Robert P. Commanday

Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Articles By This Author

Music Center at Sonoma State Still A-Greening

Robert P. Commanday - February 16, 2010
While California and its constituent parts sit in a blue mood, Sonoma County on Friday night was celebrating the future and its hopes. At least, 350 of its movers and shakers were doing that, the donors who had raised much of the $96 million toward building the Green Music Center on the Rohnert Park campus of Sonoma State University.

In Memoriam: Mariedi Anders1915-2009

Robert P. Commanday - December 29, 2009
Mariedi Anders, a leading American concert manager and the first in San Francisco, died Dec. 26 in the California Pacific Hospital after a short illness. She was 94. She was a major agent on the West Coast, managing her Mariedi Anders Artists Management, Inc., for 50 years, right up to her death.
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Review

Dohnányi to the Fore

Robert P. Commanday - October 27, 2009
The San Francisco Symphony’s Chamber Music Series, offered most Sunday afternoons, is a dependable bet. There, members of the Symphony emerge as individuals from orchestral submersion and can be heard doing what they most like to do, as best they can.
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Review

Seattle Ring Achieves a Triumphant Finale

Robert P. Commanday - August 17, 2009
The Seattle Opera’s Siegfried performed heroically on Wednesday, fighting the lingering effects of an illness more challenging than Fafner the dragon. Stig Andersen’s strategy worked.
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Review

A New Look in a Traditional Ring

Robert P. Commanday - August 11, 2009

There’s a lot of life left in the old Ring myth, made abundantly apparent Sunday and Monday in the opening of Seattle Opera’s current rerunning of Wagner’s tetralogy. With Stephen Wadsworth’s imaginative direction, the first two operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were wholly engaging, his fresh interpretation showing how little need there is to transport the story into different times, cultures, or modern places, to try to make obvious strained metaphors of class or economic conflict or whatever.

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Review

Hale and Farewell

Robert P. Commanday - June 2, 2009
The musically merry month of May came to a close on Sunday, traditionally as ever, with concerts conjoined to graduations, two that could not have been more different.
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Review

Stretching Summer Festival Season

Robert P. Commanday - March 17, 2009
A summer-style music festival in the middle of March? There it was, full-blown in Boca Raton, Florida, the resort community's third annual Festival of the Arts Boca, March 5-15. Of course mid-March is summer there, both weather-wise and in the lifestyle of the seasonal residents who swell the local population this time of year, the snowbirds from New York and the Northeast.

Shout to Heaven

Robert P. Commanday - December 16, 2008
The Santa Rosa Symphony has more than earned its role as the future orchestra-in-residence at the Green Music Center, now edging toward completion at Sonoma State University (see the feature article). It has made remarkable progress during the past two decades, even under the handicap of an acoustically mediocre home.
Feature

Hope and Promise for Sonoma County

Robert P. Commanday - December 16, 2008

Good news does happen, even now. It took a short trip north, a week ago, to find it — but there it was, the Green Music Center, in Rohnert Park.

Fervent Excellence

Robert P. Commanday - August 5, 2008
In the world of fine cello soloists, Matt Haimovitz has to be a leading adventurer. There he was at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Sunday night in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, performing a solo recital of prodigiously challenging pieces that many of his colleagues may never have heard of.