Reviews

In Music@Menlo's latest concert in this year’s winter series, festivals co-director and pianist Wu Han, Alessio Bax, and Anne-Marie McDermott performed fairly indulgent music from the turn of the 20th century, all of it written for two pianos.

There's a powerful magnetism about a great professional countertenor, a singer who exhibits both fantastic vocal range and crystalline purity of tone. David Daniels has built an impressive career as a countertenor, with luscious tone and careful craftsmanship among his assets, as demonstrated in Philharmonia Baroque’s lively program on Saturday.

Music truly is the international language. Case in point at the San Francisco Symphony: A French conductor leads an American orchestra in an all-Russian program — and it all sounds amazingly authentic, and mostly excellent.

Escaping from “lake-effect” snow and winter, the venerable Cornell Glee Club brought a warm mixture of Romantic-inflected music to its Bay Area concerts.

It’s not often that we get to hear such a large body of new music, developed over a long time, by one composer and played by a single ensemble. No one could listen to Lisa Bielawa's two-CD set and not marvel.

The San José Chamber Orchestra celebrated Johann Sebastian Bach on Sunday and the evening began with a bang.

The New Esterházy Quartet's performance — the third iteration of the ensemble’s “Dedicated to Haydn” series — demonstrated camaraderie, marked above all by exceptional unity of purpose and total commitment to the group's interpretive schemes.

Magdalena Kožená has proven her mettle in music of the high Baroque, and in her 2010 CD, Lettere Amorose, she adds to her recorded repertory Italian love songs by the 17th-century composers, bringing a natural flair and easy virtuosity to the works, and a beautiful and distinctive sound.

What better way to usher in a new year than to have fun with that funmost of instruments, the clarinet? Those who love William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost reinvention of ragtime will take instantly to the first four cuts of this new Harmonia Mundi release.