Reviews

Composer Elinor Armer brims with excitement about creating music. "There's a kind of energy that I feel when I'm playing music or writing it. I feel exhilarated and happy and 'God, is this fun.'" Armer, who retired from teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music a few years ago, is co-honoree in a special concert by the Conservatory Orchestra this week.

Bless San Francisco Lyric Chorus' collective heart for programming heavenly music during the worst of summer's classical concert lull. While Lord knows how many singers and musicians were hiking Yosemite, SFLC's music director, Robert Gurney, took his musicians on a trek to the firmament.

David Sloss and the Fremont Symphony proved last weekend that the rave review for the Fremont Opera's inaugural production of La Bohème last year was not the result of a fluke.

Musiciens Sans Frontières have arrived, musicians without regard to genre frontiers, courtesy of the Wordless Music Series, which premiered at Herbst Theatre on Thursday. On the one hand, regional pride is raising its ugly head: We don't need no stinkin' "New York new music" to enliven our concert life.

Joel Fan is a young pianist who has been quickly making a name for himself in the past few years, most visibly as a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. His work as a solo performer has much of that group's spirit of exploration and its canny sense of connection between the standard repertory and more far-flung musical adventures.

The final Music@Menlo concert, given last Thursday, was called "Music Now: Voices of Our Time." It should have been called "Recent Music That Pulls Your Heartstrings, Wrenches Your Guts, and Then Beats You to Death." It began with a flat-out masterpiece for piano quintet, superbly performed, Scenes From the Poet's Dreams (1999) by Jennifer Higdon.

The Guitar Foundation of America held its annual Convention and Competition in San Francisco this year and presented a week of fascinating concerts, lectures, master classes, and showcases of the work of celebrated luthiers and publishers, as well as this year's most important international classical guitar competition.

At the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco's Mission District, sfSoundSeries presented a Sunday concert centered on works composed for the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Founded in 1961 by composers Morton Subotnick and Ramón Sender, the Tape Music Center was at the heart of the city's musical counterculture in the 1960s.

Concertgoers are lucky, compared to critics. They can simply like or dislike the music, but critics have to figure out why. At Saturday's Cabrillo Festival concert, after being tremendously disappointed by the clarinet concerto Riffs and Refrains by Mark Antony Turnage, a composer I normally admire, I couldn't put my finger on the reason.

"May I ask which paper you're writing for?" asked the lovely gray-haired woman during intermission on Sunday afternoon. First I explained that I was reviewing for the only classical music review–rich publication in the Bay Area, San Francisco Classical Voice, as well as American Record Guide.