Reviews

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Review

Ringed by the Imaginative George Benjamin

Georgia Rowe - January 16, 2010
It’s always fascinating to hear where composers are coming from, as well as where they’re going.
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Review

Nathan Gunn, Out of the Comfort Zone

Jason Victor Serinus - January 13, 2010
The exceptionally fine baritone Nathan Gunn was at Herbst Theatre last Tuesday, where he tackled Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The fair maid of the mill) in a recital for San Francisco Performances.
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Review

Songs of His Fathers and Forefathers

Scott Cmiel - January 12, 2010
The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the largest and most enthusiastic audiences in the country for the classical guitar. Internationally acclaimed artists are regularly featured by San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation, while young talent is often presented by smaller organizations.
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Review

World Tour, For Strings

Georgia Rowe - January 12, 2010
Music composed before 1900 still pays the bills for many chamber groups, but our most adventurous ensembles, following the example of pioneers such as the Kronos Quartet, are increasingly likely to build their programs around works from the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Review

Shaking Hands With the Past

David Bratman - January 12, 2010
Sunday was string quartet night at the San José Chamber Orchestra’s concert, conducted by Barbara Day Turner, at Le Petit Trianon in its namesake city. The Cypress String Quartet played as guest soloists in the premiere of Pablo Furman’s Paso del Fuego, and the SJCO ceded the entire stage to the Cypress foursome for the first half of the concert, which consisted of Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Op.
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Review

A Master at Play in the Fields of Chopin

Jerry Kuderna - January 11, 2010
Garrick Ohlsson’s credentials as an interpreter of Frédéric Chopin — he has recorded the complete works, twice — place him in the top echelon of modern pianists. Many performers possess the technical prowess and power to treat the piano as a slave and to do pretty much as they please to the music.
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Review

Streaming Steve Reich

Jessica Balik - January 11, 2010
The music of Steve Reich can sound deceptively simple. After all, for about 50 years, his name has been associated with so-called minimalism. The term vaguely denotes music built from the repetition and layering of simple musical modules over harmonies and temporal pulsations that remain relatively constant.
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Review

The Clinch Connection

Steven Winn - January 10, 2010
The Jan. 7-10 San Francisco Symphony concerts were studies in orchestral transformation. What the relatively short program of an hour and 45 minutes, conducted by David Robertson at Flint Center and Davies Symphony Hall, lacked in intensity, it made up for in a rewarding skein of associations.

George Benjamin, the orchestra’s Phyllis C.

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Review

Boccherini, That Chamber Music Renegade

Dan Leeson - January 10, 2010
On the surface, Friday’s program for a concert at Palo Alto’s First Lutheran Church looked peculiar. The concert consisted of four works, all with the same instrumentation — two violins, one viola, two cellos — all written by the same late-18th- and early-19th-century composer; one who is not perceived as being among the hot shots of classical chamber music.
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Review

Precision Plus

Heuwell Tircuit - January 5, 2010

Piano fans will find much of interest from the new two-piano release of Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire, drawn from live performance at last summer’s Salzburg Festival. Their programming consists of two staples, Brahms’ Haydn Variations, Op. 56b, and Schubert’s Rondo in A Major, D. 951, plus two uncommon transcriptions: Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, Op.