Reviews

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Review

Nimble New Voice in the Juilliard Quartet

Michelle Dulak Thomson - October 20, 2009
The introduction of a new player into a venerable chamber ensemble is always a touchy thing; you can never quite be sure what sort of entity will emerge at the end of the process, how much or how little it will resemble the group you once knew. That goes doubly for the leaders of string quartets.
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Review

Pulling Out All the Stops, and Then Some

Heuwell Tircuit - October 20, 2009

This new release of piano trios by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov features three virtuoso musicians delivering gushy music gushily. In a way, this likely was the way this music was played in its own day, minus emotive restraint. This can almost be considered to be a recording as a historical study, free of the sometimes exaggerated objectivity of contemporary performances.

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Review

Pan-Cultural Beauty and Longing for Kim Kashkashian

Jason Victor Serinus - October 19, 2009

Award-winning producer Manfred Eicher’s transcendent vision for his ECM New Series recordings defies simple categorization. A case in point is violist Kim Kashkashian's Neharót, a collection of unusual, oft-rarefied pieces that transcend national and genre boundaries, the recording touches the heart with its universal expressions of longing and prayer.

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Review

Inspired Guitar

Scott Cmiel - October 19, 2009
Pixinguinha is a name revered in Brazil but relatively unknown elsewhere. Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho, better known as Pixinguinha, was the first and most influential musician in Brazilian popular music.
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Review

Schubert, and Nothing But

Anna Carol Dudley - October 19, 2009
Michael Schade makes a strong case for singing nothing but Franz Schubert, as he did Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, presented by Cal Performances. The German-born Canadian tenor combines his fluency in Schubert’s language with Mozart’s Italian sensibilities.
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Review

The Demented and the Divine

Jason Victor Serinus - October 19, 2009

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death,” sings Salome, the eponymous central character in Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera.

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Review

An Intimate Bohème From West Bay Opera

Jeff Kaliss - October 19, 2009
Giacomo Puccini often chose settings that brought opera up close and personal, and he thus worked vital changes on the form and made it ready for the 20th century.
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Review

Launching the S.S. Berkeley

Jeff Dunn - October 19, 2009

Awesome was the recaptained ship, the Symphony Season Berkeley, as it slipped into the October-audience channel. The Symphony’s new skipper, Music Director Joana Carneiro, brought on board high hopes, boundless energy, charismatic facial expressions, and two newish pumping systems in the engine room: works by John Adams and Gabriela Lena Frank.

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Review

A Grand Night For Singing

John Bender - October 16, 2009
The Daughter of the Regiment (La Fille du Régiment) by Gaetano Donizetti is about singing as a direct route to the hearts both of characters and audiences. The opera’s apparent naiveté and, at times, blatant absurdity belie its perfection.
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Review

Adding Leafy Branches to the Takács Tree

Michelle Dulak Thomson - October 13, 2009
Four years have passed since ex–San Francisco Symphony Principal Violist Geraldine Walther became the newest member of the Takács Quartet, and by now the ensemble sounds as though it’s been together forever. In the first of this season’s two Cal Performances recitals (happily, the two-concert-a-year rhythm looks to be an established pattern), there were a few untidy moments.