Orchestra

If there’s a Great American Symphony, it’s Roy Harris’ rugged Third from 1938, a fitting companion for “Decoration Day” from Charles Ives’ Holiday's Symphony also on the program from an intrepid amateur community ensemble, the Palo Alto Philharmonic.

Berkeley Symphony and their music director, Joana Carneiro deeply engage contemporary symphonic music in all its diversity. 

This combination ought to make people sit up and take notice: conductor George Cleve and pianist Peter Serkin performing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. 

Always a seasonal highlight, the annual joint holiday concert of the Stanford Symphonic Chorus and the Peninsula Symphony, will this year feature a typically vivid pairing.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer/conductor who until recent years led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brings to the Pacific shore the same Philharmonia Orchestra whose many recordings with some of the greatest conductors of the latter 20th century have achieved legendary status.

The Oakland East Bay Symphony concludes the national election work week with all American composers.

Tis the season for late Brahms, and the San Francisco Symphony under late replacement conductor Asher Fisch delivered a somber, powerful reading of the composer’s last symphony.

We were all grateful for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But we’re even happier to see him creating works like this brilliant Violin Concerto.

Two superstars will be playing two No. 2 concertos too difficult for most other mortals.

The California Symphony opens its conductor search with Robert Moody fronting the orchestra in a straight-down –the-middle program.