Reviews

Bizet’s Carmen is an opera seething with emotion, drama, and theatricality, but it was only in the last two acts that these potent elements were fully realized at UC Davis’ production on Sunday at the Mondavi Center, which featured principals from the San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows.

Berkeley Opera boasts that its new Romeo and Juliet, which opened on Saturday night at the Julia Morgan Theatre, is by William Shakespeare and Charles Gounod.

Christopher Maltman is a spellbinder — a British baritone with a voice at times honeyed, assertive, suave, dramatic, ethereal, and gutsy. Along with pianist Julius Drake, an appealingly muscular presence with superb fingers and a musical imagination equal to that of the singer, Maltman charmed continually.

No matter how often you've heard a piece of music, once it fails to surprise it's past its sell date. Perpetual surprises are what separates merely well-made and original music from masterpieces. The refreshing level of discovery on last week's San Francisco Symphony presentations of Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust, Op. 24, under guest conductor Charles Dutoit, beautifully achieved that.

On Friday evening, the UC Davis-based Empyrean Ensemble made a guest appearance on San Francisco's respectable Old First Concert series, presenting a reprise of its program "Double Trouble," first performed one month ago at the Mondavi Center in Davis.

The Russian-born, British-based pianist Nikolai Demidenko made an impressive Bay Area debut on Saturday afternoon. His recital at the Florence Gould Theater, under the aegis of Chamber Music San Francisco, showed him to be a serious, sincere, intense, and engaging pianist of diverse repertoire.

The end of the concert season always brings a spate of big, symphonic showpieces, as orchestras go into summer with a bang (and goose their audiences into subscriptions for next year). The Marin Symphony chose Strauss' symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, Op. 40) as its grand finale, and you don't get much showier than that.

A couple of merry wives took possession of the Florence Gould Theater on Sunday afternoon at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Noted UCLA musicologist Robert Winter and guest conductor George Thomson joined forces on Saturday night with the Santa Rosa Symphony to produce a Symphonie fantastique in its native habitat: the golden age of literature and the arts that was Paris in 1830, the year the restored Bourbon monarchy ended in revolution.