Reviews

The pastiche choral work has a less-than-illustrious history.

Last Friday marked the final concert of Oakland East Bay Symphony’s 2006-2007 season, but it also marked the beginning of its newest initiative, the "American Masterworks Series," which will continue in upcoming seasons.

On Sunday afternoon at Old First Church, composer Elinor Armer faced the risks inherent in any recital dedicated to a single composer's work. She must have come away from it with an enhanced sense of achievement, because the program's seven compositions were well-performed, enthusiastically received, and richly indicative of her talent and accomplishments.

Chamber Music San Francisco's director, Daniel Levenstein, seems to favor loud Slavs. Soon after an eardrum-shattering recital by pianist Nikolai Demidenko, in which he pounded out Bach and Schumann with the same force that Samson used to topple the temple, we get powerhouse tenor Vladimir Kuzmenko.

You may notice her 6-foot-plus height first, but when Kendall Gladen begins to sing, she makes another, far more important impression. Even at an age that's young for a mezzo, and at the beginning of her career, Gladen has the "it" of the It Girl, a certain something, the je ne sais quoi.

Chamber music, by definition, should be intimate and personal for both the musicians and the audience. And few Bay Area groups have mastered the art of intimate, welcoming entertainment like the Gold Coast Chamber Players, as they again proved on Saturday in "Magic Flute," the second of their three-concert 2007 season.

No music makes a bigger statement than the brassy sunrise of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. Because tour programs are generally about making statements, the extravagant tone poem based on Nietzsche's extravagantly confident philosophy is music befitting the San Francisco Symphony's current itinerary.

"Lo, the winter is past ... and the time of the singing of birds is come," says the Song of Songs in the Bible. And lo, the singing of Schola Cantorum San Francisco came to St.

The Avedis Chamber Music Series at San Francisco's Legion of Honor has rarely drawn the kind of packed house it did on Friday evening, or more enthusiasm for the results. The occasion featured pianist Jon Nakamatsu with the Stanford Woodwind Quintet, who offered two light and popular French works embedded between a crossover Cuban work and a grand sextet by a forgotten Austro-German master.

Maestro Kent Nagano led the Berkeley Symphony in a rousing season finale on Friday night at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. However exciting it turned out to be, the concert was nevertheless bittersweet, as that evening marked the beginning of the end of Nagano's full-time (and long-time) music directorship of the Symphony.