Reviews

Grand and glorious as Mozart's 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio (The Abduction from the Seraglio) is, it's not a through-composed, sung-only "grand opera." Now onstage at the San Francisco Opera, in a new coproduction with Chicago's Lyric Opera, "Abduction" is an early forerunner of the Broadway musical, a "singspiel" with a great deal of spoken dialogue.

San Francisco Symphony audiences who have grown accustomed to long-arch excursions through the Mahler symphonic canon need to adjust their sights for this week’s “Gustav Mahler: Origins and Legacies” programs at Davies Symphony Hall. As the middle panel of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas’ three-week Mahler Festival ’09, the programs amount to busily filled, prismatically constructed talk-and-play probings of the composer’s musical sources, techniques, humor, pathos, and psychology. 

Some early music ensembles approach the performance of Renaissance polyphony as if it were fine crystal: beautiful, but delicate, a fragile object not to be unduly disturbed. Like crystal, the music can occasionally shimmer and reveal prisms of color when viewed through different angles, but it remains a static object, more a museum piece than a kinetic construct. This analogy aptly summarizes the experience of hearing Ensemble Gombert, a 14-voice chamber choir from Australia specializing in High Renaissance polyphony.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble does not confine itself to the region of its name. The Bay Area–based chamber ensemble opened its 2009-2010 season Monday evening at the Green Room of the Veterans Building in San Francisco with an engaging program of short works derived from such far-flung musical locales as Armenia, India, Iran, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Balkans.