Reviews

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Review

Sunstruck at Festival del Sole

Georgia Rowe - July 20, 2009
With its feast-for-the-senses blend of performance, art, and culinary events, Festival del Sole has become an attractive summer destination for music lovers throughout the Bay Area and beyond. The annual Napa Valley extravaganza, a spinoff of Italy’s Tuscan Sun festival, has also turned out to be a great place to experience the work of up-and-coming conductors.
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Review

Tasty Feast From sfSound

Jessica Balik - July 20, 2009
The contemporary chamber music concert that I attended Sunday evening was refreshingly free of gimmickry. For example, it took place in the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco’s Mission District: a humble, but also accommodating, performance space. The program, by sfSound, also did not boast any flashy title or unifying theme.
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Review

Carmel Bach, Trotting Through Paradise

Scott MacClelland - July 20, 2009

The search for a new Carmel Bach Festival music director is already under way, even while Bruno Weil has one last Festival to lead in 2010. One local wag lately suggested in a letter to the Monterey County Herald that Weil might give serious thought to a mostly-Bach program next year.

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Review

Doctor Atomic: 'Except You Enthrall Me ...'

Janos Gereben - July 20, 2009
John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony is an orchestral reduction, the soundtrack in a sense of his 2005 opera.  The work presents episodes from the opera, with three movements titled “The Laboratory,” “Panic,” and “Trinity.”
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Review

Mozart's Many Midsummer Charms

Heuwell Tircuit - July 20, 2009

Levelheaded dedication flashed on Friday evening at the San Francisco Conservatory’s concert hall, as conductor George Cleve opened this season’s Midsummer Mozart Festival with a display of brilliance. If anything, it all went to prove how much variety Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced in his all-too-short lifetime.

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Review

Eos EnsembleAdmirable, but ...

Heuwell Tircuit - July 13, 2009

A program titled “Romancing the Voice” opened Old First Church’s summer season Friday evening, with the Eos Ensemble and guest mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack as featured soloist. The basic ensemble of five chamber musicians was made up of violinists Craig Reiss and Mariya Borozina, violist Caroline Lee, cellist Thalia Moore, and pianist Marilyn Thompson.

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Review

New Merolini Bow, Sing, and Conquer

Janos Gereben - July 13, 2009

Although Friday was July 10, the evening presented a Lucky 13 at Herbst Theatre as exactly one-third of the San Francisco Opera Merola Program's 39 participants made their debut here.

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Review

A Tempest of Torments

Jason Victor Serinus - July 13, 2009

Chromatic gales, emotion-churning dissonances, and vocal writing so torturous it makes you wonder whether the all-star cast is composed of masochists: Such is the score for Thomas Adès’ three-act opera, The Tempest.

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Review

Festival Opera's Triumphant Turandot

James Keolker - July 13, 2009

Everything about Puccini’s opera Turandot is big: big orchestra, big voices, big chorus, enormous sets, and massive emotions. So it is daring for a company the size of Festival Opera to undertake such a giant. But no need to worry, for this is a triumphant Turandot.

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Review

Songs Worth Far More Than a Smile

Jason Victor Serinus - July 7, 2009
Pentatone Classics has issued a veritable bonanza of recent American song, half of which come from Bay Area composers. And if the Song Be Worth a Smile, which takes its name from a line in Gordon Getty’s setting of his poem “The Ballad of Poor Peter,” features songs by William Bolcom, Jake Heggie, David Garner, John Corigliano, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Getty himself.