Reviews

Often the repertoire and locale of summer festivals seem, on first glance, a disconcerting mix, as the music we are used to hearing in a formal concert hall setting doesn’t smoothly combine with bucolic surroundings.

Few rock concerts are as eventful as the Wagner-Mozart-Bach presentation at Festival del Sole last Thursday turned out to be. The news included the disruptive effects of a Presidental visit and roadblock, a serious injury to the conductor/violinist the day before the concert, and a near-catastrophic memory lapse by the pianist.

From Beethoven to Wagner to Schoenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach influenced the subsequent course of Western music. Everybody knows that. Particularly influential is Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. This work consists of two volumes, each of which features one prelude and one fugue in every major and minor key.

Two major masterpieces dominated Friday's opening of the annual Midsummer Mozart Festival as George Cleve conducted his merry band with two important soloists in Herbst Theatre. Each piece was a prelude to a somewhat lesser Mozartian work, but all of it was so well-presented that this hardly mattered. Cleve opened with the Divertimento No. 7 in D Major, K. 205, and the Piano Concerto No.

Bach's Mass in B Minor can be a work of grandeur, just as it can be a miscellany of movements gathered from various of his cantatas with the original words replaced by those of the Latin Mass. Either, and even more possibilities, can readily be justified, or at least rationalized.

Benjamin Britten's opera Albert Herring is something of a miracle. From the pen of a composer inclined to Christian moralizing and examining the dark underbelly of the human psyche came, soon after Peter Grimes, this delightful chamber opera, which poked fun at tight-buttoned British moralists and celebrated the free expression of human passions.

The Music at Menlo Chamber Music Festival launched its sixth season Saturday with a reprise of its first year's programming concept: "The Unfolding of Music." Although the title may be a bit opaque (how, exactly, does one "fold" music?), the idea is an ambitious one.

Unusual as it may be to mention the economy and other seemingly extraneous items right at the top of a concert review, the unusual nature of said economy (and its relationship to the arts) well warrants doing so here. First impression Saturday at the beginning of the third season of Festival del Sole in Napa: a full Lincoln Theater, the cavernous space filled probably more than at previous gala op

Long before composer Philip Glass' latest bevy of fans alighted on Planet Earth, scores of people filled Radio City Music Hall to witness the 1982 premiere of Godfrey Reggio's multiple award-winning film, Koyaanisqatsi.

The American Bach Soloists began, 20 years ago, as an ensemble formed by tenor and conductor Jeffrey Thomas specifically to perform the Bach choral/vocal works.