Reviews

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Review

A Chinese Classic in European Style

Angela Hsiao - January 15, 2008
In an all-out effort to embrace modernity, China’s first Western-style opera, Farewell My Concubine, made its premiere this weekend at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. It marked the first time that a brand-new opera was presented in the United States by the China National Opera.
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Review

Illuminating the Chanson

Michelle Dulak Thomson - January 15, 2008
One of the pleasures of working in the field of early music — really early music, that is, music from well outside the ordinary classical musician's realm of experience — must be the sense of having found a corner of the repertoire and built a relationship to it, minutely and intimately and genuinely from scratch.
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Review

Halves and Have-Nots

Jeff Dunn - January 15, 2008
Last Wednesday's San Francisco Symphony concert presented a strong contrast in luster. The second half had it; the first lacked it. First, there was a fairly opaque opening number, Oliver Knussen's Symphony No.
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Review

Vocal Epiphanies

Anna Carol Dudley - January 15, 2008
For 21 years, the Coro Hispano de San Francisco has been singing to accompany the Three Kings who make their annual Epiphany trip 12 nights after Christmas. Saturday's "Concierto del Dia de los Reyes," the fourth of five performances around the Bay Area, was held at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Berkeley.
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Review

A Musical Conversation

Lisa Hirsch - January 15, 2008

The Pacifica Quartet performed at Stanford Lively Arts on Wednesday, bringing with it a program of Beethoven, Carter, and Smetana. The program notes made much of the fact that the Beethoven (Op. 18, No. 2) and the Smetana (Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, "From My Life") were written when their composers were going deaf. Still, the works themselves, which respectively opened and closed the concert, don't have much in common.

Racing Bach

January 15, 2008
The nice thing about living in 21st-century California is that people find gods for everything and in every place. Take J.S. Bach, for instance. He’s a god of music if ever there was one and, as every god should, he has a high priest. At least, that’s what it says in Anthony Newman’s bio.

Racing Bach

John Karl Hirten - January 15, 2008
The nice thing about living in 21st-century California is that people find gods for everything and in every place. Take J.S. Bach, for instance. He’s a god of music if ever there was one and, as every god should, he has a high priest. At least, that’s what it says in Anthony Newman’s bio.
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Review

Overtones From Across the Border

Jeff Dunn - January 8, 2008
Contemporary composers are like presidential candidates: A few front-runners get all the attention while others languish at the margins of recognition. And then there are the two major "parties," the American and the European. How does a composer from Latin America stand a chance? Armando Castellano founded Quinteto Latino to provide such chances, having grown up in a U.S.
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Review

Variations on the Quartet

Michelle Dulak Thomson - January 8, 2008
It's yet another measure of how good we, the listening public, have it in the Bay Area that while the seasons of our "major presenters" would keep a voracious concertgoer pretty happy by themselves, you could eliminate every one of them from consideration and still put together a full — nay, impossibly overfull — calendar of first-rate recitals out of the offerings of the smaller concert
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Review

Songs Stuck Between Two Worlds

Jason Victor Serinus - January 8, 2008

Kitka has come a long way since a presumably Birkenstock-clad group of women founded it in 1979. Dedicated to exploring music rooted in Eastern European women's vocal traditions — think Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares with a Western twist — the Oakland-based ensemble, whose name means "bouquet" in Bulgarian and Macedonian, has accomplished the near-impossible: sounding surprisingly authentic.