David Bratman

Saturday night’s Symphony Silicon Valley concert at the California Theatre in San José was full of interesting resonances and connections. For one thing, it was the anniversary of D-Day. What better time, as the organization’s President Andrew Bales pointed out in his welcoming talk, to hear a Mass, a work ending with the words “Dona nobis pacem” (Grant us peace)?

Everybody knows Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Each century has its standard, default large-scale choral work (Messiah, Verdi’s Requiem), and, like it or not, Carmina Burana fills that role for the 20th.

“Spring Symphonies” is the title that Symphony Silicon Valley gave to its May program, which I heard Saturday at the California Theatre in San José. Sure, it’s adequately descriptive for a concert performed in the spring. Yet neither of the symphonies on the program had Spring or Pastoral in their titles, or any other obvious programmatic connection with the season.

Stanford University’s Memorial Church turned into a Byzantine abbey for two hours on Sunday evening, with a concert of medieval Byzantine chant performed by the vocal group Cappella Romana, from Portland, Oregon.

Music from Eastern Europe, especially if it’s also from the earlier part of the 20th century, has a reputation for being rugged and rough-hewn, full of exotic sounds and hypnotic motifs over catchy rhythms. Sometimes that reputation is deserved.

The San Francisco Piano Quartet discovered American music on Sunday afternoon at the Noe Valley Ministry in the city, as part of the Noe Valley Chamber Music series. That is to say, they presented a program tracing the discovery of self-awareness of Americanism in the works of several generations of composers.

George Cleve is best-known these days as director of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, but in person, with his beard and his solid presence at the podium, he looks rather like Johannes Brahms. Born in Vienna, though long a resident of the Bay Area, he’s a conductor who actually specializes in both these great Viennese composers.