Reviews

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. 

Some early music ensembles approach the performance of Renaissance polyphony as if it were fine crystal: beautiful, but delicate, a fragile object not to be unduly disturbed. Like crystal, the music can occasionally shimmer and reveal prisms of color when viewed through different angles, but it remains a static object, more a museum piece than a kinetic construct. This analogy aptly summarizes the experience of hearing Ensemble Gombert, a 14-voice chamber choir from Australia specializing in High Renaissance polyphony.

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble does not confine itself to the region of its name. The Bay Area–based chamber ensemble opened its 2009-2010 season Monday evening at the Green Room of the Veterans Building in San Francisco with an engaging program of short works derived from such far-flung musical locales as Armenia, India, Iran, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Balkans.

Keeping Score is about to return. The first three musical journeys in the second season of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score TV series are set to air nationwide. Scheduled locally on KQED-TV for Oct. 15, 22, and 29 at 10 p.m., the one-hour programs explore Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, and Ives’ Holidays Symphony.

In a long-gone era of baseball, before they needed four days of rest between starts, pitchers routinely worked both games of a doubleheader. Soprano Patricia Racette goes them one better in San Francisco Opera’s Il trittico, by playing substantial roles in all three outings of this 1918 Puccini triple-header of one-act operas.