Michael Zwiebach

There's a new choral group in town with a name that might make a PR consultant despair. The group is EUOUAE, is medieval shorthand for “saeculorum amen,” the last Latin words in the common doxology. It's a fit name for a group that, for it's first concert, is resurrecting a medieval mass that you find in history books but rarely in performance.

Michael Lawrence's BACH & friends documentary created a big
splash with the audience at the West Coast premiere that took place at
the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco last Wednesday evening.
Presented by San Francisco Classical Voice as a fundraiser for
the organization, the film about Bach's
impact on music and musicians was greeted with cheers, laughter, and
occasionally, stunned silence from the sold-out crowd.

San Francisco native and Julliard grad Wayne Lee returns to his old stomping grounds to join pianist Wayne Graber in a complete traversal of the Beethoven violin sonatas in three concerts, beginning on Friday July 19 at the Crowden School in Berkeley.

Jeffrey Thomas has the touch with Bach's B Minor Mass, a showcase piece combining all the facets of Bach's art into a gigantic musical fresco. Anyone who has heard the American Bach Soloists recording of the piece, with Thomas conducting, knows that the coming concert on Sunday is a must-see.

Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. This weekend, you can hear the San Francisco Symphony play the score live, synching to a showing of the movie, and if you really want to get the full skin-crawling effect of the musical sequences in this cinematic landmark you probably can't do better.

If you want to jazz up a birthday party or anniversary, do something unexpected or plan a surprise. Pianist Daniel Glover is doing something like that with the otherwise dull-as-dishwater Frédéric Chopin commemorations this year, by pairing Chopin with Samuel Barber, another anniversary boy. His recital for San Francisco’s Old First Concerts promises to reveal some interesting connections.

Filmmaker Michael Lawrence’s Bach and Friends has been making waves among classical listeners and audiences who might never have suspected they would have a connection to J.S. Bach’s music. In advance of the SFCV-sponsored premiere on July 14 at San Francisco’s Kabuki Cinema, Lawrence sat down to answer some questions about the film and his take on Bach’s music.

Back when Milton and Peggy Salkind teamed up as a piano duo in the early 1950s, there were just a handful of piano duo acts — Rosina and Josef Lhevinne, Gaby and Robert Casadesus, and a few others. The Salkinds helped to blaze the trail that others, most famously the Labeque sisters, have since trod. San Franciscans have a chance to enjoy a rare duo on the weekend of July 8-10.

For some it will be an opportunity to hear bass John Relyea, and soprano Patricia Racette, who is one of the artists who could capture my attention even if she was only singing the phone book. But the July 4 concert at Stern Grove with the San Francisco Opera will also present a program of American operatic classics, which are rare on the world's stages.