Reviews

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Review

Of Time and Turmoil

David Bratman - March 16, 2010
Saturday’s Music at the Mission chamber music concert, at Old Mission San Jose in Fremont, bore the title “Music in the Time of Turmoil: From Conflict to Redemption.” It featured a quartet for the end of time, and another quartet from after the end of time.
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Review

Repeat Counts as Pleasure

Be'eri Moalem - March 15, 2010
One of my favorite composition teachers once said, “Any buffoon can get a premiere. A real achievement is a repeat performance.”

Last May, I reviewed the Ives Quartet’s premiere of Dan Becker’s work Time Rising.

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Review

Strength and Grandeur

Jason Victor Serinus - March 15, 2010

Like the footsteps of a life partner, Beethoven’s music is heard so frequently that it’s easy to take it for granted. But listen to Austrian pianist Till Fellner’s ECM New Series CD of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No. 4 and 5, performed with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano, and the love affair is renewed.

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Review

'Primal Light' Trumps Gigantism

Janos Gereben - March 13, 2010
Every time I hear what Gustav Mahler did not call his “Resurrection Symphony” — but others did — I think about what the work must have sounded like to the first listeners 115 years ago.
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Review

Tough Nut Cracked

Michelle Dulak Thomson - March 9, 2010

The Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider has a taste for challenges. Two years ago, in his San Francisco Performances debut recital, he gave a stunning performance of Arnold Schoenberg's late Phantasy. The Schoenberg Concerto, a monumentally tough nut, is in his repertoire; so is Carl Nielsen's notoriously difficult one.

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Review

Ravishing Ravel

Heuwell Tircuit - March 8, 2010
Last week was a big week for Maurice Ravel’s music at Davies Symphony Hall.
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Review

Flip/Flop

Jeff Dunn - March 8, 2010
Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde.
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Review

Savall Scintillates With the PBO

Jonathan Rhodes Lee - March 8, 2010
Sunday evening at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra treated an enthusiastic audience to a Francophilic romp through Europe, titled “The French Suite in Europe.” We started in Stockholm, of all places, with Guillaume Dumanoir’s 17th-century Suite du Ballet de Stockholm.
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Review

Serenading the Dancer From the Dance

Lisa Hirsch - March 7, 2010
New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current program, titled “Serenades and Dances,” bookends a pair of shorter, lighter works around a core of two large-scale mainstays of the standard repertory, Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.
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Review

Drinking in a Perfect Blend

Matthew Cmiel - March 6, 2010
I would hazard a guess that rarely has a local music festival been so intriguing and provocative as San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, which is headed by the insightful and interesting Charles Amirkhanian.