Reviews

Sure, the Cabrillo Festival showcased a trio of distinctive, lauded — and breathing — composers on its opening night program. And yes, Music Director Marin Alsop and her band played their hearts out, as they usually do. But perhaps more impressive was the most neglected portion of the classical music communication channel: the audience.

Music@Menlo opened a broad umbrella for “La Ville Lumiere: Paris, 1920–28,” with composers as various as Milhaud, Prokofiev, Fauré, Copland, Antheil, Ravel, and Gershwin all gathered underneath. Variety, in both style and delivery, proved to be the prevailing spirit of Saturday’s musically sprawling program.

Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s first solo recital helps clarify her position in the pantheon of great Verdi sopranos. In this recording by Delos in a Moscow studio, backed by San Francisco–born Constantine Orbelian and his Philharmonia of Russia, Radvanovsky holds forth in 10 drama-filled arias that showcase her innately dramatic voice that seems tailor-made for Verdi.

Want to know what can makes a bel canto opera performance great and what can neutralize it? Head to Cowell Theater, where select participants in this summer’s installment of San Francisco Opera’s famed Merola Opera Program hold forth in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore.

Music@Menlo continued its traversal of geographically inspired programs Saturday night with a focus on music from Vienna. Looking at the festival’s range of programs, this approach seems, as often as not, to raise a new banner under which the organization presents a fair amount of familiar repertoire.

One of the persistent pleasures in listening to whatever comes your way is that any random find may lead you to treasure. You pick up a stray gem, track its source, and suddenly uncover an entire vein of music as good. It was like that for me with Georg Philipp Telemann’s orchestral suites.

Once upon a time, six long years ago, there was a little opera company in Berkeley tackling a huge project, called the Legend of the Ring, making waves far and wide. And now, on Saturday, here was a little company again, taking up the same challenge: David Seaman’s condensation of Richard Wagner’s four-opera, 15-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle into a four-hour evening.

If you head to iTunes, you can check out a great new recording of American compositions in the live DG Concerts series, for which John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his own work. It used to be that new classical pieces, if they got recorded at all, took years to get on a CD. But things aren’t the way they used to be, thanks to the advent of the download.

After two centuries of an increasing reputation as a “Land Without Music,” whose homegrown composers weren’t considered worth importing by disapproving Germans, England suddenly flowered with a blossom of great composers starting around the turn of the 20th century. A garland of works by three of these masters formed “The English Voice,” the second of this year’s Music@Menlo chamber music festival main concert programs.

Since 2006, Napa Valley’s Festival del Sole has lured the likes of Joshua Bell and the Russian National Orchestra to wine country in the summer months for an orgy of the tasteful high life: the world’s finest musicians paired with the region’s best wines, enjoyed between meals at the area’s architecturally exquisite estates, vineyard strolls, and test drives of the Bentleys parked on display. On Friday, thanks to the sponsorship of Dede Wilsey, the festival added ballet to its pleasures, with tremendous success. “Stars of American and Russian Ballet” sold out Yountville’s Lincoln Theater.