Robert P. Commanday

His 90th birthday anniversary triggers the celebrations of the late Andrew Imbrie and his music. On Friday, March 25, Composers Inc. kicks off the series with a promising program featuring new works written to honor his memory by former students David del Tredici, Richard Festinger, and Hi Kyung Kim, and another new piece in Imbrie’s honor by his distinguished colleague and friend Yehudi Wyner.

Jane Hohfeld Galante, a leading chamber musician and prominent San Franciscan, died at her home in San Francisco Wednesday morning. She was 86. She had been a leader in San Francisco’s chamber music scene for more than 60 years as a pianist, scholar, board member, and vigorous advocate of music and education.

Alan Rich, America’s most outspoken classical music critic, died in his sleep Friday in his home in West Los Angeles at the age of 85. For his entire career, he was as full-out in his enthusiasms and advocacies as he was unsparing and sharp in his assessments, always making a deep impression. He was, in short, a leading commentator on the classical music scene, one who would not just engage but stir his reader.

While California and its constituent parts sit in a blue mood, Sonoma County on Friday night was celebrating the future and its hopes. At least, 350 of its movers and shakers were doing that, the donors who had raised much of the $96 million toward building the Green Music Center on the Rohnert Park campus of Sonoma State University. In their presence that night, the Santa Rosa Symphony gave the first real test to the auditorium that bids to be the prime symphony hall in Northern California.

The San Francisco Symphony’s Chamber Music Series, offered most Sunday afternoons, is a dependable bet. There, members of the Symphony emerge as individuals from orchestral submersion and can be heard doing what they most like to do, as best they can. The players, not the Symphony, program it, so there is little or no Russian music, no Mahler, but rather music of fresh interest — as was the case last Sunday in Davies Symphony Hall.

There’s a lot of life left in the old Ring myth, made abundantly apparent Sunday and Monday in the opening of Seattle Opera’s current rerunning of Wagner’s tetralogy. With Stephen Wadsworth’s imaginative direction, the first two operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were wholly engaging, his fresh interpretation showing how little need there is to transport the story into different times, cultures, or modern places, to try to make obvious strained metaphors of class or economic conflict or whatever. 

A summer-style music festival in the middle of March? There it was, full-blown in Boca Raton, Florida, the resort community's third annual Festival of the Arts Boca, March 5-15.