Reviews

Mark Wardlaw - October 7, 2008
It’s a rare occurrence when a symphony orchestra devotes an entire half of a subscription concert to music that wasn’t intended for a concert hall.
Joseph Sargent - October 7, 2008
For several years now, the Baroque ensemble Magnificat has made seventeenth-century French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier into something of a cottage industry. A regular fixture on the ensemble's season calendars, this composer embodies Magnificat's stated mission of uncovering the "'new music' of the early Baroque" — masters of the era who have yet to receive their due.
Kwami Coleman - October 7, 2008
Before an attentive and animated audience on Sunday afternoon, Artistic and Executive Director of Stanford Lively Arts Jenny Bilfield concluded her opening remarks on what we should expect from this, the presenter's 39th season opener, by restating part of its mission: “We bring artists that don’t fall neatly into artistic guidelines and categories.” Sunday's crowd understood that they were going
Jerry Kuderna - October 7, 2008
Call it the Wall Street Willies or what you will, the audience attending Richard Goode's Cal Performances recital at Zellerbach Hall on Sunday afternoon was in need of a musical bailout. Despite the somber tone of Bach's G-minor prelude from Bk.
David Bratman - October 7, 2008
The Rose of Persia, currently being performed by Lyric Theatre at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose, was originally produced in 1899. It was probably the most successful operetta penned by Sir Arthur Sullivan after his collaboration with W.S. Gilbert.
Heuwell Tircuit - October 7, 2008
A listener could easily have ended up feeling a bit like Alice wandering through Wonderland, Monday evening at a program titled "Struck, Plucked, Scraped & Shaken," which San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented in the Arts Forum in Yerba Buena Center. A large crowd greeted the event with loud cheers for a semiritualistic program exhaling new music for percussion instruments.
Be'eri Moalem - October 7, 2008
Used to be that the mention of bluegrass conjured up thoughts of a throng of senior citizens sitting in folding armchairs listening to foot-stomping, string-twanging folk music. The mention of Bach conjured up a dark church and powdered wigs.
Michelle Dulak Thomson - September 30, 2008
Once a year or so, it's well to remember what we really owe the San Francisco Early Music Society.
Kwami Coleman - September 30, 2008
The California Theater looked sparkling and effervescent both inside and out on the opening night of Symphony Silicon Valley's 2008-2009 season. The program, "Dances at an Opening," featured three multimovement dance-inspired and dance-related works by Alberto Ginastera, Duke Ellington, and Sergei Prokofiev.
Jason Victor Serinus - September 30, 2008

Chanticleer celebrates several musical milestones this fall. The men's chorus' opening program of the season, titled "Wondrous Free," honors the 250th anniversary of America's earliest surviving secular composition, Frances Hopkinson's My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free. The concert program, heard last Thursday, was a marvelous gambol through five centuries of the repertoire Chanticleer so frequently champions, choral music of the Americas.