Reviews

Making her debut with Opera San José last Sunday afternoon, Khori Dastoor dominated the stage in the coloratura title role of Lucia di Lammermoor, blazing through her shrewdly conceived mad scene with theatrical abandon and scenery-chewing panache.

Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is a big musical — large in passion and in production values. It originally opened in 1979 at one of Broadway's biggest theaters, in Harold Prince's hugely operatic production, and went on to be performed by opera companies as well as in theaters around the world.

The San Francisco Lyric Chorus and its director, Robert Gurney, have a history of presenting programs both ambitious and unusual, so Saturday night's concert at San Francisco's Trinity Episcopal Church was unexpected only in specifics, not in quality.

From Oakland, drive 40 miles south on 880, that overcrowded, dangerous highway, paved like hell, and not with good intentions. Then, 10 miles north of San Jose, hang a left on Auto Mall Parkway, in search of Ohlone College. You are now in Fremont, formerly rural, now a mixed industrial-residential city of 200,000, with the largest number of expatriate Afghanistanis in the U.S.

Napa Valley's Music in the Vineyards summer festival draws a devoted group of enthusiasts to its 17 concerts, often held in small winery spaces. Friday's concert was no exception. Three disparate works were heard by 65 people in a barrel-aging cave at the Stag's Leap Winery on Silverado Trail. Fanny Mendelssohn's first published work, Songs (Op. 1), got things off well.

Before departing for their big European tour, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony offered their own bon-voyage sendoff Thursday night in Davis Symphony Hall. This was a sampler that will not be offered again anywhere.

Swarms of new and returning students clogged the streets around UC Berkeley Thursday evening. What to do: Attend a free opera or check out frat-house receptions? Considering the state of art music in the U.S. today, you can guess where they went. Nevertheless, about a hundred or so did show up for Our American Cousin in Hertz Hall.

The 50th year of the highly merited Merola Opera training program ended with a flourish of young hopefuls at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on Saturday evening with a Grand Finale concert, assisted by members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.

Napa Valley's "Music in the Vineyards," now in its 13th season, produced an exciting and eclectic concert on Saturday afternoon in the small hall at the posh Silverado Cellars.

If every piece of architecture had its own inherent sound, the church of Mission San Juan Bautista would be heard for miles. The relatively high-ceilinged structure (long and narrow, made of wood and plaster, and primitively painted), whose interior was completed in 1817, creates a resounding acoustic like none other I've experienced.