Reviews

A true-to-the-original production of Gershwin’s masterwork is blessed by four outstanding women singer/actors, but marred by lax baton work.

The Grand Finale of the Merolini serves as a coming-out party for singers who may rise to the top of the operatic world or settle in the middle ranks.

Carmel’s new Days and Nights Festival embraces the idea of repetition, with brilliantly played works by founder Philip Glass, Schubert, and Shostakovich

Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts receives a colorful, if often inscrutable, remounting at Yerba Buena Center.

Cabrillo wraps up its season with new works that surprise, delight, and sometimes frustrate.

Ample musical excerpts plus intriguing interviews (in German and English) distinguish a DVD on the life and works of a great American composer.

Cabrillo treats listeners to some delectable 20th anniversary sweets, some of higher calorie than others.

Lou Harrison's seductive setting offers cross-cultural history and eroticism in a Javanese structure that begs for more pianos to be retuned for concertos featured on this disc.

A last-minute substitution at Menlo and a change of programming fares for the better with late works by Brahms and Chopin played by pianist (and replacement) Jeffrey Kahane and the members of the Emerson Quartet.

Claudio Abbado delivers a radiant, believable version of Beethoven’s sole opera, aided by a sterling cast, including Jonas Kaufmann and Nina Stemme.