Reviews

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Review

Pulling Listeners Into Her World

Ken Iisaka - September 22, 2009
North Bay fans of piano music are a lucky bunch. For the past six years, the Concerts Grand series, produced by Terry McNeill, has been presenting piano recitals primarily in Sonoma, attracting established as well as upcoming talents from near and far.
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Review

Orchestra of Promise

Rebecca Liao - September 22, 2009
Warhorse has become a dirty word, synonymous with tired and predictable. If a musical warhorse is included in a concert program, particularly one as important as the season opener, its function is to appease those who did not love the aural and intellectual assaults that preceded it.
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Review

Keeping Score Scores a 10

Jason Victor Serinus - September 21, 2009

Keeping Score is about to return. The first three musical journeys in the second season of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score TV series are set to air nationwide. Scheduled locally on KQED-TV for Oct. 15, 22, and 29 at 10 p.m., the one-hour programs explore Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, and Ives’ Holidays Symphony.

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Review

Magical Mahler From the S.F. Symphony and Susan Graham

Georgia Rowe - September 19, 2009
For many San Francisco Symphony fans, the orchestra’s 2009/2010 season finally got underway last Wednesday (Sept. 16). True, the season’s official start came one week earlier, with a glitzy gala that featured pianist Lang Lang.
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Review

Patricia Racette’s TriumphantTriple-header

Steven Winn - September 17, 2009

In a long-gone era of baseball, before they needed four days of rest between starts, pitchers routinely worked both games of a doubleheader. Soprano Patricia Racette goes them one better in San Francisco Opera’s Il trittico, by playing substantial roles in all three outings of this 1918 Puccini triple-header of one-act operas.

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Review

Bargain Beethoven From the Alexander String Quartet

Heuwell Tircuit - September 14, 2009

Beethoven’s music can be played in many ways: by emphasizing its sheer momentum by tearing ahead, or its dramatic dynamic shifts by overdoing the extremes a bit, or its contemplative virtues by taking time to sniff the daisies along the way. These can run to extremes when it comes to his monumental output of 16 string quartets.

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Review

Let Us Now Arrange Famous Composers

David Bratman - September 14, 2009
Compared to other forms of music-making, classical music is noted for keeping to the original score rather than arranging works anew for each performer. Leonard Bernstein once even suggested that “exact music” would be a better name.
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Review

Exuberantly Baroque

Joseph Sargent - September 14, 2009
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s opening concert of its 2009-2010 season, “Apotheosis of the Dance,” was an exercise in transcending the traditionally defined eras of musical history.
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Review

Listening to Thomas Hampson's America

Jason Victor Serinus - September 14, 2009

After several decades of championing American art song, baritone Thomas Hampson refuses to let the major label slowdown hold him back. Instead, he’s started the Thomas Hampson Media label, and launched a full-out multimedia American song assault, as well.

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Review

Trovatore Signals a New Dawn at San Francisco Opera

Steven Winn - September 13, 2009

It’s a curious fact about Il trovatore, Verdi’s "magnificent demonstration of unprincipled melodrama," as Joseph Kerman called it, that this 1853 potboiler contains so much dramatically still water. No sooner does the curtain rise than a captain launches into a lengthy, action-stalling account of events that happened years before. And that’s not the only instance of extended exposition in Salvatore Cammarano’s creaky libretto, based on the Antonio Garcia Gutierrez play.