Reviews

Are opera lovers reevaluating La Rondine? Puccini’s 1917 lyric comedy has always been dismissed as something of a trifle, a one-hit wonder with a single great soprano aria.

Ranging from Bach to Copland to Webern, pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s April 24 recital at Herbst Theatre looked at first glance like a model of eclecticism. In fact, it was a tightly and cannily structured program, with variations as the organizing principle.

Eric Kujawsky, music director of the Redwood Symphony, likes sometimes to lead his volunteer musicians into the thorny thickets of Eastern European modernism. This time, on Saturday at the Cañada College Theatre in Redwood City, nobody got seriously lost.

On paper, last week’s San Francisco Symphony programs looked like meat and potatoes repertory, but Friday evening’s performance in Davies Symphony Hall turned out to be more like servings of Salzburger Nockerl with a well-made Kir Royale to wash it down.

Word of the Kuss Quartett preceded its actual appearance here. That’s pretty much how things do happen in the Bay Area with string quartets that haven’t actually been born here, but in the case of the Berlin-based Kuss Quartett it wasn’t “word” so much as whispers.

Thursday night’s concert at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts had all the markings of Bay Area fusion — a combination that works through pure juxtaposition, rather than synergy.

I’d been hearing rumors about the American clarinetist Jon Manasse for years, but at this, my first hearing, his new Harmonia Mundi release containing two concertos confirmed all those rumors. He’s a paragon of musicality.