Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.
Despite some regrettable directorial and production choices, S.F. Opera’s Siegfried still delivers strong characters that are very well sung, backed by first-class playing from the orchestra pit.
Brahms’ rich choral works rise again, in a fine program by Paul Flight’s California Bach Society; a little Fauré follows, across the street, sung by the UC Alumni Chorus.
The noted Bay Area composer Andrew Imbrie, who would have turned 90 this year, will be celebrated with a series of concerts, a symposium, and a display of his collected scores and manuscripts.
Escaping from “lake-effect” snow and winter, the venerable Cornell Glee Club brought a warm mixture of Romantic-inflected music to its Bay Area concerts.
Were there the shadow of a doubt of the continuing and historic power of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde to capture and move its audiences, this summer’s Seattle Opera production dispelled it, two major shortcomings notwithstanding. The leading strength in Thursday’s fourth of seven performances was appropriately the orchestra.
Alan Rich, America’s most outspoken classical music critic, died in his sleep Friday in his home in West Los Angeles at the age of 85. For his entire career, he was as full-out in his enthusiasms and advocacies as he was unsparing and sharp in his assessments, always making a deep impression.
The dust had not even settled after the Green Music Center’s successful acoustical debut on Feb. 12, when a storm blew up in Sonoma County turning that dust into a gray cloud over the entire project. The storm last Thursday, Feb.
