CD Reviews
Each week, our professional critics review the latest recording releases, from Bay Area music groups to international releases our editors think deserve your attention.
CD REVIEW
March 22, 2011
In Yuja Wang's first orchestral recording the pianist enthralls, ravishes, and demonstrates a kind of magic in what the pianist describes as “red-hot" reportoire.
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March 15, 2011
A new CD release of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, is an often lovely, often puzzling performance — sometimes innocently affectionate, sometimes seeming to be making historical points in a way that aren't necessarily beneficial.
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March 12, 2011
The latest release from the Bay Brass, an ensemble made up of some of the best musicians in the S.F. Symphony, Ballet, and Opera orchestras offers attractive compositions and more than belies prejudices often conjured up by brass ensembles, with excellent playing and first rate sonics.
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March 1, 2011
Joyce DiDonato’s latest recording, DivaDivo displays an artist so on top of her form and versatile in her voice that, like her last CD, it has a good chance of snaring another round of awards.
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February 22, 2011
It’s pleasing for a great orchestra to record the standard repertoire; but it’s more exciting, from an audience perspective, for it to record something you’ve not had the opportunity to hear before. The San Francisco Symphony’s recent release is not only an artistic triumph but emblematic of priorities rightly ordered.
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February 15, 2011
Hélène Grimaud’s new solo disc Resonances comprises the recital program she has been touring this past season. It is a welcome change to find a pianist willing to risk the juxtaposition of Mozart and Berg.
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February 8, 2011
Classical musicians don’t ordinarily record “albums” now; they record works. But Musica Pacifica’s Dancing in the Isles is an album.
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February 8, 2011
Our very own San Francisco Symphony have come up with an excellent performance of the most famous symphony of them all. This release is worth making some sublime noise about.
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February 8, 2011
Lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes (1887-1977) may be the most important “Aframerican” (his term) classical singer of the 20th century that you don’t know about.
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January 31, 2011
When lauded strangeness becomes vastly public, it may herald a change of fashion. Such seem to be Simone Dinnerstein’s Bach interpretations, which bring elements of romanticism back into baroque performance practice. Bach: A Strange Beauty is will not disappoint her new-found fans, nor will it convince her detractors.
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