Reviews

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Review

Bach, Stewed

Scott Cmiel - October 5, 2009
The Japanese guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita performed an ambitious, all-Bach program Friday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
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Review

Three Notes, And Worlds of Them

Jeff Dunn - October 5, 2009
Would you rather focus on atoms, or planets? Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas chose both and overindulged a bit in one for Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. It began with music of the Zen-inspired Italian Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), whose Hymnos took 13 minutes to elaborate just three elemental notes — D, E, and B-flat.
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Review

Thomas Hampson Surveys American Song

Jason Victor Serinus - October 2, 2009

Midway through his Song of America recital on Wednesday, presented by San Francisco Performances, Spokane-raised Thomas Hampson paused to address the adoring Herbst Theatre audience he had sung for on 10 previous occasions. “In many of the places where I’ve presented this project," the 54-year-old baritone declared, “people ask me if I’d please sing more songs like that one called Shenandoah.

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Review

Grace Notes, but Not by Accident

Brett Campbell - September 29, 2009
French music, the stereotype goes, prizes clarity, elegance, balance — in a word, gracefulness. Of course, exceptions are easy to find, but last weekend’s concerts titled “Les grâces françoises: Graceful Music From France,” by the aptly named ensemble Les grâces, made a persuasive case that a consciously graceful performance style immaculately suits the polite, early-Baroque gems.
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Review

Heartening a/rhythmia From Alarm Without Sound

Jason Victor Serinus - September 28, 2009
Within three or four measures, the riot is in full swing. It’s as though Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti embrace under acid rain madness, while Frank Zappa and Bruce Springstein come sloshing through in quick-step fashion.
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Review

Brewer Breathes Life Into American Songs

Georgia Rowe - September 28, 2009
The American song repertoire is often overlooked in vocal recitals, though it wasn’t always thus; as Christine Brewer observed in her splendid recital Sunday afternoon at Hertz Hall, sopranos including Eileen Farrell, Kirsten Flagstad, Eleanor Steber, and Helen Traubel used to regularly include English-language songs in their programs. Citing those artists as primary influences, Brewer made a sele
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Review

Start of a New Schubert Cycle

Heuwell Tircuit - September 28, 2009

Avie Records has begun a new series of recordings of Schubert’s late piano works, featuring the estimable pianist Imogen Cooper, who has recorded little in recent years. Volume I is just out, containing five important and varied Schubert compositions on a pair of CDs (AV2156).

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Review

A House of Many Chambers

Jason Victor Serinus - September 27, 2009
It’s easy to understand why Cal Performances scheduled four preconcert educational events in association with the two-performance U.S. premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s new opera, A House in Bali, at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall.
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Review

Mozart 'Musical' at the War Memorial

Janos Gereben - September 26, 2009

Grand and glorious as Mozart's 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio (The Abduction from the Seraglio) is, it's not a through-composed, sung-only "grand opera." Now onstage at the San Francisco Opera, in a new coproduction with Chicago's Lyric Opera, "Abduction" is an early forerunner of the Broadway musical, a "singspiel" with a great deal of spoken dialogue.

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Review

Running Mahler to Earth

Steven Winn - September 25, 2009

San Francisco Symphony audiences who have grown accustomed to long-arch excursions through the Mahler symphonic canon need to adjust their sights for this week’s “Gustav Mahler: Origins and Legacies” programs at Davies Symphony Hall. As the middle panel of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas’ three-week Mahler Festival ’09, the programs amount to busily filled, prismatically constructed talk-and-play probings of the composer’s musical sources, techniques, humor, pathos, and psychology.