Celebrating two decades of adventurous programming and fine playing, the San José Chamber Orchestra under Barbara Day Turner’s direction presents a feast, including three premieres.
Musicians from Marlboro tours are a chance to catch these artists when they’re mostly still young and little-known. The San Jose Chamber Music Society brought them to Le Petit Trianon in downtown San Jose on Wednesday, for an immensely vivid evening.
The Calder Quartet, with pianist Gloria Cheng, offered a concert that presented contrasts, alternating visions of hell, cryptic smiles, and a program promising doom and gloom ... all of which added up to a positively cathartic experience.
I’m a curious cat, intrigued by unusual things, so I went to a double-bass recital as part of the Music at the Mission chamber music series. The lesson of the evening’s repertoire was that composers who write solo pieces for the double bass are apt to be slightly eccentric.
The Vienna Philharmonic began its Berkeley residency Friday with a concert that showed off its versatility. The three composers, all from within Vienna’s cultural orbit, were aesthetically different from each other: high Classicism from Franz Schubert, wallowing Romanticism from Richard Wagner, and violent modernism from Béla Bartók.
Rhythmic vitality ruled Saturday at the Redwood Symphony concert, led by guest conductor Joyce Johnson-Hamilton, in a program designed to warm the hearts of music lovers who prefer the just slightly unusual.
