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.
Many string quartet concerts are programmed as miniature histories of the medium. Few, though, can have had a chronological spread so wide as the St. Lawrence String Quartet’s Stanford Lively Arts concert at Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Sunday.
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.
New string quartets inspired by older masterworks in the genre have a long tradition. The latest composer to add to it is John Adams. Hearing the St. Lawrence Quartet perform late Beethoven inspired him to write a new quartet, which the St. Lawrence will give the premiere performance of at this Stanford Lively Arts concert. It's an important new work by a major composer.
Symphony Silicon Valley's chorale is one of its best features, so the opportunity to hear them led by the renowned choral conductor Vance George, retired San Francisco Symphony choirmaster, should be a local highlight — especially when the program features the elegant and airy Requiem of Gabriel Fauré. This concert is not part of the regular Symphony Silicon Valley season.
