Orchestra

What other touring orchestra posts its country's flag on stage when performing internationally? Israel's nationalistic pride is well known, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) is a particularly special source of honor for Israelis.

The Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s great orchestras, plumbs the depths and heights of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, in its final Berkeley performance Sunday.

What sacred music do you set alongside Mozart’s great Requiem in a concert? The San Francisco Symphony movingly squared the circle Thursday with works by Morton Feldman and Mindaugas Urbaitis.

Three interpreters at Oakland East Bay Symphony's concert on Friday transformed composers’ dreams into art worthy of both praise and concern.

The Vienna Philharmonic began its Berkeley residency Friday with a concert that showed off its versatility. The three composers, all from within Vienna’s cultural orbit, were aesthetically different from each other: high Classicism from Franz Schubert, wallowing Romanticism from Richard Wagner, and violent modernism from Béla Bartók.

The Oakland East Bay Symphony is doing the Brahms Requiem on Friday and it will do right by it with soloists Brian Leerhuber and Carrie Hennessy. But that's obviously not the whole story: new music by Armenian composer Avetis Berberyan, which casts the Requiem's message of solace in a wholly modern light.

Terrance Kelly and his Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir showcase their infectious spirit at the Oakland East Bay Symphony's holiday celebration, “Let Us Break Bread Together.”

SFCV catches up with pianist Yefim Bronfman, loved by audiences as one of the more virtuosic and commanding soloists on the concert hall stage. Emanuel Ax calls him a “complete pianist,” and Esa-Pekka Salonen says, he “can play better than most other people on the planet.”

The advance ads might have convinced you that the main event on this week’s San Francisco Symphony program was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. To be sure, Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra performed the work as planned, conferring considerable eloquence and brio on Tchaikovsky’s monumental masterpiece. But the program’s greatest rewards came in a trio of American works by Aaron Copland and Lou Harrison. It may be some time before audiences hear any of these works played in the Bay Area again — or hear them played this well.