Reviews

The North American premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s 2007 Violin Concerto No. 2, In tempus praesens (In the present time), arrived Thursday as an important musical event, revealing a strong, compelling, unusual, and rewarding work.

After I was admitted to the Conservatory in the Hague, I was allowed to see my adjudication sheet. The director had written one sentence: “He has fast fingers.” Bemused, I showed this to my teacher, who clasped me on the shoulder, and said in the most comforting way possible, “That was not a compliment, my boy.”

To celebrate the newly renovated, reopened, and renamed Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College, various ensembles and musicians gathered on Saturday evening to perform the music of one of the college’s many musical luminaries: Darius Milhaud, the French composer who took up a post there after fleeing the Germans in 1940.

“Things Fall From the Sky” was the theme of Monday’s concert, yet nary a clunker of a composition felled the good spirits of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players attendees. A refreshing eclecticism replaced SFCMP’s usual emphasis on neomodernist and spectralist genres.

With their magical imagery and multiple musical cues, the plays of William Shakespeare have been a constant source of inspiration, for composers from the playwright’s era to our own.

Holding aloft its dedication and musicianship like a banner, Artistic Director Robert Geary led the Volti chamber choir through eight contemporary works Saturday evening, four of which were premieres. The program, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, also included the services of the amazing Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir.

In the first of its two programs at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church this past weekend, Le Concert des Nations presented a potpourri of baroque classics titled “Les Goûts Réunis.” The title really ought to have been “Greatest Hits of the Baroque,” or — better — “Savall’s Number Ones.” Of the program’s six pieces, four were bona fide classics, the others evident favorites of Jordi

Mendelssohn’s great violin concerto, premiered in 1845 with the same Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig heard on this CD, has been subject to any number of interpretations.