Reviews

To celebrate the newly renovated, reopened, and renamed Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College, various ensembles and musicians gathered on Saturday evening to perform the music of one of the college’s many musical luminaries: Darius Milhaud, the French composer who took up a post there after fleeing the Germans in 1940.

“Things Fall From the Sky” was the theme of Monday’s concert, yet nary a clunker of a composition felled the good spirits of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players attendees. A refreshing eclecticism replaced SFCMP’s usual emphasis on neomodernist and spectralist genres.

With their magical imagery and multiple musical cues, the plays of William Shakespeare have been a constant source of inspiration, for composers from the playwright’s era to our own.

Holding aloft its dedication and musicianship like a banner, Artistic Director Robert Geary led the Volti chamber choir through eight contemporary works Saturday evening, four of which were premieres. The program, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, also included the services of the amazing Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir.

In the first of its two programs at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church this past weekend, Le Concert des Nations presented a potpourri of baroque classics titled “Les Goûts Réunis.” The title really ought to have been “Greatest Hits of the Baroque,” or — better — “Savall’s Number Ones.” Of the program’s six pieces, four were bona fide classics, the others evident favorites of Jordi

Mendelssohn’s great violin concerto, premiered in 1845 with the same Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig heard on this CD, has been subject to any number of interpretations.

British pianist Paul Roberts’ Friday night recital-lecture at Old First Church turned out to be a rather iffy affair. On the whole, he left the impression that he’s more scholar than polished pianist. His objective was to untangle the roots of what would evolve into French Impressionism from Liszt’s piano style.

While speaking with one of the singers of the Pacific Collegium during the intermission of their Sunday concert giving the complete motets of Johann Sebastian Bach, I mentioned that I came to love these works only via recordings, while attending the Carter centenary at Tanglewood this past summer.

How can a critic fully convey the scope of Cecilia Bartoli’s magnificent artistry without running out of superlatives?