Reviews

Performance standards were of their usual high order Sunday afternoon as Donato Cabrera conducted a concert of the San Francisco Symphony’s Youth Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall. Even so, there were problems, notably with the programming, as well as with Cabrera’s concept of a classic warhorse.

Volti’s Friday concert at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church shared the stage with three outstanding high school choirs: Head-Royce’s Colla Voce, the Acalanes High School Chamber Singers, and Ecco, Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir.

Cello concertos are where you find them. Visiting soloist Gary Hoffman found two excellent short pieces that work well in that role, though they aren’t called concertos, to play with Symphony Silicon Valley, under guest conductor Gregory Vajda, at San José’s California Theatre on Saturday.

How could I not lose myself completely in the wondrous beauty of baritone Eugene Brancoveanu’s voice during the first set of his Sunday afternoon, San Francisco Performances-sponsored recital?

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony trumps everything. What else can hold its own on a program with this searching quest that leads to the most fervent final movement in music history? The Oakland East Bay Symphony, under Music Director Michael Morgan’s baton, offered a proposal at once modest and moving.

Gustavo Dudamel brings a cheering crowd to their feet with a predictable, but audience-effective rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, while Jean-Yves Thibaudet entertains with Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety.

Patrons returning for the second half of Monday night’s Santa Rosa Symphony concert witnessed the unusual sight of five microphones: one to the left of the conductor’s podium, and four to the right. These peculiar forces and accoutrements had been assembled by Music Director Bruno Ferrandis for Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins.

ChamberBridge’s Sunday recital at Old First Church in San Francisco was a model of compositional and interpretive invention, with the San Francisco–based duo of soprano Lara Bruckmann and pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann providing vivid performances of newly commissioned work by a mix of American and Swiss composers.

It would not be impossible to construct a program of three piano trios more taxing than the one the Skride/Vogler Trio played last Tuesday at Herbst Theatre. It might, though, be difficult to find anyone willing to play it.

Anyone who might have arrived very late for Saturday’s splendid New Century Chamber Orchestra concert at Herbst Theatre would have gotten an amusing summary from fiddler Evan Price.