Reviews

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Review

Tough Nut Cracked

Michelle Dulak Thomson - March 9, 2010

The Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider has a taste for challenges. Two years ago, in his San Francisco Performances debut recital, he gave a stunning performance of Arnold Schoenberg's late Phantasy. The Schoenberg Concerto, a monumentally tough nut, is in his repertoire; so is Carl Nielsen's notoriously difficult one.

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Review

Ravishing Ravel

Heuwell Tircuit - March 8, 2010
Last week was a big week for Maurice Ravel’s music at Davies Symphony Hall.
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Review

Flip/Flop

Jeff Dunn - March 8, 2010
Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde.
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Review

Savall Scintillates With the PBO

Jonathan Rhodes Lee - March 8, 2010
Sunday evening at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra treated an enthusiastic audience to a Francophilic romp through Europe, titled “The French Suite in Europe.” We started in Stockholm, of all places, with Guillaume Dumanoir’s 17th-century Suite du Ballet de Stockholm.
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Review

Serenading the Dancer From the Dance

Lisa Hirsch - March 7, 2010
New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current program, titled “Serenades and Dances,” bookends a pair of shorter, lighter works around a core of two large-scale mainstays of the standard repertory, Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.
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Review

Drinking in a Perfect Blend

Matthew Cmiel - March 6, 2010
I would hazard a guess that rarely has a local music festival been so intriguing and provocative as San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, which is headed by the insightful and interesting Charles Amirkhanian.
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Review

Adding K to the Three B’s

David Bratman - March 5, 2010
With pianist Peter Serkin as its guest artist, the Orion String Quartet brought a pantheon of composers to its Stanford Lively Arts concert on Wednesday at Dinkelspiel Auditorium: Bach. Beethoven. Brahms. ...
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Review

Gyan Riley's Guitar Night at the Club

Jason Victor Serinus - March 2, 2010

How to widen the circle, to bring more music lovers, both young and old, into the classical fold? In a time of shrinking budgets, that question constantly haunts concert producers, record company executives, musicians, and, yes, even critics in the U.S. (not China, Korea, or parts of Europe) who find themselves communicating with a shrinking pool of graying, mainly white-skinned, classical music aficionados.

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Review

Choral Dancing on a High Wire

Don Kaplan - March 2, 2010
What can you expect from a chorus whose motto is “singing without a net”? Certainly not sea chanteys or singers standing solemnly on risers. Instead, audiences attending Volti’s memorable concert Saturday at St.
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Review

New Music, Old Values

Jeff Dunn - March 1, 2010

I’ve covered so many scrape-a-thon concerts of new music featuring the cello that I’ve almost forgotten what a gorgeous, melodious instrument it is. With cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han’s release (on the ArtistLed label) of four duos they commissioned, the lyrical cello returns with welcome suffusion.