Reviews

The advance ads might have convinced you that the main event on this week’s San Francisco Symphony program was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. To be sure, Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra performed the work as planned, conferring considerable eloquence and brio on Tchaikovsky’s monumental masterpiece. But the program’s greatest rewards came in a trio of American works by Aaron Copland and Lou Harrison. It may be some time before audiences hear any of these works played in the Bay Area again — or hear them played this well.

When an opera is as brilliant as Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and everything onstage and in the pit clicks, the results can be magical. Such is the case with one of the most animated and delightful productions of the masterpiece that I have ever seen.

Time has smiled sweetly on Anonymous 4. Twenty-four years after their founding, three of four members of this chart-topping a cappella women’s vocal ensemble remain, sounding as good as ever ... and as simple as ever.

Chanticleer began its 33rd season this week with “Out of This World,” a program built around music referencing the stars, the planets, and the heavens. The men’s chorus drew principally on music of the Renaissance, Romantic, and modern eras, and delivered a performance that was varied in content, well-nuanced, and crowd-pleasing.

San Francisco Opera’s current production adopts Goethe’s ironic distance, but works against so much of what Massenet does with the music. On the other hand, it boasts an extremely strong cast, headed by Ramón Vargas and expertly conducted by Emmanuel Villaume. Everyone should hear Villaume’s stunning ensemble of singers and players.

The multitude of musicians and aficionados swarming, free of charge, through the San Francisco Conservatory last Sunday afternoon displayed how far the annual Chamber Music Day has outgrown the chamber it began in.

Not that long ago it would have been rare to find any small label issuing all 12 of Haydn’s last symphonies at one go, and borderline impossible to find them so well-played as they are on Marc Minkowski’s new set of Haydn’s “London” Symphonies, with Les Musiciens du Louvre.

Richard Thomas' Jerry Springer the Opera is a multiple award-winning, much-praised work, developed with the support and participation of Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Nick Hytner, and other notables.

It finally made its profane, foul-mouthed, offensive and hilarious entry last weekend in a big, spectacular Ray of Light Theater production at the Mission's Victoria Theater, the beginning of a five-week run.

Works of fiction that become operas often suffer some degree of degradation in the translation. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is generally acknowledged a masterpiece: Dostoyevsky called it “flawless as a work of art.” Yet David Carlson’s opera Anna Karenina seems destined to go down in operatic history as a valiant attempt, at best.

As one of the grandest of grand operas, it’s only fitting that Verdi’s Aida would open San Francisco Opera’s fall season. The 140 people assembled on the War Memorial Opera House stage for the Triumphal Scene may not have held a candle to the 2,000 supernumeraries enlisted by Col. Mapleson in Chicago in 1885, but when you add in all the women in the audience who used the opening as an excuse to wear huge pieces of Egyptian-styled jewelry, it was quite the show.