Reviews

Sunday's matinee performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a feature of the 70th anniversary season of the Carmel Bach Festival, memorialized Sandor Salgo.

Music festivals, whether of the mini or maxi kind, invite audiences to think of music as part of an entire experience. For most of the year, we're content just to hear a concert. But the summer festival experience is also partly about location and lingering twilight.

Chamber music gluttons can always find satiation at the American Bach Soloists' SummerFest concerts.

The German composer Hans Werner Henze, considered one of Europe's major composers of the '60s, '70s, and beyond, rarely gets a hearing in the U.S. One fan, however, will not take this neglect (is it simply old-hattedness?) lying down.

Hundreds of thousands, millions, perhaps billions of people around the globe, had just taken the seven-point Live Earth Pledge to do their part to avert global warming. But in Walnut Creek on Saturday night, at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, it was business as usual.

In 1781, Joseph Haydn announced the appearance of a new set of string quartets, "composed in a new and special way, because I have written none in 10 years." The six quartets would appear as Opus 33, and would be Haydn's first authorized quartet publication in accordance with the terms of a contract he signed in 1779 with Prince Nicolaus Esterházy. With one of these works, No.

As the lights were going down in Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday night, I caught a line in the program book asking "What are we to make of Prokofiev ..." but had no chance to read further before the hall went dark. The question — after a childhood of mandatory Prokofiev in a Soviet-occupied country and a subsequent lifetime of listening to him by choice — didn't make sense.

Festivals should celebrate something that doesn't happen every day.

It is fitting that San Francisco Opera's new production of Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigenia in Tauris) feels extremely contemporary. Indeed, Gluck's work, which premiered in 1779, would have sounded revolutionary in its time.

Three lesser-known works of Sergei Prokofiev were featured on Saturday's concert of the San Francisco Symphony's festival program in Davies Symphony Hall. After a lightweight icebreaker, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas launched into two of Prokofiev's largest, most demanding orchestral compositions, abetted by pianist Vladimir Feltsman.