Forty-nine minutes into our chat about the San Francisco Symphony Chorus’ Spring Concert, Music Director Ragnar Bohlin addresses what makes him tick.
“All we conductors have a vision of how the music should sound ideally,” he says on the patio of the near idyllic, precariously perched Berkeley hills rental he shares with his cellist wife and children.
“We tend to think of Brahms as a grumpy old man,” said Dr. Donald Kendrick, conductor and artistic director of the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra, which will perform the composer’s German Requiem as a Mondavi Matinee on March 28 at the Mondavi Center, at UC Davis.
Lots of orchestras give concerts for children, but the Fremont Symphony does it with a twist: They get kids involved. “Last year, we had eight kids come up to the front and conduct the orchestra,” says Music Director David Sloss.
If you plan to drive up I-80 to the next concert of the Vallejo Symphony to hear virtuoso Meredith Brown, you must be prepared to play her second-most-important instrument. No, not the French horn, but the one in which “Freeway Philharmonic’” members are extremely practiced: the steering wheel.
The Paramount Theatre returns to its roots and its “mighty Wurlitzer” takes center stage at the upcoming Oakland East Bay Symphony concert on March 19 and 21.
It’s not your standard concert evening — and that’s just the point.
Back in the days when the piano ruled and recordings didn't exist, a lot of music for four hands (one piano, two players, as opposed to two pianos) got written or arranged for the home market.
If you haven’t had a chance to listen to Joel Fan’s 2006 CD, World Music, you’re missing a wonderful introduction to contemporary classical music from around the globe. You’ll still have a chance to hear large parts of it live when he performs at Holy Names University in Oakland on March 20.
Mandolin, usually of the flatback variety, is a given to stand in for fiddle in bluegrass or country swing, yet not so much for violin in classical music — nor as a solo instrument with orchestra.
After last year's hip, happening Switchboard Music Festival, one of the event's cocreators, Jonathan Russell, moved to Washington D.C and another, Ryan Brown, decamped to Princeton, New Jersey.
