Reviews

Jason Victor Serinus - March 15, 2010

Like the footsteps of a life partner, Beethoven’s music is heard so frequently that it’s easy to take it for granted. But listen to Austrian pianist Till Fellner’s ECM New Series CD of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No. 4 and 5, performed with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano, and the love affair is renewed.

Janos Gereben - March 13, 2010
Every time I hear what Gustav Mahler did not call his “Resurrection Symphony” — but others did — I think about what the work must have sounded like to the first listeners 115 years ago.
Michelle Dulak Thomson - March 9, 2010

The Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider has a taste for challenges. Two years ago, in his San Francisco Performances debut recital, he gave a stunning performance of Arnold Schoenberg's late Phantasy. The Schoenberg Concerto, a monumentally tough nut, is in his repertoire; so is Carl Nielsen's notoriously difficult one.

Heuwell Tircuit - March 8, 2010
Last week was a big week for Maurice Ravel’s music at Davies Symphony Hall.
Jeff Dunn - March 8, 2010
Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde.
Jonathan Rhodes Lee - March 8, 2010
Sunday evening at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra treated an enthusiastic audience to a Francophilic romp through Europe, titled “The French Suite in Europe.” We started in Stockholm, of all places, with Guillaume Dumanoir’s 17th-century Suite du Ballet de Stockholm.
Lisa Hirsch - March 7, 2010
New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current program, titled “Serenades and Dances,” bookends a pair of shorter, lighter works around a core of two large-scale mainstays of the standard repertory, Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.
Matthew Cmiel - March 6, 2010
I would hazard a guess that rarely has a local music festival been so intriguing and provocative as San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, which is headed by the insightful and interesting Charles Amirkhanian.
David Bratman - March 5, 2010
With pianist Peter Serkin as its guest artist, the Orion String Quartet brought a pantheon of composers to its Stanford Lively Arts concert on Wednesday at Dinkelspiel Auditorium: Bach. Beethoven. Brahms. ...
Jason Victor Serinus - March 2, 2010

How to widen the circle, to bring more music lovers, both young and old, into the classical fold? In a time of shrinking budgets, that question constantly haunts concert producers, record company executives, musicians, and, yes, even critics in the U.S. (not China, Korea, or parts of Europe) who find themselves communicating with a shrinking pool of graying, mainly white-skinned, classical music aficionados.