So many and illustrious are the touring string quartets that pass through the Bay Area in any given season that it can be difficult to remember the ones that are here all year round. And so hard is it these days to find a browsable selection of classical CDs in a record store that you might be pardoned for thinking that the only one making recordings regularly is the Kronos Quartet.

In the Western musical tradition, December is the time for the “holiday concert,” full of impressive, noisy praise, the sing-along Messiah, and dozens of choral offerings featuring carols and the more generic “holiday music.” Nowhere in the generalized musical prescription that fuels our annual shopping and eating binge does it say “gentle, 17th-century, Lutheran, devotional work.”
Sure, the Bay Area has recently seen a couple of performances of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Christmas Mass and other substantial fare, but few organizations, with the notable exception

The San Francisco Symphony’s Thanksgiving week program is a singularly joyous and virtuosic array. Under the baton of guest conductor Leonard Slatkin, the three performances open with Haydn’s folksy yet concertolike Symphony No. 67 in F Major, followed by Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, featuring Garrick Ohlsson.

Last summer, the Cabrillo Festival gave the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 8. Glass has been famous since the mid-1970s, but he didn’t write his first symphony until 1992. His symphony project moved along fairly quickly after that, and by 2005, he'd reached number eight. (See SFCV’s review.)

Philip Glass