Reviews

A decade or so back, there was some talk of a planned, independent-label Beethoven symphony cycle from Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all the recording to be done in concert. Since then, PBO has taken to issuing live recordings on its own label, and the Beethoven project appears to be taking slow shape.

I came in hopes of a full solo recital from Leon Fleisher at Herbst Theatre on Saturday. I left grateful that Fleisher is back and in fine form as a soloist, and that he shared the stage with his wife, the pianist Katherine Jacobson Fleisher. The program included two late masterpieces by Schubert: one for piano duet, one solo.

As the musical establishment for England’s monarchy, the Chapel Royal has played host to some of that nation’s most renowned musicians, from Thomas Tallis and William Byrd to Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel.

Last Wednesday, it was Laura Jackson’s turn to impress the Berkeley Symphony audience and perhaps follow Kent Nagano as music director. Hugh Wolff and Guillermo Figueroa showed their stuff earlier this season, and three more candidates are going to do the same this fall. How did she measure up?

Friday night’s performance by Europa Galante offered a long-awaited opportunity to hear some of the most colorful performers on today’s early-music scene.

By the time an erstwhile hot young virtuoso has lived through a couple decades of concertizing, whatever keeps you still listening is necessarily something other than hotness, youth, or virtuosity. Sometimes, to be sure, even the youth and the hotness persist longer than you would think possible.

Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack comes from Buenos Aires, and her home is now in San Francisco, but her future is in the great opera houses and recital halls of the world.

"Indigenous Instruments," composer Steve Mackey writes of one of his pieces, "is vernacular music from a culture that doesn't actually exist." But at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall on Friday, the audience was able to catch aural samples of familiar vernacular music.

"Are all choral concerts like this?" asked my extremely sensitive sister-in-law. Had she not continued her thought, I could have responded in many ways. "No, they are not," I might have said. Of the thousands upon thousands of choral groups that grace the American landscape, precious few are as fine-tuned and impeccably voiced as San Francisco Choral Artists.

As soon as soprano Elza van den Heever started to pour forth her large, stunning sound, a story about Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad came to mind. For Flagstad's first Metropolitan Opera audition, she was sent to a small rehearsal room whose proportions so cramped her vocal projection that no one sensed her ultimate potential.