Reviews

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Review

Star-Studded Singfest

Michael Zwiebach - June 17, 2008
Handel's Italian operas live through great singing, more so than many of their bel canto brethren. The subject matter and sensibility of their stories can seem foreign to us, and the arias are founded on emotions and metaphors that recur in every one of the operas.
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Review

Stars in the New World

Anna Carol Dudley - June 17, 2008
The Thomashefskys are back.

Idealism Meets Reality

Heuwell Tircuit - June 17, 2008
On Friday evening, Old First Church featured the local debut of America’s newest chamber group devoted to promoting new music, New York’s Redshift quintet. The ensemble is especially idealistic in that it avoids big-name composers in favor of up-and-coming hopefuls. And this, while setting forth those intentions enthusiastically for every piece in sight: hook, line, and stinkers.

Singular Black Notes

Michelle Dulak Thomson - June 10, 2008
The New Century Chamber Orchestra's next season will see the orchestra with a regular music director again, in the person of the newly hired Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.
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Review

Sound Garden

Jonathan Russell - June 10, 2008
On Sunday night, the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco's Mission District was full of classical music's most coveted demographic — young people in their 20s and 30s.

Triple-Threat Treat

Alexander Kahn - June 10, 2008
On Friday night, the San Francisco Symphony offered up a unique program as part of its 6.5 series: a chance to observe three of the Symphony’s staff conductors — Benjamin Shwartz, Ragnar Bohlin, and James Gaffigan — conducting back to back.
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Review

Seeing Music as Drama

Lisa Hirsch - June 10, 2008
The Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, held in alternate years, typically features at least one program that's as much theater as music. In past years, the early music extravaganza had the horse ballet "Le carousel du roi" and the "Carnaval Baroque".
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Review

Heavenly Music in the California Hills

Brett Campbell - June 10, 2008
For a new music fan, Southern California’s Ojai Festival is about as close to nirvana as it gets. For 62 years now, this little artsy town in the hills near Santa Barbara has been bringing contemporary music to the outdoor Libbey Bowl, an acoustic shell in a sylvan park setting as idyllic as the music can be challenging.
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Review

Stages of Love

Anna Carol Dudley - June 10, 2008

The Concord Ensemble is aptly named. In a Berkeley Festival concert Wednesday night in Hertz Hall, the individual voices of the ensemble's six men produced a wonderful concord of sound and style. The program of Spanish secular music during the Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries) was organized into six sections, showing the course of true love through its various stages: Courtship, The Lovers, The Wedding Banquet, The Betrayal, A Bitter End, and Fortune's Whims.

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Review

Enlivening a Legend

Scott L. Edwards - June 10, 2008
I would have liked to see Davitt Moroney's reaction when it dawned on him precisely what that dusty box of partbooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale contained.