Modern listeners can find 14th-century secular music tough to grasp. Working within highly restrictive formal structures, this era’s composers and poets created elaborate ruminations on wide-ranging themes — love, loss, justice, virtue — in a sound world quite distinct from earlier chant or later imitative polyphony.
The male and female voices of the Sanford Dole Ensemble chorus, 24 strong, had already made a distinct impression in a Palm Sunday concert at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. Over a groundswell of somber strings in the first section of James MacMillan’s 1993 Seven Last Words From the Cross, the men burst forth with an urgent “Rex Israel.”
You’d hardly know that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Hugo Wolf (1860-1903). Even as orchestras and music publications worldwide extol the praises of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), church bells are hardly pealing Wolf melodies.
(Washington, D.C.) — Lately, here in the nation’s capital, we’ve being seeing much of a certain leader from San Francisco. She’s usually pictured at a podium, ominously wielding a piece of carved wood, aiming for radical change, and threatening to whack anyone who doesn’t stay in step.
On a clear spring night that tempted concertgoers to linger outside Davies Symphony Hall until the last moment on Monday, the musical weather that followed inside was prevailingly murky.
For its 74th season, Director Corey Jamason and the San Francisco Bach Choir and Baroque Orchestra programmed five highly unusual Bach compositions for their Sunday program in Calvary Presbyterian Church.
Ian Bostridge is a master singer of German lieder, and he brought Schubert’s Winterreise to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Sunday afternoon, splendidly partnered by pianist Julius Drake. Experiencing Schubert’s intimate, searing song cycle would be more satisfying in the intimacy of Hertz Hall, where we last heard Bostridge.
Two major young stars of the music world, pianist Simon Trpčeski and conductor Vasily Petrenko, have begun a new CD cycle of all of Sergei Rachmaninov’s piano-orchestral works, for Avie Records.
From the hauntingly tentative first notes, or rather the first words of a poem prefacing the Brahms Requiem sung Saturday by the powerful but always beautifully balanced and expressive Cantare Chorale led by Artistic Director David Morales, I knew I was about to have a unique experience. I was to have a window not only into Johannes Brahms’