Reviews

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music opened Friday night with its familiar sense of community and relaxed warmth much in evidence.

You can hardly have more fun than by stumbling across quality music you didn't even know existed. Pianist Gary Graffman certainly provided a rich panoply of that Thursday in Palo Alto's St. Mark's Episcopal Church, via his recital titled "For the Left Hand." The event was presented as part of the important Music@Menlo Festival, to a packed and roaring audience.

It was a very San Francisco affair. This is, after all, an area where no urban sophisticate blinks an eye when a photo of three leather-clad, motorcycle-mounting Barbies graces the cover of The San Francisco Chronicle's Pink Section.

The Midsummer Mozart Festival's first foray into opera, a production of The Abduction from the Seraglio at San Jose's California Theater, was highly successful in most respects. The singers ranged from capable to excellent, with one standout.

War, violence, revenge, and parent-child relationships are evergreen subjects found at the heart of important operas from the earliest days of the form.

Santa Fe Opera is presenting its first Billy Budd this season. The company, which was founded just five years after Benjamin Britten premiered the first version of the opera in 1951, waited an inexplicable five decades to stage this haunting 20th-century masterpiece.

The didactic imperative runs deep, if gentle, at Music@Menlo. Every season and indeed every program boasts a design, one calculated to make the audience hear anew, or differently, or both.

Last Thursday’s San Francisco Symphony’s Summer in the City concert in Davies Symphony Hall turned into a light, but charming array of basic French fare, as conductor James Gaffigan went from opera excerpts to Ravel’s bitter take on the Viennese Waltz.

The best thing about the Carmel Bach Festival, besides that it's in Carmel, is that, as Calvin used to say to Hobbes, "The days are just packed." Except that, unlike Calvin's day, one at the festival really is packed.

The second installment of this season's Midsummer Mozart Festival took off on Thursday at Mission Santa Clara. Unlike the first program, this concert featured only two works — and for good reason. The Serenade for 12 wind instruments and a double bass, K.