Benjamin Frandzel

One of the Bay Area’s most remarkable musical partnerships marked its ending on Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall. After 30 years of shared artistic growth, the Berkeley Symphony offered its final concert with Kent Nagano at the helm as music director.

Joel Fan is a young pianist who has been quickly making a name for himself in the past few years, most visibly as a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. His work as a solo performer has much of that group's spirit of exploration and its canny sense of connection between the standard repertory and more far-flung musical adventures.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music opened Friday night with its familiar sense of community and relaxed warmth much in evidence.

The Berkeley Symphony's Zellerbach Hall season opened last Thursday with Kent Nagano, departing music director, at the helm for his only performance with the full orchestra this year.

Amazing young string quartets seem to appear at a steady pace these days, and it was a great pleasure on Sunday to see another one added to the local crop.

You would think that Dennis Russell Davies has his hands full this October, conducting Philip Glass' Appomattox at the San Francisco Opera. But Thursday night, he headed down the street to the Herbst Theatre and lent his versatility and musicianship to a piano duo performance with his keyboard partner Maki Namekawa, in a benefit for the Other Minds Festival.

The sfSoundGroup continued to carve out an exciting niche for itself in its concert Sunday night at ODC Theater. Among all the area’s new-music ensembles, this group has evolved an aesthetic that most vividly brings to mind the Bay Area’s long history of experimentation and boundary-crossing.

On Thursday night at Davies Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony took a huge and potentially unwieldy work, Mahler's Symphony No. 7, and graced it with a heady and absorbing performance.

San Francisco Performances took an impressive leap of faith last week in presenting Italian pianist Marino Formenti’s local debut in not one, but three solo recitals at the DeYoung Museum’s new Koret Auditorium. In the two performances I heard, this adventurous move was rewarded with often extraordinary results.