Although many arts organizations capitalize on the holidays to throw together friendly (and underrehearsed) programs of familiar music, Christmas has long inspired the vivid imagination of composers and performers through a wealth of excellent music. It was heartening, therefore, to see Berkeley’s First Congregational Church filled Saturday night to hear a reconstruction of a 1660 Christmas Vespers at the Dresden Court Chapel through a festive collaboration between the early-music ensembles Magnificat, the Whole Noyse, and the Sex Chordae Consort of Viols.
Judging by the number of excellent professional string players who showed up to hear the New Esterházy Quartet Saturday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco, the small audience knew it was in for a treat. This quartet is my favorite type of chamber ensemble.
Although museums and classical music are both part of “the arts,” art historians often have minimal understanding of music and music history. This was readily apparent on Sunday afternoon when San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor presented New York–based Asteria — a fine early-music duo — in a program of medieval love songs from the mid-15th-century court of Charles the Bold.
One of the nice things about an ensemble like Warren Stewart’s Magnificat, which I heard Saturday at St. Mark’s Church in Berkeley, is that having a flexible roster of musicians enables it to match itself to the needs of the music at hand.
One of the great things about the San Francisco Early Music Society’s concert series is that it gives exposure to emerging ensembles and new collaborations. On Saturday at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, I heard the Baroque Band, a Chicago string ensemble formed in 2007 by violinist Garry Clarke.
Metropolitan Cleveland is about the size of metro Sacramento, yet in addition to the famous Cleveland Orchestra, it’s also home to Apollo’s Fire, a professional Baroque orchestra I was fortunate enough to hear Sunday at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall.
The most beloved and successful composer ever is surely Anonymous. Judging by the strong turnout for Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice on the San Francisco Early Music Society series last Saturday in Berkeley, word had gotten out that Anonymous was still up to his or her usual misdeeds.
I have long wished to hear a live performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Descent d’Orphée aux enfers. Several years ago, I even transcribed portions of the composer’s manuscript from a facsimile in the UC Berkeley library.
I must have been caught in some sort of Bach nexus to review three concerts of the composer's choral works over the past three weeks. Saturday's performance of Bach's B-minor Mass by the San Francisco Bach Choir at the Calvary Presbyterian church gave me a unique opportunity to observe the effect of artistic leadership and performing environment on a period instrument band with the same concertmistress, a majority of the same instrumentalists, and even common soloists.
On Sunday, Christopher Kula tested the mettle of his Pacific Collegium, artists-in-residence at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Oakland, with a challenging set of Bach Cantatas (nos. 22, 182, 54, 49, and 106). Kula's programs are ambitious and often overachieving, but he was able to contract a roster of first-rate players on period instruments who normally sit in the front chairs of the Bay Area's best and more established groups. It was satisfying to see the Pacific Collegium come so far.
In his opening remarks before Sunday’s concert at St. Mark’s Lutheran church in San Francisco, American Bach Soloists’ Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas made only scant mention of the specter lurking behind the choir’s final program of the season: the date February 13, 1945.
I hope British conductor Peter Phillips and members of the Tallis Scholars — the choral ensemble he founded in 1973 — would be flattered to know that one of their recordings was the second compact disc I ever bought. I missed the LP generation, and that CD had been out for 10 years. Sunday’s all-Victoria program presented by Cal Performances at Berkeley’s acoustically ideal First Congregational Church was, therefore, comfort music for me. The performance was as vocally resplendent as my nerdy teenage ears remembered, minus the puffy sleeves and pastels of mid–’80s fashion.
For pretentious types, the term Freeway Philharmonic carries deservedly pejorative overtones. Regional orchestras, with precarious funding and limited seasons, tend to offer reliably safe fare, of the overture-concerto-intermission-symphony variety. Separate audiences attend a moneymaking pops series given minimal rehearsal. It was heartening, therefore, to hear Music Director Alasdair Neale leading the Marin Symphony in a Sunday program that challenged the dingy rituals of both “masterworks” and pops concerts.
It would have been hard to tell, observing the small, graying audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Saturday, that videos of the early-music band Voices of Music had received, as of this writing, 3,558,070 hits on YouTube. I suspect a good deal of those came from Web queries for the famous Pachelbel Canon, of which VOM has posted an excellent recording.
I didn’t need to hop a train to Palo Alto Wednesday to check out the latest in avant-garde electronica, famed vocals, and a cultish following; I could have waited for Friday’s new Radiohead album. “The Electric Voice,” Stanford Lively Arts' program of new works for electronics and voice, featuring bass Nicholas Isherwood, reinforced the contradictions and arrogance often associated with the field of highbrow electronic music.
Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco hosted a concert on Sunday consisting of larger chamber works by Martinů, Vaughan Williams, Schubert, Monteverdi, and others. It was organized by members of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, a good community orchestra identifying with the LGBT community. The concert solicited donations for Larkin Street Youth Services, as well as the three-year-old orchestra’s own fund to purchase percussion instruments.
On Sunday, I had the rare fortune to hear the Aulos Ensemble presented by Music at Kohl Mansion in a Christmas concert in Hillsborough that managed to stand apart from the tired demands of the season while capturing the joy of the holiday.
California State University only seems to show up in the news nowadays in tales of budget cuts, tuition raises, deferred maintenance, and devastating program reductions. Fortunately, the May T. Morrison Artists Series of free chamber music concerts at San Francisco State University is protected by permanent endowment. On Sunday, the Czech Nonet opened the series’ 55th season, curated by a new artistic director, composer Ronald Caltabiano.
OK, I’ll admit it: I am addicted to the cable reality show Project Runway, a competition for fashion designers. The charm of the show lies in observing the designers’ genuine creativity. They are encouraged to be unique and innovative and to express their point of view as a designer while satisfying their clients and facing difficult design challenges.
Judging by the number of excellent professional string players who showed up to hear the New Esterházy Quartet Saturday at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco, the small audience knew it was in for a treat. This quartet is my favorite type of chamber ensemble.
Although museums and classical music are both part of “the arts,” art historians often have minimal understanding of music and music history. This was readily apparent on Sunday afternoon when San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor presented New York–based Asteria — a fine early-music duo — in a program of medieval love songs from the mid-15th-century court of Charles the Bold.
One of the nice things about an ensemble like Warren Stewart’s Magnificat, which I heard Saturday at St. Mark’s Church in Berkeley, is that having a flexible roster of musicians enables it to match itself to the needs of the music at hand.
One of the great things about the San Francisco Early Music Society’s concert series is that it gives exposure to emerging ensembles and new collaborations. On Saturday at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, I heard the Baroque Band, a Chicago string ensemble formed in 2007 by violinist Garry Clarke.
Metropolitan Cleveland is about the size of metro Sacramento, yet in addition to the famous Cleveland Orchestra, it’s also home to Apollo’s Fire, a professional Baroque orchestra I was fortunate enough to hear Sunday at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall.
The most beloved and successful composer ever is surely Anonymous. Judging by the strong turnout for Montreal-based Ensemble Caprice on the San Francisco Early Music Society series last Saturday in Berkeley, word had gotten out that Anonymous was still up to his or her usual misdeeds.
I have long wished to hear a live performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Descent d’Orphée aux enfers. Several years ago, I even transcribed portions of the composer’s manuscript from a facsimile in the UC Berkeley library.
n his opening remarks before Sunday’s concert at St. Mark’s Lutheran church in San Francisco, American Bach Soloists’ Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas made only scant mention of the specter lurking behind the choir’s final program of the season: the date February 13, 1945.
It would have been hard to tell, observing the small, graying audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Saturday, that videos of the early-music band Voices of Music had received, as of this writing, 3,558,070 hits on YouTube. I suspect a good deal of those came from Web queries for the famous Pachelbel Canon, of which VOM has posted an excellent recording.
I didn’t need to hop a train to Palo Alto Wednesday to check out the latest in avant-garde electronica, famed vocals, and a cultish following; I could have waited for Friday’s new Radiohead album. “The Electric Voice,” Stanford Lively Arts' program of new works for electronics and voice, featuring bass Nicholas Isherwood, reinforced the contradictions and arrogance often associated with the field of highbrow electronic music.
