Reviews

With Thanksgiving a hazy memory, the first few weekends of December arrive with a whiteout blizzard of Christmas concerts from choruses large and small, professional and amateur. The air is still and chill all of a sudden, and you can feel genuine euphoria about town as the sounds of familiar carols deck the halls — even Bing Crosby's White Christmas sounds novel and cheery.

One of the most satisfying experiences you can have at a concert consists of being forced to reexamine your own attitude toward a piece of music. I had just such an experience on Friday, at the San Francisco Symphony's performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

Avoiding the obvious, the California Bach Society offered a delightfully refreshing program of Christmas music Friday evening in St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco. Director-scholar Paul Flight chose a program largely devoted to the neglected Baroque master Marc-Antoine Charpentier, plus a few traditional French noëls and brief visits to the music of Hector Berlioz and Antoine Brumel.

Concerts full of 20th-century music are not always appealing to audiences. And when concerts are unappealing, they risk being unappreciated, if not avoided. Similarly, if recital spaces as modest as local churches seem unappealing to world-class performers, then such performers might shun performing in them. Such recoiling is dangerous.

The Tallis Scholars, 10 singers this year, brought their beautifully matched voices to Grace Cathedral for Sunday's concert, titled "Poetry in Music for the Virgin Mary." At first glance, the choice of a Mass based on a motet text from the Song of Solomon might seem to have little to do with the Virgin Mary.

For a change, a Handel oratorio other than Messiah sounded seasonally sweet at UC Santa Cruz — with an added performance in San Francisco — this past weekend.

Igor Stravinsky was a constantly changing artist. He's also the most Janus-like of all musicians — always looking forward and back at once. His work, when it was new, puzzled and challenged in equal measures.

Opera audiences the world over live under the dominion of stage directors and dramaturges who relocate classic works to places and times remote from the originals and even rewrite major plot events.

The music is necessarily colored by the life. —Edward Elgar

Conductor Leonard Slatkin and the San Francisco Symphony had multiple personalities to deal with in last week's concert program: the trickster in Franz Josef Haydn (Symphony No. 67), the troubled craftsman in Samuel Barber (his Piano Concerto), and the elusive alluder in Edward Elgar (Enigma Variations).

The dapper St. Petersburg Philharmonic was in town last week for two concerts in Davies Symphony Hall with a more intriguing break with the world's music than expected.