issued the same year as the award. Indeed, Jennifer Higdon (who won the 2010 Music Pulitzer for her Violin Concerto) would seem to be the first in a long time. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have been writing for Hilary Hahn.
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September 14, 2010
Not that long ago it would have been rare to find any small label issuing all 12 of Haydn’s last symphonies at one go, and borderline impossible to find them so well-played as they are on Marc Minkowski’s new set of Haydn’s “London” Symphonies, with Les Musiciens du Louvre.
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September 7, 2010
Chamber music is everything from traditional string quartets to So Percussion to small orchestras. You would need an entire iPhone app linked to the Classical Voice calendar to keep track of all the chamber music events in the Bay Area. Instead of an app, we have an op: Michelle Dulak Thomson, SFCV’s longtime string quartet maven, who gives you the inside scoop on five hot small ensembles playing here this fall.
More "Close Up: Five Rewarding Chamber Music Concerts" »CD REVIEW
August 3, 2010
One of the persistent pleasures in listening to whatever comes your way is that any random find may lead you to treasure. You pick up a stray gem, track its source, and suddenly uncover an entire vein of music as good. It was like that for me with Georg Philipp Telemann’s orchestral suites.
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July 27, 2010
It’s a tried-and-true strategy for constructing programs, concerts, and CDs alike: Make certain there’s a surefire favorite in there somewhere, then pack around it as much unfamiliar music as you dare. Not often, though, have I seen it deployed as baldly as it is on the new Mozart recording by the Cleveland-based period-instrument orchestra Apollo’s Fire.
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