Reviews

Friday's episode of the San Francisco Symphony's Franz Schubert/Alban Berg festival showed that Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas' abundant love for the two Viennese composers' music, despite commentators' attempts to argue the contrary, was the strongest element they had in common.

Musical repertory is full of masterpieces that rarely get programmed. Largely, it’s a matter of either instrumentation or length. On Wednesday, with a full orchestra and a handful of soloists available, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony concentrated on five of those masterpieces, as part of their “Schubert/Berg Journey.”

I left the performance I attended on Thursday with the feeling that I got two concerts for the price of one. In truth, it was just that one musician, cellist Zoë Keating, opened for another, vocalist Amy X Neuburg.

The Sanford Dole Ensemble performed a program called "Heaven and Earth" Saturday night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. They were a month late for the celebration of Earth Day, but exactly on time for the anniversary of the premiere (on May 30, 1992) of Libby Larsen's Missa Gaia: Mass for the Earth. An additional touch of serendipity for me was that I attended that debut. It was good to hear the work again.

It has become a cliche to refer to classical musicians as being “phenomenal” or even geniuses at their instruments. If a performer can get to the heart of the music, that’s enough for me. Still, in a profession in which it’s expected that as a teenager you have already learned and performed the summits of the keyboard, it has become increasingly difficult to grab the attention of the public as, say, Vladimir Horowitz did when he raced Sir Thomas to the finish line of the Tchaikovsky First.