Reviews

With its concerts last weekend, the American Bach Soloists completed the fourth year of its Bach cycle, an elaborate multiseason project featuring a wide variety of the composer's most important works.

In a combination of community service and organizational preservation, on Sunday evening the San Francisco Academy Orchestra presented a concert in Calvary Presbyterian Church, to thunderous applause. Conductor Florin Parvulescu took on major repertoire with an orchestra made up of college students and recent graduates, infused with a few members of the San Francisco Symphony.

Although Steven Isserlis had decided on his program long before hearing the sad news of Mstislav Rostropovich's death on April 27, his recital at Herbst Theatre on Thursday, which consisted entirely of Russian music for cello and piano, turned out to be a poignant and fitting homage to the great cellist and humanitarian.

There can be no denying that music plays a powerful role in inspiring political activism. But the marriage between social consciousness and music is more commonly associated these days with the protest songs of high-profile pop and folk artists like Joan Baez and the Dixie Chicks than the symphonies and improvisations of their counterparts from the classical and jazz worlds.

In his annual pilgrimage to the First Congregational Church in Berkeley last weekend, gambist extraordinaire Jordi Savall showed Berkeley a different side from his appearances of late. Friday night's Cal Performances program, titled "Marin Maris and Antoine Forqueray: L'Ange et le Diable," highlighted works by the two most famous viol players of the French Baroque.

Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya Dama) delivers a decidedly mixed bag: a lush, gushingly romantic score, rich with gorgeous, often-sprawling arias and ensembles, married to a tryingly melodramatic and barely credible tale of love and obsession.

It is not every day that "Sylvan and Oceanic Delights" inhabit the halls of Berkeley's Northbrae Community Church, but a happy audience tasted those delights there Friday night.

Bizet’s Carmen is an opera seething with emotion, drama, and theatricality, but it was only in the last two acts that these potent elements were fully realized at UC Davis’ production on Sunday at the Mondavi Center, which featured principals from the San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows.

Berkeley Opera boasts that its new Romeo and Juliet, which opened on Saturday night at the Julia Morgan Theatre, is by William Shakespeare and Charles Gounod.

Christopher Maltman is a spellbinder — a British baritone with a voice at times honeyed, assertive, suave, dramatic, ethereal, and gutsy. Along with pianist Julius Drake, an appealingly muscular presence with superb fingers and a musical imagination equal to that of the singer, Maltman charmed continually.