Reviews

Thomas Busse - March 2, 2011

It would have been hard to tell, observing the small, graying audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Saturday, that videos of the early-music band Voices of Music had received, as of this writing, 3,558,070 hits on YouTube. I suspect a good deal of those came from Web queries for the famous Pachelbel Canon, of which VOM has posted an excellent recording.

Be'eri Moalem - March 1, 2011

What other touring orchestra posts its country's flag on stage when performing internationally? Israel's nationalistic pride is well known, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) is a particularly special source of honor for Israelis.

Steven Winn - March 1, 2011

The Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s great orchestras, plumbs the depths and heights of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, in its final Berkeley performance Sunday.

Jerry Kuderna - February 28, 2011

What sacred music do you set alongside Mozart’s great Requiem in a concert? The San Francisco Symphony movingly squared the circle Thursday with works by Morton Feldman and Mindaugas Urbaitis.

Georgia Rowe - February 28, 2011

Philip Glass’ Orphée earns high marks as a 20th-century alternative to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. It just deserves a better production than the blunt, charmless staging mounted by the Ensemble Parallèle at Herbst Theatre over the weekend.

Scott Cmiel - February 28, 2011

The Paris Guitar Duo, in its first San Francisco outing, performed wide-ranging music with brilliance, but with odd mannerisms.

Jeff Dunn - February 28, 2011

Three interpreters at Oakland East Bay Symphony's concert on Friday transformed composers’ dreams into art worthy of both praise and concern.

David Bratman - February 27, 2011

The Vienna Philharmonic began its Berkeley residency Friday with a concert that showed off its versatility. The three composers, all from within Vienna’s cultural orbit, were aesthetically different from each other: high Classicism from Franz Schubert, wallowing Romanticism from Richard Wagner, and violent modernism from Béla Bartók.

Jason Victor Serinus - February 24, 2011

Joyce DiDonato’s latest recording, DivaDivo displays an artist so on top of her form and versatile in her voice that, like her last CD, it has a good chance of snaring another round of awards.

Michelle Dulak Thomson - February 22, 2011

It’s pleasing for a great orchestra to record the standard repertoire; but it’s more exciting, from an audience perspective, for it to record something you’ve not had the opportunity to hear before. The San Francisco Symphony’s recent release is not only an artistic triumph but emblematic of priorities rightly ordered.