Thomas Busse

What's old becomes new. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines schola cantorum as "A choir that performs Gregorian chant." A 19th-century French institution founded by composer Vincent d'Indy took up the title to revive the art of plainchant and to "instruct" (not perform) in church music and counterpoint. Sunday's affair at San Francisco's St.

The crack early-music ensemble Magnificat attempted the difficult challenge of performing a Baroque comic opera in concert over the weekend. The form is unlike serious opera or slighter genres such as intermezzos or serenatas, which readily lend themselves to unstaged presentation.

Monday night’s concert at the odd sanctuary of San Francisco’s St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church by the chorus Volti, under the direction of Bob Geary, offered an intriguing evening of new choral works. The first half of the concert was largely given over to a performance from conductor Geary’s Piedmont Children's Choirs.

As he neared the end of his life, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a composer active in Paris from ca. 1670 to 1704, wrote:

I am he who was born long ago and was widely known in this century, but now I am naked and nothing, dust in a tomb, at an end, and food for worms. … I was a musician, considered good by the good musicians, and ignorant by the ignorant ones.

I first discovered the Russian Patriarchate Choir of Moscow through a series of recordings released on the early music label Opus 111 in the 1990s. It may be surprising to associate a Russian religious choir with early music, but in this case, the label is apt.

Every so often, a Russian performing group rides through town and brings out what seems to be the entire Russian émigré community, filling one of the largest halls to capacity. Its program typically offers a serious or traditional first half followed by arrangements of favorite tunes from the war years or Soviet cinema.

Although regional opera companies fulfill an important role in the American musical landscape, too often their limited resources and ambition cause them to cut corners and deliver cheap, amateurish productions. This is especially true of companies that try to mount reduced versions of monumental grand operas.

The pastiche choral work has a less-than-illustrious history.