Orchestra

The point of this concert is to throw a spotlight on a range of cultures not normally represented on American orchestral programs in their own voices — an important component of keeping orchestral music healthy and relevant. 

The Marin Symphony presents Brahms’s German Requiem, preceded by a beautiful and far more tender elegy to the transience of life by Anna Clyne.

Weeks after the San Francisco Symphony plays Anton Brucker's gorgeous Seventh Symphony, the Berkeley Symphony, under the guiding hand of Joana Carneiro, will play his Fourth Symphony.

If you heard Handel’s Messiah at Grace Cathedral last December, you may be interested in the arrival of the New College Choir from Oxford, which sings J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion at Grace on Good Friday.

In his quest to illuminate the life work of Robert Schumann, the fascinating pianist Jonathan Biss has enlisted the Elias String Quartet to pair Schumann’s string quartet and piano quartet in E-flat, with Henry Purcell’s string fantasias. 

Thanks to the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth, his Requiem, one of the most popular choral works of all time, is sure to figure in the Bay Area concert scene a number of times this year. 

The Australian Chamber Orchestra and their dynamic leader, Richard Tognetti return  to Cal Performances for a wide-ranging pair of programs, featuring pianist Alice Sara Ott in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

Now you can hear Clarice Assad’s chamber orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition again, played by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, along with the premiere of the composer’s Pandemonium for String Quartet and String Orchestra.

Pablo Heras-Casado’s mastery of contemporary-music idioms is perfect for the S.F. Symphony’s West Coast premiere of Magnus Lindberg's EXPO.

When Lynn Harrell and the Berkeley Symphony led by Music Director Joana Carneiro take on Witold Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto, they will be taking a trip to the dark side that balances, in a radical way, the vivacity of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, also on the program.