Michelle Dulak Thomson

There was half an hour to go before the concert, but if you happened to be standing outside St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco at 3:30 on Saturday you could hear them. Just a few highly trained people, a few feet apart, yet formidably strong and utterly fearless — powering through their chosen medium at alarming speed and with frightening precision ...

If you had been in the audience for Saturday's Michael Tilson Thomas–led San Francisco Symphony concert, and had opened the printed program at random, more likely than not you would have hit the page of bios for the soloists in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which are just at the midpoint of the booklet. You might, on the other hand, have landed a few pages further on, with your eye lighting on the bolded phrase "abnormal thoughts and behavior." Part of the Ninth's program note?

The didactic imperative runs deep, if gentle, at Music@Menlo. Every season and indeed every program boasts a design, one calculated to make the audience hear anew, or differently, or both. But throw a roster of musicians of the Music@Menlo caliber together on programs, and the lessons you planned for your listeners might not be the only ones they learn.
"Classical Bookends: Haydn and Schubert" was the title of the second evening Music@Menlo program, and meant no more than that Haydn and Schubert stood at opposite ends of what we've come to call the "Classical Period" in music.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra's next season will see the orchestra with a regular music director again, in the person of the newly hired Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Still, the ensemble's two-year run of guest-directed concerts, a running adventure that has resulted in far more hits than misses, is ending on a high note.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is unique among the Bay Area's new-music-focused ensembles in spending a fair amount of time outside the 21st or even 20th centuries. LCCE programs typically juxtapose new, 20th-century, and yet older works playable with a particular clutch of four or five instrumentalists, the instrumentarium changing from program to program as each of the ensemble's 12 players gets a lick in.
So Monday's program in the Veterans Building's Green Room, featuring music for clarinet, violin, cello, and (in two of three pieces) piano, was typical of the ensemble's planning.

An entire program's worth of Haydn is not something the San Francisco Symphony is apt to serve up every year, so thanks are due up front to guest conductor Bernard Labadie for Friday night's generous helping. The program, which also featured the Symphony Chorus and an excellent quartet of vocal soloists, had a martial theme, bringing together the Missa in tempore belli (Mass in time of war) of 1796 and the “Military” Symphony (No.

A decade or so back, there was some talk of a planned, independent-label Beethoven symphony cycle from Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all the recording to be done in concert. Since then, PBO has taken to issuing live recordings on its own label, and the Beethoven project appears to be taking slow shape. A disc coupling the "Eroica" and the Eighth Symphony appeared in 2005, and last year was joined by this Ninth.
Listen to the Music

• Symphony No.
  

Tastes in violin recitals have changed markedly over the years. At one time, the second half of a virtuoso's program generally consisted entirely of what we now think of as encore pieces. Nowadays, paradoxically, the only time you are likely to see a program like that is when the player is an "intellectual" musician making a historical point.