Reviews

Be'eri Moalem - June 23, 2010

For a society of iPod shufflin’, Web surfin’, channel flippin’, Facebook friendin’ individuals, the annual Garden of Memory is an excellent idea. Every summer solstice since 1995, Sarah Cahill and New Music Bay Area present “a columbarium walk-through event at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland.”

Janos Gereben - June 21, 2010

There are recitals, there are great recitals, and then there’s Yuja Wang. In an extraordinary scene Sunday in Herbst Theatre, after hearing her play the audience appeared both exhausted and elated. My hands hurt not merely from applauding, but also from an apparent case of couvade syndrome (men’s sympathy pain at childbirth) on listening to two hours of devilishly difficult Scriabin and Prokofiev played with ease and astonishing clarity.

Jason Victor Serinus - June 19, 2010

Proof of our good fortune in having Ragnar Bohlin as director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, this tremendous CD demonstrates his overarching sense of line and purpose. In six contemporary works by Swedish and (in the case of Ned Rorem) American composers, Bohlin’s leadership of the 32-person Swedish Radio Choir produces mesmerizing dynamic gradations and shading.

Jason Victor Serinus - June 15, 2010

Tenor Jonas Kaufmann will likely be your tenor of the hour, if not the decade, after you hear his new Decca recording of German arias by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Wagner. Supported and urged on by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, magnificently conducted by Claudio Abbado, the tenor lavishes as much care, love, and passion on his repertoire as you can ever expect to hear.

Anna Carol Dudley - June 14, 2010

And the winner is ... Claudio Monteverdi! He was well-served Saturday night in a Berkeley Festival performance at that city’s First Congregational Church. ARTEK (from The Art of the Early Keyboard), a New York–based ensemble of six singers and seven players of plucked and bowed strings, gave magnificent voice to Monteverdi’s Fifth Book of Madrigals.

Rachel Howard - June 14, 2010

“Miriam’s Well,” billed as “an interfaith collaboration of sacred dance, music, and poetry,” begins and ends with a poem by Coleman Barks, popular scholar of the Sufi mystic poet Rumi:

What is praised is one, so the praise is one, too, Many jugs being poured into one huge basin. All religions, all this singing, one song.

Lisa Hirsch - June 12, 2010

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, opened at San Francisco Opera on Thursday night with a thrilling, deeply moving performance that bodes extremely well for the full Ring to be presented in June 2011.

Steven Winn - June 10, 2010

Audience members who may feel tempted to bail out early on San Francisco Opera’s The Girl of the Golden West should be advised that the best — and briefest — act of this often wayward and wearisome production comes last. 

Jeff Kaliss - June 9, 2010

There seemed something prescient in one of the 17th-century motets presented by Magnificat on Monday night at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

Jason Victor Serinus - June 7, 2010

This 2-disc DVD gives the lie to the notion that opera can remain relevant only if the setting is updated to contemporary times. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s historically based, thoroughly modern sets, costumes, and direction for this 2009 production of Claudio Monteverdi ’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at Teatro Real, Madrid, are so compelling, and the authentic instrument performance by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants is so alive and colorful, that an opera first performed 369 years ago resounds with life and feeling.