Reviews

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players ensemble continues to evolve and explore new music, as evidenced by its Monday concert that displayed rich variety.

It would have been hard to tell, observing the small, graying audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Saturday, that videos of the early-music band Voices of Music had received, as of this writing, 3,558,070 hits on YouTube. I suspect a good deal of those came from Web queries for the famous Pachelbel Canon, of which VOM has posted an excellent recording.

What other touring orchestra posts its country's flag on stage when performing internationally? Israel's nationalistic pride is well known, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) is a particularly special source of honor for Israelis.

The Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s great orchestras, plumbs the depths and heights of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, in its final Berkeley performance Sunday.

What sacred music do you set alongside Mozart’s great Requiem in a concert? The San Francisco Symphony movingly squared the circle Thursday with works by Morton Feldman and Mindaugas Urbaitis.

Philip Glass’ Orphée earns high marks as a 20th-century alternative to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. It just deserves a better production than the blunt, charmless staging mounted by the Ensemble Parallèle at Herbst Theatre over the weekend.

The Paris Guitar Duo, in its first San Francisco outing, performed wide-ranging music with brilliance, but with odd mannerisms.

Three interpreters at Oakland East Bay Symphony's concert on Friday transformed composers’ dreams into art worthy of both praise and concern.

The Vienna Philharmonic began its Berkeley residency Friday with a concert that showed off its versatility. The three composers, all from within Vienna’s cultural orbit, were aesthetically different from each other: high Classicism from Franz Schubert, wallowing Romanticism from Richard Wagner, and violent modernism from Béla Bartók.

Joyce DiDonato’s latest recording, DivaDivo displays an artist so on top of her form and versatile in her voice that, like her last CD, it has a good chance of snaring another round of awards.