Reviews

Words and music came together (or didn’t) Sunday in five works sung by Volti and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir — Robert Geary’s gift to creators and performers of new choral music.

The S.F. Symphony and Anne Sofie von Otter dressed up their offerings with immensely enjoyable performances of works by Hindemith, Brahms, and a panoply of Scandinavian composers.

Few operas have been worked over as much as Bizet's Carmen. In the East Bay, where Berkeley West Edge Opera's Carmen Fixation opened Saturday night, the opera company offered a "different" version, with a standout performance by Buffy Baggott.

Last week’s Other Minds Festival showcased world musicians doing wild and crazy, and often enjoyable and inventive, things.

Eugene Chan’s resonant baritone voice and passionate delivery were the prize in a somewhat self-conscious Sunday recital.

Mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, in the midst of an astounding series of performances with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, performed as a substitute for the great mezzo Frederica von Stade (Flicka), singing beautifully and giving fully of her heart and soul.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players ensemble continues to evolve and explore new music, as evidenced by its Monday concert that displayed rich variety.

It would have been hard to tell, observing the small, graying audience in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Saturday, that videos of the early-music band Voices of Music had received, as of this writing, 3,558,070 hits on YouTube. I suspect a good deal of those came from Web queries for the famous Pachelbel Canon, of which VOM has posted an excellent recording.

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.