The English Concert, 3/15/00, By Bruce Lamott

The program order (Brandenberg Concertos Nos. 1, 3, 5 and then 4, 6, 2) showed each concerto to its best advantage, as well as demonstrating the versatility of the performers. Violinist Rachel Podger was a powerful presence as soloist in five of the six works, easily tossing off the dazzling violino piccolo pyrotechnics of No. 1 and supplying a rhythmically pliant and improvisatory unaccompanied fantasia for the missing slow movement in No. 3. It also fell to her to provide most of the personality of the otherwise-dour ensemble, whose virtuosic playing was somewhat stifled by an orchestral mien. The English Concert speaks the musical rhetoric of the Baroque period fluently, with a subtle delineation of lines and interplay of parts devoid of affectation. The ensemble as a whole undulates with the shapes of the musical figures. And the constantly shifting dynamic contours draw the listener into the musical texture.

Women's Philharmonic, 3/25, By Thomas Goss

The sole spark of modernism was Jennifer Higdon's Fanfare, a triumphant shout of rhythmically intertwined but straight ahead orchestral jamming. Sneakily paced passages led into abrupt punches of color, which in turn introduced further suspenseful stuttering. Densely layered yet clearly marked textures were abundant. The orchestra kept cresting against punctuations of long, fevered episodes, until a choral theme broke out amongst the crowd, a bit brass-heavy on top in its balance. Yet this turn of melody offered no release, until it came in the flick of the tip of conductor Apo Hsu's baton on the very final beat.

San Francisco Symphony, 4/26/00, By Michelle Dulak

(David) Robertson has the knack of conveying a general momentum and a specific musical gesture at the same time. He could inflect the music without giving any sense that he was neglecting the longer trajectory. This was a Petrushka bristling with details, but not encumbered by them. Occasionally some amazing sonority would leap out. (Among a dozen examples, the little horn-and-bassoon passage at the end of the second tableau springs to mind; never have I heard it sound so perfectly like an accordion.) But more often, especially in the opening and closing tableaux, the color was just an aspect of the incredible panorama-a vision as full of human (and animal) gestures as of sounds.

Mitsuko Uchida, 5/14/00, By Mack McCray

Who else would begin with Chopin's Romantic showstopper, progress through Webern's delicate and prickly etchings, and end the first half with Mozart's quietest, saddest work for piano? The plan worked stunningly. Chopin was given freshness and dignity (indeed, a new lease on life) by being played first: we were asked to accord it the respect and attention we normally give the Beethoven usually found in this place of prominence. The explosiveness, sweetness, and Romantic gestures were revelatory, both in their program position and under the artist's wise hands. Then the bright colors of the Chopin darkened and led intriguingly, inexorably into the shadowed land of the Webern and Mozart, a dramatic and plausible reversal of the usual journey.

San Francisco Symphony, 5/3/00. By James Carmichael

Having performed Brahms' Second Piano Concerto only the week before, Garrick Ohlsson presented a Brahmsian version of Mozart's Concerto No. 20 in D Minor on last week's San Francisco Symphony program and you could hear the influence. It was an interpretation that recognized the Mozart as the precursor to other D minor concertos to come, most notably Brahms' First, the Op. 15. Brahms knew Mozart's concerto very well (and wrote the cadenza for the first movement played by Ohlsson) and you can still hear echoes of the phrasing and orchestration of the Mozart in Brahms' Fourth Symphony. Though this was not "period" Mozart, you have to appreciate the historical perspective it lends to a concerto filled with urgency and almost romantic poignancy.

Anyone who has followed Garrick Ohlsson's career for the last 30 years has to be impressed and grateful for his continual artistic development. His is playing that is always clean, clear, and concise but never "safe." While known for a big technique, he also works some very subtle magic, such as the return of the main theme in the Romance of the concerto. As at the beginning of the movement, it is simple and serene, yet transformed by the G minor "storm" it has just weathered.

San Francisco Opera, 9/23/00, By Heather Hadlock

With its sophisticated and melodious score, outstanding cast, handsome production, and intriguing dramatic limitations, San Francisco Opera's premiere production of Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe made for entertaining and thought-provoking theater on Saturday evening. This work, usually cited as one of the finest American operas, has received little attention from major companies since it first appeared in 1956, and like Carlisle Floyd's Susannah and Copland's The Tender Land is benefiting from the current interest in American works, as more and more world-class American musicians and companies begin to explore our musical history. What we find is usually stylish, well crafted, and often beautiful, but flawed in interesting ways. This was the case with Baby Doe.

Mark Morris & Philharmonia Baroque 9/23/00, By Kip Cranna

The fact that (Virgil Thomson's) Four Saints in Three Acts has always defied both description and interpretation fits nicely with Morris' own esthetic, which resists the urge to be "about" something. The opera is an amiably absurdist romp envisioning various blissful Spanish saints — principally Saint Teresa and Saint Ignatius — doing essentially nothing, or at least nothing that can be clearly defined. A product of Stein and Thompson's close friendship during the composer's early sojourn in Paris, the opera exploits Stein's love of manipulating language for the shear joy of its sound, delighting in insistent repetition, unusual rhyme, and oddly out-of-place words. Her response to the little girl in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music who complains that Do-Re-Mi "doesn't mean anything" would probably be "Yes, my dear, isn't it wonderful!" What else can be said of a libretto with lines like "A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover"?

Thomson's solidly diatonic music — a deliberately simplistic melange of hymns, chants, waltzes, and even a tango or two — still sounds uniquely fresh nearly 70 years after its composition, with its repetitive chord progressions that demonstrate the influence Thomson has had on modern minimalist composers, especially Philip Glass, whose opera Satyagraha is close to a Sanskrit version of Four Saints.

Mills College, 9/22/00, By Sarah Cahill

It would be nice to be as prolific as Darius Milhaud. The composer, who taught intermittently at Mills College from 1940 to 1971 and died in 1974, wrote 18 string quartets, 12 symphonies, hundreds of songs, and a boggling amount of piano music, as well as operas, ballets, oratorios, film scores, and theater music. But fecund imaginations have their drawbacks. Any output that massive becomes slightly suspect. Milhaud, along with composers like Alan Hovhaness, produced so much of such uneven quality that his reputation has suffered as a result. Unless it's by Mozart, how could music churned out that fast be any good? Friday's annual Milhaud celebration at Mills College proved that the composer wrote many multifaceted gems, vastly different from his classics, such as Creation du Monde, Boeuf sur le Toit, and Scaramouche.

Most rewarding was Milhaud's String Quartet No. 9, Op. 140, in an extraordinary performance by the Ives Quartet. This quartet distills the improvisatory quality of Milhaud's music that Aaron Copland pointed out: It "comes from the 'deep places of the mind' — from a kind of secondary consciousness over which he seems to exert no control." The Ives members pulled together this sprawling piece into a cohesive statement, and revealed a spectrum of moods ranging from lyric tenderness to angry dissonance.

San Francisco Symphony, 9/5/00, By George Thompson

This music (Mahler's Seventh Symphony) is so much about the act of its own creation and recreation, with a conductor's personality at the center --; the endless specificity of detail, the precise control of torrents of sound and feeling. Yes, it is a work that treats of nature, night to day, uncertainty to exultation, but all in the first person singular. Tilson Thomas is arguably one of the most qualified such "first persons" around, and his performance with the Symphony was riveting.

The Seventh must have been hard for Mahler to compose, for it took the better part of two summers. It is certainly hard for any orchestra to bring off. Part of the challenge is its disparate structure: three ingratiating central movements -- character pieces really-- flanked by two much larger, knottier constructions. The orchestra must switch from heroic grandeur to beguiling intimacy and back with unnerving speed. The thread of ideas, especially in the outer movements, is complex and not always obvious. In short, this is a work that has to be conducted every moment, all the way through.

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