San Francisco Classical Voice

What a difference a change of principals can make. Instead of the overhyped Anna Netrebko, who, as Violetta in the first five performances of San Francisco Opera’s production of Verdi’s La traviata, simplified her coloratura, shunned the much-anticipated E-flat at the end of a hardly free “Sempre libera” (Forever free), and mostly scratched the surface of her role, we now have the alive-in-the-moment soprano of Elizabeth Futral.

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Jonathan Khuner is a Bay Area classical music fixture. He is artistic and musical director for the Berkeley Opera. He also divides his time between the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera as assistant conductor and a prompter for both companies.

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How would classical music have evolved in the last century had not the Holocaust robbed us of some of our greatest composers? That is but one of the questions that preoccupied Susan Waterfall, cofounder of the Mendocino Music Festival, as she prepared for the festival’s July 16 evening program, They Left a Light: Masterpieces From Nazi Prison Camps. More about Mendocino Music Festival »
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“We’re having a lot of fun down here,” says David Gordon, dramaturge of the Carmel Bach Festival. For 71 years audiences have agreed, journeying to one of California’s most picturesque seaside towns for a summer idyll of Bach and his contemporaries, among other musical offerings.

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Channel has released another in its series of Mahler symphonies under Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Symphony No. 4 in G Major. The engineering is by far the most impressive thing about it: This SACD sounded terrific, even on my non-SACD player, displaying impressive depth and clarity of tone.

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