Jason Victor Serinus

It goes without saying that the Cabrillo Festival is going to win next year's ASCAP annual award for the most Adventurous Programming of Orchestral Music by a festival. It has won every year since the award was initiated in 1982. Some might argue that winning the ASCAP award does not signify cutting edge programming.

Suffering hath no season. Perhaps that’s why, on a beautiful summer’s day just warm enough for short sleeves, the Carmel Bach Festival programmed baritone Sanford Sylvan performing, in shirt sleeves, Schubert’s chilling song cycle, Der Winterreise (Winter’s journey). It was no small challenge, on such a lovely day, to conjure Schubert's bare, desolate, emotional landscapes.

Benjamin Britten's opera Albert Herring is something of a miracle. From the pen of a composer inclined to Christian moralizing and examining the dark underbelly of the human psyche came, soon after Peter Grimes, this delightful chamber opera, which poked fun at tight-buttoned British moralists and celebrated the free expression of human passions.

Long before composer Philip Glass' latest bevy of fans alighted on Planet Earth, scores of people filled Radio City Music Hall to witness the 1982 premiere of Godfrey Reggio's multiple award-winning film, Koyaanisqatsi.

The setting is as monumental as it is humbling.

It was a bit like "second-try night." Only last fall, three of the principals in San Francisco Lyric Opera's current production of Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw — Anja Strauss (the Governess), Brooks Fisher (Miles), and Madelaine Matej (Flora) — appeared in the same roles in Oakland Opera Theater's abysmal production of that opera.

Although Johannes Brahms carried great pain over his apparently unconsummated relationship with Clara Schumann, the heartfelt beauty of his most popular music speaks far more of resolution and transcendence rather than enslavement to suffering. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the great German Requiem, Op.

On paper, American mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard reads like a filly breaking free from the pack. At 25, she has already debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in Roméo et Juliette, singing Stéphano alongside Anna Netrebko and Roberto Alagna. Other star turns include her recent Zerlina with Chicago Opera Theater, a forthcoming Cherubino in Santa Fe, and a gig at the Cincinnati May Festival.

Lynn Harrell is one vital man. In the middle of an extended phone conversation about his forthcoming S.F. Jazz gig — he plays J.S. Bach’s complete Suites for Solo Cello this Thursday and Friday night in Grace Cathedral — the voice of a child punctuates the proceedings.

Saturday's programming for the Gold Coast Chamber Players was so delightful that it brought smiles to the face of many an attendee.