Music Features

Restless adolescents and concerned parents alike, all around the Bay Area, have discovered that a symphony orchestra can be a great place for kids to hang out.

The yin and yang of musical fashions and fads shift every 20 or 25 years, and always have done. In the 1950s, concert music fledged itself from new music in traditional tonal style and notation toward an increasing respect for serial music, and in the process up popped Elliot Carter, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, and the like. In that process, perfectly respectable and popular composers got pretty much shoved out of the nest.

The dust had not even settled after the Green Music Center’s successful acoustical debut on Feb. 12, when a storm blew up in Sonoma County turning that dust into a gray cloud over the entire project. The storm last Thursday, Feb. 18, was the raid by the FBI and other investigators on Sonoma State University’s administration and finance department and the seizure of computers and boxes of records.

In late 2006, Misha Dichter was visiting his wife’s family in Rio when he sat down at the piano to practice Brahms’ Ballade in D Minor, Op. 10. A simple chord in the second measure stopped him cold. The renowned pianist couldn’t stretch the fingers on his right hand to make the interval of a major sixth. He panicked.

For anyone who cares about 17th-century music, 2010 is without question a Claudio Monteverdi year. The 400th anniversary of the composer’s ground-breaking and magisterial Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610 is a ripe occasion to program the sacred masterpiece of an artist deemed “the creator of modern music” by scholar Leo Schrade.

Berkeley Opera has always been known for its adventurous spirit. While it has never enjoyed the large subscriber base — or extravagant budgets — of its high-profile counterparts, the company has given audiences a wide range of productions in the last three decades, offering forgotten masterpieces, English adaptations, and world premieres alongside standards of the repertoire.

This month, though, the company embarks on one of its biggest adventures to date: After years at the Julia Morgan Theater, Berkeley Opera is moving to El Cerrito.

Violinist Yin Bin Qian wanted to study abroad after graduating from the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the oldest Western-oriented music school in China. He applied to graduate school at Yale, the Eastman School of Music, USC, and other American colleges. But after hearing violinist Wei He perform at the Shanghai Conservatory last year, Qian set his sights on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where He is on the faculty.