Reviews

The Jack Dubowsky Ensemble had its work cut out for it last Thursday at San Francisco's Eagle Tavern. The plan: Play through Depeche Mode’s classic 1990 album Violator with a small chamber group, and score it for (mostly) acoustic instruments — a reinterpretation that has the potential to delight.

We’re blessed here in the Bay Area with a bounty of good, small companies that get us up close and personal with opera in good, small venues. How much better the blessing is, then, when the operatic material is as powerfully and finely wrought as Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, now enjoying a three-week West Coast premiere run at Petaluma’s intimate Cinnabar Theater.

A concert by Cadenza, the former Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra, is like taking a drink from a mountain spring: cool, clear, and refreshing — though more refreshing, in truth, than thirst-quenching. Saturday’s concert at Holy Cross Church lasted just over an hour, intermission included. When it ended, soon after 9 p.m., twilight had not quite finished fading.

Listeners unacquainted with Thomas Adès can embark on a powerful, short-course introduction to the magnificently gifted young British composer with this EMI disc. The emotional pull, drama, expressive complexity, wit, and allusive richness of Adès’ music are all in evidence.

It only took the better part of two decades, but Thursday evening at Davies Symphony Hall, Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence finally received its first San Francisco Symphony performance. Holloway’s original Clarissa Sequence, that is, the one for soprano and orchestra.

It’s not as rare as one might think, from the constant reports of the demise of the classical recording industry, to encounter great new recordings of unfamiliar music. All the same, this recent release by the Göttingen Festival Orchestra, the NDR Choir, and a stellar cast of soloists under the direction of Nicholas McGegan is rather astonishing.

Fixed on the playlist of eternally popular operas, Verdi’s La traviata is easily adapted to community opera houses. It is full of all the elements that people find most appealing to opera: glamour, effusive melodies and, best of all, great love with an unusual love triangle. This past weekend West Bay Opera opened La traviata as the final production of its 54th season.

How in the world could the San Francisco Library lead the violist Pamela Freund-Striplen to a pool, “full of old fish, blind-stricken long ago … revealed only by the croaking of consumptive frogs”? Like the best adventures, the path was circuitous, but the result was a highly imaginative program for her Gold Coast Chamber Players that absorbed lucky listeners at the Lafayette Library Community Hall Saturday night.

The San Francisco Symphony program was a bit of an odd one. It was not bad, certainly, but was strangely bifurcated, veering from some rather fluffy 19th-century French music, by Litolff and Adam, to major works by Chopin and Debussy. Under Michael Tilson Thomas’ direction, the orchestra sounded grand in less than grand music, as well as in works of substance; and piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson was magnificent in everything he touched.

“What?!” you say, “another recording of Rhapsody in Blue?” Amazon lists 632 recordings of this music co-opted by United Airlines ads and 71 MP3 downloads. What’s so special about this rendition?