Michelle Dulak Thomson

Admirers of the Takács Quartet have had it good these past several years, due to the ensemble's two-concerts-a-season relationship with Cal Performances. The quartet's first Bay Area visit in 2009, though, wasn't to Berkeley's Hertz Hall but to Mill Valley's Mount Tamalpais United Methodist Church.

It's not often that anyone gets to salute a major composer's centenary while he's still there to appreciate it. That Elliott Carter's 100th birthday this week didn't get so much as a nod from any of the Bay Area's many orchestras is understandable, if disappointing.

It was a grand design for a concert: two string quartets, one relatively young and the other making its farewell tour, playing three new works (one quartet for each, an octet for the two together), with Mendelssohn's beloved Octet to close. But owing to the death of Johannes Quartet violist Choo-Jin Chang's brother early last week, the ensemble's double bill at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre with

Music Director Nicholas McGegan began Sunday night's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra concert at Berkeley's First Congregational Church with a theatricality that, for longtime PBO fans, now seems paradoxically "homey." He crept to the podium and put his finger to his lips, urging silence. He didn't quite get it, but went ahead anyway with the opening of Beethoven's Op.

Someone at San Francisco Performances is keen on completeness.

There are times when it seems to me that you could drop a pail anywhere in the 17th century and find when you brought it back up that it contained enough first-rate (and, for the most part, completely unfamiliar) music for a season's worth of concerts. Needless to say, it's not quite so simple as that.

Some "regional orchestras" settle down to the comfort levels of their audiences and their all too often exhausted players. During Jeffrey Kahane's tenure as music director, the Santa Rosa Symphony distinguished itself repeatedly as the one stop on the "Freeway Philharmonic" circuit where players and audience alike were encouraged, or rather commanded, to stretch their ears.

Once a year or so, it's well to remember what we really owe the San Francisco Early Music Society.

If you had been in the audience for Saturday's Michael Tilson Thomas–led San Francisco Symphony concert, and had opened the printed program at random, more likely than not you would have hit the page of bios for the soloists in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which are just at the midpoint of the booklet.