Reviews

Swarms of new and returning students clogged the streets around UC Berkeley Thursday evening. What to do: Attend a free opera or check out frat-house receptions? Considering the state of art music in the U.S. today, you can guess where they went. Nevertheless, about a hundred or so did show up for Our American Cousin in Hertz Hall.

The 50th year of the highly merited Merola Opera training program ended with a flourish of young hopefuls at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on Saturday evening with a Grand Finale concert, assisted by members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.

Napa Valley's "Music in the Vineyards," now in its 13th season, produced an exciting and eclectic concert on Saturday afternoon in the small hall at the posh Silverado Cellars.

If every piece of architecture had its own inherent sound, the church of Mission San Juan Bautista would be heard for miles. The relatively high-ceilinged structure (long and narrow, made of wood and plaster, and primitively painted), whose interior was completed in 1817, creates a resounding acoustic like none other I've experienced.

Great performances are nearly a given at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, whether or not you find yourself loving the work being played, thanks to Music Director Marin Alsop and her fabulous orchestra.

In 1781, Joseph Haydn wrote to his publisher Artaria about recent performances of his Stabat Mater in Paris: "They were amazed to find me so exceptionally pleasing in vocal composition, but I am not amazed, and they have heard nothing yet; if only they could hear my short opera L'isola disabitata ...

Can a simple story, deliberately lacking in operatic gestures, make a good play? Thornton Wilder's 1938 Our Town certainly did. It was a subtle, laid-back, and whimsical account of small-town America, more of an archetypal abstraction than practical reality.

If posting the phrase "World Premiere" on a concert program seems to lend a certain aura to the proceedings, imagine how aurific a program must be that consists solely of premieres, three "world" and one "U.S." Such was the promise of the first concert of the Cabrillo Music Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday, whose music turned out to please listeners mightily, despite the varying q

In a concert Friday night at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, the Music@Menlo festival featured the world-class artists for which it is known, playing music both familiar and strange.