Reviews

"Lo, the winter is past ... and the time of the singing of birds is come," says the Song of Songs in the Bible. And lo, the singing of Schola Cantorum San Francisco came to St.

The Avedis Chamber Music Series at San Francisco's Legion of Honor has rarely drawn the kind of packed house it did on Friday evening, or more enthusiasm for the results. The occasion featured pianist Jon Nakamatsu with the Stanford Woodwind Quintet, who offered two light and popular French works embedded between a crossover Cuban work and a grand sextet by a forgotten Austro-German master.

Maestro Kent Nagano led the Berkeley Symphony in a rousing season finale on Friday night at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. However exciting it turned out to be, the concert was nevertheless bittersweet, as that evening marked the beginning of the end of Nagano's full-time (and long-time) music directorship of the Symphony.

With its concerts last weekend, the American Bach Soloists completed the fourth year of its Bach cycle, an elaborate multiseason project featuring a wide variety of the composer's most important works.

In a combination of community service and organizational preservation, on Sunday evening the San Francisco Academy Orchestra presented a concert in Calvary Presbyterian Church, to thunderous applause. Conductor Florin Parvulescu took on major repertoire with an orchestra made up of college students and recent graduates, infused with a few members of the San Francisco Symphony.

Although Steven Isserlis had decided on his program long before hearing the sad news of Mstislav Rostropovich's death on April 27, his recital at Herbst Theatre on Thursday, which consisted entirely of Russian music for cello and piano, turned out to be a poignant and fitting homage to the great cellist and humanitarian.

There can be no denying that music plays a powerful role in inspiring political activism. But the marriage between social consciousness and music is more commonly associated these days with the protest songs of high-profile pop and folk artists like Joan Baez and the Dixie Chicks than the symphonies and improvisations of their counterparts from the classical and jazz worlds.

In his annual pilgrimage to the First Congregational Church in Berkeley last weekend, gambist extraordinaire Jordi Savall showed Berkeley a different side from his appearances of late. Friday night's Cal Performances program, titled "Marin Maris and Antoine Forqueray: L'Ange et le Diable," highlighted works by the two most famous viol players of the French Baroque.

Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (Pikovaya Dama) delivers a decidedly mixed bag: a lush, gushingly romantic score, rich with gorgeous, often-sprawling arias and ensembles, married to a tryingly melodramatic and barely credible tale of love and obsession.

It is not every day that "Sylvan and Oceanic Delights" inhabit the halls of Berkeley's Northbrae Community Church, but a happy audience tasted those delights there Friday night.