Features

So many and illustrious are the touring string quartets that pass through the Bay Area in any given season that it can be difficult to remember the ones that are here all year round.

In the spirit of the season, following are a select handful of DVDs, those little boxes of superior performances and visual delights.

In the Western musical tradition, December is the time for the “holiday concert,” full of impressive, noisy praise, the sing-along Messiah, and dozens of choral offerings featuring carols and the more generic “holiday music.” Nowhere in the generalized musical prescription that fuels our annual shopping and eating binge does it say “gentle, 17th-century, Lutheran, devotional work.” Sure,

Balancing the comfortable and familiar with the new and challenging — that’s the toughest task of any ambitious arts administrator.

The San Francisco Symphony’s Thanksgiving week program is a singularly joyous and virtuosic array. Under the baton of guest conductor Leonard Slatkin, the three performances open with Haydn’s folksy yet concertolike Symphony No.

Is there a body of acknowledged masterpieces more unevenly explored than the Haydn string quartets?

Last summer, the Cabrillo Festival gave the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 8. Glass has been famous since the mid-1970s, but he didn’t write his first symphony until 1992. His symphony project moved along fairly quickly after that, and by 2005, he'd reached number eight.

Is there a conspiracy here? After enjoying the mellifluous playing of the Talich String Quartet at the opening concert of Music at Kohl’s silver anniversary season, it’s hard to believe that people aren’t beating down the doors of Burlingame’s Kohl Mansion to get in.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is an M.D. and plays a Bechstein. His newest book, Musicophilia, will be published this month by Random House. The impact of music on the human brain, Sacks writes, cannot be overstated. It's as important as language.

For more than a decade, New Yorker classical-music critic Alex Ross has been showing readers why music composed in the last century — and last week — matters.