Features

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Hope and Promise for Sonoma County

Robert P. Commanday - December 16, 2008

Good news does happen, even now. It took a short trip north, a week ago, to find it — but there it was, the Green Music Center, in Rohnert Park.

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Truth and Daring: The Lure of Live Performance

Georgia Rowe - December 16, 2008
What makes live music so moving? Audiences might have wondered last month, as three Bay Area organizations presented extraordinary performances within the space of little more than a week. First came Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, performed by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall; also that weekend, the San Francisco Opera revived Puccini’s La Bohème.
Classical guitarist David Tanenbaum
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Featured article on David Tanenbaum

December 3, 2008

Classical guitarist David Tanenbaum presented an excellent recital of classical guitar, featured in a variety of chamber music settings, along with one spellbinding solo work on Saturday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall.

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In the Sound Fields of Elliott Carter

Jerry Kuderna - December 2, 2008
Composer Elliott Carter has been around for 100 years, literally. For 60 of them he has been at the forefront of serious American composition. But, like so many 20th-century composers, his music has had more limited exposure to audiences than his genius warrants. But that may be changing now.
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Holiday Music Tips With a Twist

Janos Gereben - November 25, 2008
Religious holidays occur in the context of philosophies favoring the small over the big, the poor over the rich. Accordingly, this report will relegate the usual large and often costly events to an end-of-file roundup. Up front, there will be smaller, less familiar, and less costly events.
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The Power of the Fragmentary

Jaime Robles - November 18, 2008
When experience comes to us in fragments, we often set about building them into a pattern that can be easily and neatly understood. That’s part of our human effort to understand the world: the need to find an interpretive key to a confusing set of experiences, but what if?
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Nurturing the Singers of Tomorrow, Part 2

Jason Victor Serinus - November 11, 2008
Last week, Jason Victor Serinus investigated singer development in the San Francisco Opera Center's Merola and Adler Fellows programs.
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Nurturing the Singers of Tomorrow

Jason Victor Serinus - November 4, 2008
Who are they? Who will replace the generations of singers who thrilled us and brought us to tears when we first fell in love with opera and art song?
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Eat, Sleep, Music

Be'eri Moalem - October 28, 2008
You know you are at a music conservatory when you are sitting in a history class and, in addition to the professor's voice, you can also faintly hear a soprano wailing in the next room, a violinist practicing fast licks in the room across the hall, a trumpet being blown in the room below, and a double bass rattling the ceiling from the room above.
cloning_elsistema.jpg
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Cloning El Sistema in Oakland

Janos Gereben - October 21, 2008

St. Martin de Porres is a small parochial school in North Oakland. It is named for a 17th-century Dominican brother from Peru who was famous for establishing orphanages and children’s hospitals. He was canonized in 1962.