Reviews

No matter how often you've heard a piece of music, once it fails to surprise it's past its sell date. Perpetual surprises are what separates merely well-made and original music from masterpieces. The refreshing level of discovery on last week's San Francisco Symphony presentations of Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust, Op. 24, under guest conductor Charles Dutoit, beautifully achieved that.

On Friday evening, the UC Davis-based Empyrean Ensemble made a guest appearance on San Francisco's respectable Old First Concert series, presenting a reprise of its program "Double Trouble," first performed one month ago at the Mondavi Center in Davis.

The Russian-born, British-based pianist Nikolai Demidenko made an impressive Bay Area debut on Saturday afternoon. His recital at the Florence Gould Theater, under the aegis of Chamber Music San Francisco, showed him to be a serious, sincere, intense, and engaging pianist of diverse repertoire.

The end of the concert season always brings a spate of big, symphonic showpieces, as orchestras go into summer with a bang (and goose their audiences into subscriptions for next year). The Marin Symphony chose Strauss' symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, Op. 40) as its grand finale, and you don't get much showier than that.

A couple of merry wives took possession of the Florence Gould Theater on Sunday afternoon at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Noted UCLA musicologist Robert Winter and guest conductor George Thomson joined forces on Saturday night with the Santa Rosa Symphony to produce a Symphonie fantastique in its native habitat: the golden age of literature and the arts that was Paris in 1830, the year the restored Bourbon monarchy ended in revolution.

J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor of 1747-49 (BWV 232) is a curious creature. This late vocal masterpiece was conceived as a series of independent Mass sections, rather than as a unified whole. Bach wrote its component parts over the course of some two decades, in widely divergent circumstances and for various audiences.

San Francisco Performances took an impressive leap of faith last week in presenting Italian pianist Marino Formenti’s local debut in not one, but three solo recitals at the DeYoung Museum’s new Koret Auditorium. In the two performances I heard, this adventurous move was rewarded with often extraordinary results.

At nearly every turn there was something crazy about the Berkeley Symphony concert on Thursday, making it one of the most stimulating but maddening musical events of the year. To begin with, however, give kudos to the orchestra for scheduling itself two dates in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, instead of Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, barely a stone’s throw away.