Reviews

Charles Amirkhanian, artistic director, Other Minds Festival: "How important is it for you to write something that’s never been heard before?" Keeril Makan, assistant professor of music, MIT: "Nothing’s been heard before."

To this reviewer, however, everything at the third and final concert of the 13th Other Minds Festival at the

The primary strength of some string quartets lies in transparency, in making what they play sound as though it could only go this way. Others insist on making you aware that theirs is a point of view, that there is a medium as well as a message.

Two masterpieces graced Thursday's program of the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, aided and abetted by violinist Gil Shaham. Only two works were on offer, but that was enough to provoke the audience to standing ovations.

Parler à son plaisir, veiller et dormir, Crouer à plaisir, ou autrement va-t-en mourir.

(Speaking of pleasure, waking and sleeping, Feast on pleasure, or otherwise we shall die.)

These words end Clément Janequin's Song of the Lark, which was performed by the all-male vocal group Clerestory on Sunday.

In his poem "The Soup," U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic concocted a mordant, macabre "soup of the world." Cockroaches, dirty feet, Stalin's moustache, Hiroshima, and bloody sausages number among the incendiary images in the poem. Can you even dare imagine musical analogs for them? The Bay Area composer Alden Jenks attempted to do precisely that.

With Easter just around the corner, the timing seems about right for a performance of a passion by J.S. Bach, one of the genre’s great masters. But while Bach’s St. Matthew Passion might spring immediately to mind, the San Francisco Bach Choir opted for the shorter, less grandiose Johannes-Passion. Too often overshadowed by its more famous cousin, the St.

It's hard to dislike the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra's stated mission of "bring[ing] the immediacy and intimacy of music for small orchestra and chamber ensemble to audiences of all ages." It's even harder to dislike its motto of "fresh, fun, first-class, and free" — talk that they walk by presenting professional-caliber concerts at an admission charge of $0.

When Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld was first performed in Paris, in 1858, the famed critic Jules Noriac, of mighty Le Figaro, stammered with delight: "Unheard-of. Splendid. Outrageous. Graceful. Charming. Witty. Amusing. Successful.

When does 180 miles equal light-years? When you hear Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and Shostakovich’s Ninth on the same concert, and realize that the composers’ hometowns (Järvenpää and Leningrad) are that far apart from each other. The symphonies are profound, and profoundly different.

Viewed against the more robust concert scenes in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Peninsula, the classical-music pickings in Marin County can seem slender.