Reviews

Whatever work that Music Director Marin Alsop decides to program at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, you know it will at least be interesting and intellectually provocative. Whether it's beautiful or ultimately satisfying is more subjective, but I found Saturday's "Triple Play" concert fairly successful on those counts, as well.

Abstract, intimidating, unintelligible: These are words I often hear used to describe new music. People who use them might assume that every new-music festival is chock-full of serious, difficult sounds that can daunt even trained musicians, not to mention the musically uninitiated. The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, however, fits no such description.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music opened Friday night with its familiar sense of community and relaxed warmth much in evidence.

You can hardly have more fun than by stumbling across quality music you didn't even know existed. Pianist Gary Graffman certainly provided a rich panoply of that Thursday in Palo Alto's St. Mark's Episcopal Church, via his recital titled "For the Left Hand." The event was presented as part of the important Music@Menlo Festival, to a packed and roaring audience.

It was a very San Francisco affair. This is, after all, an area where no urban sophisticate blinks an eye when a photo of three leather-clad, motorcycle-mounting Barbies graces the cover of The San Francisco Chronicle's Pink Section.

The Midsummer Mozart Festival's first foray into opera, a production of The Abduction from the Seraglio at San Jose's California Theater, was highly successful in most respects. The singers ranged from capable to excellent, with one standout.

War, violence, revenge, and parent-child relationships are evergreen subjects found at the heart of important operas from the earliest days of the form.

Santa Fe Opera is presenting its first Billy Budd this season. The company, which was founded just five years after Benjamin Britten premiered the first version of the opera in 1951, waited an inexplicable five decades to stage this haunting 20th-century masterpiece.

The didactic imperative runs deep, if gentle, at Music@Menlo. Every season and indeed every program boasts a design, one calculated to make the audience hear anew, or differently, or both.

Last Thursday’s San Francisco Symphony’s Summer in the City concert in Davies Symphony Hall turned into a light, but charming array of basic French fare, as conductor James Gaffigan went from opera excerpts to Ravel’s bitter take on the Viennese Waltz.