Reviews

Igor Stravinsky was a constantly changing artist. He's also the most Janus-like of all musicians — always looking forward and back at once. His work, when it was new, puzzled and challenged in equal measures.

Opera audiences the world over live under the dominion of stage directors and dramaturges who relocate classic works to places and times remote from the originals and even rewrite major plot events.

The music is necessarily colored by the life. —Edward Elgar

Conductor Leonard Slatkin and the San Francisco Symphony had multiple personalities to deal with in last week's concert program: the trickster in Franz Josef Haydn (Symphony No. 67), the troubled craftsman in Samuel Barber (his Piano Concerto), and the elusive alluder in Edward Elgar (Enigma Variations).

The dapper St. Petersburg Philharmonic was in town last week for two concerts in Davies Symphony Hall with a more intriguing break with the world's music than expected.

A year of research. Over 100 works by Swedish composers examined. Only four chosen. For the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' "Shimmers and Thrills" concert, the anticipation generated by Executive Director Adam Frey's Swedish quest was similar to that found in Beth E.

Even though it revolves around a love triangle, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther would not have appealed to Verdi because of its lack of a higher moral or sociopolitical conflict. But for Jules Massenet, making a stage work of such a personal, barely dramatic dilemma was just his musical meat.

Yo-Yo Ma is certainly one of the most genial and gifted soloists to grace international concert stages in recent memory. The ambitious range of his concert programming is an appealing reflection of postmodern aesthetics. He has also demonstrated an admirable commitment to bringing wider public awareness to a diverse spectrum of important musical subcultures.

Sometimes, a story is so universal that it can be updated without affecting the integrity of the drama. San Francisco Opera’s deeply problematic production of Verdi’s Macbeth, which debuted last Wednesday, proved to be one of the exceptions.

Nineteenth-century composers were not generous contributors to the flute’s solo repertory. Granted, many French composers wrote morceaux de concours, or contest pieces to be performed by students during competitive examinations at the Paris Conservatory. Aside from those, though, there are surprisingly few Romantic solo pieces for flute. German composers were particularly stingy.

The great luxury of the San Francisco Symphony’s Chamber Music Series lies in the fact that having the entire orchestra to call upon affords multiple combinations per program.