David Bratman

Sunday night’s concert by the Shanghai Quartet at Le Petit Trianon in San José opened the 25th season of the San José Chamber Music Society. It also served as the Society’s contribution to Shanghai Celebration 2010, a Bay Area–wide, yearlong festival commemorating San Francisco’s sister-city relationship with the Chinese city.

The Redwood Symphony celebrated its 25th anniversary on Saturday, opening its season with a potpourri of pleasing music at Cañada College in Redwood City. Eric Kujawsky, who founded the orchestra and has been its music director for all 25 years, conducted the occasion.

After two centuries of an increasing reputation as a “Land Without Music,” whose homegrown composers weren’t considered worth importing by disapproving Germans, England suddenly flowered with a blossom of great composers starting around the turn of the 20th century. A garland of works by three of these masters formed “The English Voice,” the second of this year’s Music@Menlo chamber music festival main concert programs.

A concert by Cadenza, the former Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra, is like taking a drink from a mountain spring: cool, clear, and refreshing — though more refreshing, in truth, than thirst-quenching. Saturday’s concert at Holy Cross Church lasted just over an hour, intermission included. When it ended, soon after 9 p.m., twilight had not quite finished fading.

Cello concertos are where you find them. Visiting soloist Gary Hoffman found two excellent short pieces that work well in that role, though they aren’t called concertos, to play with Symphony Silicon Valley, under guest conductor Gregory Vajda, at San José’s California Theatre on Saturday.

From almost the moment that guest conductor Christoph Eschenbach struck up Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 with the San Francisco Symphony last Wednesday, it was clear that this was going to be a Brahms of the bright colors. It was set against a lovely recent French work by Marc-André Dalbavie.

The St. Peter’s Chamber Orchestra finished off its first season on Saturday, at its namesake church in Redwood City, by highlighting four of its own players as soloists in two rare double concertos, and matching those with two brief standards of the orchestral repertory.

Eric Kujawsky, music director of the Redwood Symphony, likes sometimes to lead his volunteer musicians into the thorny thickets of Eastern European modernism. This time, on Saturday at the Cañada College Theatre in Redwood City, nobody got seriously lost.