Reviews

Mix equal parts youthful joie de vivre with mature warmth and you have an idea of what the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra accomplished Sunday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall. The ensemble's sheer warmth of timbre, under Conductor Benjamin Shwartz, highlighted a program of essentially lush Romanticism, from first note to last.

Time for full disclosure. As much as I admire the Oakland East Bay Symphony, I asked to review its season opener, "A Grand Opening: Beethoven and Bernstein," for one specific reason: to have the opportunity to reassess the artistry of soprano Hope Briggs.

The unlikely Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela seemed to be having an even better time in Davies Symphony Hall Sunday evening than the audience, even while it drove the audience into something approaching a hysteria of enthusiasm. In 50 years of covering orchestral concerts on four continents, I have never encountered anything even close to such unlikely musical splendor.

When Jean Sibelius died in 1957, he had not completed a major work since the late 1920s. Nonetheless, his music dominated the Finnish musical scene until the coming of serialism and modernism around the time of his passing.

Amazing young string quartets seem to appear at a steady pace these days, and it was a great pleasure on Sunday to see another one added to the local crop.

Watching Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra working with a guest director is always fascinating, but there's something special about the band's relationship with its own director, Nicholas McGegan, that makes his every appearance something to anticipate.

It was all treats and no tricks whatsoever in Davies Hall on Halloween night as far as the music went. Appearances, on the other hand, were somewhat misleading. A few years into the future, perhaps, not every mention of San Francisco Symphony Associate Conductor James Gaffigan will refer to his age and appearance.

My Russian grandmother and the daughter she taught the songs she knew (my mother), both long since gone, would have been unable to keep from dancing in the aisles and cheering at Dmitri Hvorostovsky's Cal Performances concert at Zellerbach Hall Sunday afternoon. Joined by the renowned Moscow Chamber Orchestra and the Academy of Choral Art Choir of Moscow, under the direction of the American conduc

To some, John Cage is a joy guide, a trickster, a brilliant confounder of established expectations. To others he is a constantly vexing presence: an incontrovertibly original iconoclast who changed the course of modern composition by giving artists permission to do any one of a number of things at any given time.

A substantial crowd filled St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley on Friday for the opening of Volti's 29th season. The concert, titled "Adventures in Life, Love, and Longing," presented recent works (the oldest of which was written in 1987) by six living composers, many of whom were in attendance at the performance. Four works were premieres.