Reviews

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Rafal Blechacz is among the select few who evidently were chosen to carry Frédéric Chopin’s torch to an international audience. His recital Saturday at Herbst Theatre blazed brightly.

“The Electric Voice,” Stanford Lively Arts' program of new works for electronics and voice, featuring bass Nicholas Isherwood, reinforced the contradictions and arrogance often associated with the field of highbrow electronic music.

It's astonishing for a veteran of too many Turandot performances to keep count of, to find one of the best in Palo Alto, but the tiny West Bay Opera once again conquered a musical Goliath.

The Barber of Seville is such a beguiling opera, it’s not hard to see why some mistake it for an easy one. But producers approaching Rossini’s bel canto masterpiece do so at their peril.

In a performance by a trimmed-down San Francisco Symphony on Saturday, it was hard not to get caught up in the invigorating presence of conductor Ton Koopman, who coaxed phrases out of his performers like a magician pulling handkerchiefs out of a hat.