Reviews

A new CD from the New Century Chamber Orchestra is designed around Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, and bracketed with Barber, Mahler, and live recordings. Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and her orchestra have every right to be proud of it.

Johannes Brahms and Alban Berg, great Viennese masters, make a good pairing, and San Francisco Symphony brought them together for its Thanksgiving week concerts. The well-thought-out and well-executed program never quite caught fire.

In the second season the New Century Chamber Orchestra continues to move forward with imaginative programs. Their recent round of concerts was in many ways a testament to the adaptability of great music in the hands of imaginative musicians.

The Peninsula Symphony Orchestra and Stanford Symphonic Chorus can reliably be depended on to present an engaging holiday concert. This year’s was particularly interdisciplinary, offering instrumental works that had no explicit connection to the season but that proved to be cheerfully appropriate nonetheless.

To celebrate the season, American Bach Soloists has remastered the American Bach Choir’s lovely 2002 Christmas CD, What Sweeter Music. The sweet purity of the female voices, the lovely clarity of the acoustic, and a careful selection whose tunes emphasize celebration over all else are self-recommending.

A new CD from the Turtle Island Quartet featuring eight songs by the late rock legend Jimi Hendrix may have some applauding the cross-over effort. Others are likely to come away less than satisfied, if not outright irritated.

It’s probably a good thing that Bryn Terfel stopped singing at the end of his recital Saturday night at Zellerbach Hall. Had he kept going, the audience would still be there, cheering for more.

In an ambitious, godsend of a program from Michael Morgan’s Oakland East Bay Symphony, not even the great Santana and Narada Michael Walden could transcend the acoustics of the historic Paramount Theatre.

It’s always a pleasure to watch a singer make her way from aspiring talent to full-fledged artist — and to witness her finding her comfort zone in a vast sea of repertoire. This week’s S.F. Symphony program, featuring soprano Elza van den Heever as soloist was a beguiling case in point.

The Del Sol Quartet performs an often mesmerizing always amplified program of new works that ends on an electrifying note.