Reviews

Joseph Sargent - April 3, 2010

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.

Steven Winn - April 3, 2010

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.”

Jason Victor Serinus - April 3, 2010

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.

Rebecca J. Ritzel - March 29, 2010

(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.

Steven Winn - March 23, 2010
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.

The second of two San Francisco programs by St.

Heuwell Tircuit - March 23, 2010
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.
Anna Carol Dudley - March 23, 2010
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.
Heuwell Tircuit - March 22, 2010

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.

Jerry Kuderna - March 22, 2010
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
Jeff Dunn - March 22, 2010

Did the Santa Rosa Symphony on Saturday night live up to part of a public-school student poem, by “Cristobal,” posted in its concert-hall lobby?

Sounds frightful, amazing, destructive.
Beethoven, great composer —
Music as powerful as the sun.