Reviews

The young Chinese pianist Di Wu makes a thrilling local debut, with fireworks aplenty, evoking memories of Martha Argerich.

The classic story ballet Coppélia comes home to the San Francisco Ballet, in a radiantly danced new production.

The Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra elegantly paired searing orchestral music with well-etched singing in its performance of Verdi’s Requiem.

This week, Ragnar Bohlin and the S.F. Symphony Chorus met their ultimate challenge, performing Bach's B minor Mass, a towering landmark of all music. The result is a delightful surprise; an intimate, gentle, lyrical performance of this majestic expression of yearning for peace and the good of all humanity.

In Yuja Wang's first orchestral recording the pianist enthralls, ravishes, and demonstrates a kind of magic in what the pianist describes as “red-hot" reportoire.

A new CD release of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, is an often lovely, often puzzling performance — sometimes innocently affectionate, sometimes seeming to be making historical points in a way that aren't necessarily beneficial.

In the Marin Symphony’s lively pops-cum-masterworks concert Sunday, Bay Area composer Nathaniel Stookey ran away with the show.

To pianists, Chopin’s formidable Études have always seemed akin to waterboarding. Canadian pianist Louis Lortie certainly earned his place among those who attempt them by recording the entire set in 1986, and since then has made the program an important component of his career.

A recent BluePrint concert offered a disconcerting, echoing trope in a major new work offered at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, just one piece in a series of experimental works that impressed.

I’m a curious cat, intrigued by unusual things, so I went to a double-bass recital as part of the Music at the Mission chamber music series. The lesson of the evening’s repertoire was that composers who write solo pieces for the double bass are apt to be slightly eccentric.