Michelle Dulak Thomson

We in the Bay Area have had a remarkable number of opportunities to hear the young violinist Hilary Hahn, whose more-or-less-yearly performances here stretch all the way back to her Brahms Concerto with the Santa Rosa Symphony in 1999. This year her return, courtesy of Cal Performances, was in recital with pianist Valentina Lisitsa, in a dauntingly difficult program given last Tuesday at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. It was a program seemingly calculated to demonstrate Hahn's range, and so it did, though not perhaps entirely as it was intended to.

An all-Vivaldi program is a tricky proposition. The Four Seasons notwithstanding, the listening public is apt to regard an evening of Vivaldi concertos with a certain skepticism, as half-remembered jibes about "the same concerto written 500 times" float to the mental surface.
As it happens, concocting a Vivaldi program bristling with variety and excitement is dead easy, as long as you avail yourself of the wildly scored ensemble concertos clustered toward the end of the Ryom (RV) Catalog.

One of the downsides of living and listening in a place so attractive to visiting artists as the Bay Area is that even the best musicians who actually live here have a hard time attracting notice among the touring stars. It takes attention to lower-profile recital series, faculty recitals, and the like even to realize how good we have it.
The Crowden School's "Sundays @ Four" series, at the Crowden Music Center in Berkeley, is one of our invaluable lines on the quality of the Bay Area's year-round musical community.

Ah, it's that time again. Spring is in the air, school's almost out, and summer music festivals beckon legions of young musicians. The Yehudi Menuhin Chamber Music Seminar and Festival, which the Alexander Quartet launched five years ago at San Francisco State University, is, when measured against the big weeks-long summer programs, a sort of summer-music-festival concentrate — that is, a welter of coachings, master classes, and performances crammed into a few days.

Sometimes it's better not to know too much of what goes on behind the scenes in the making of a performance. History is replete with examples of acrimonious, not to say borderline murderous, artistic partnerships resulting in splendid performances (and, for that matter, of unfailingly genial partnerships that never managed to spark).

The New Century Chamber Orchestra's ongoing season of guest-conducted performances has produced some fascinating programs (see, for example, SFCV's reviews of its January and March sets). April's run, guest-conducted by St. Lawrence Quartet first violinist Geoff Nuttall and heard Saturday at the Florence Gould Theater of San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor, was a dicier affair, owing to the music chosen and the ensemble's (and leader's) approach to it.