Reviews

Triple-Threat Treat

Alexander Kahn - June 10, 2008
On Friday night, the San Francisco Symphony offered up a unique program as part of its 6.5 series: a chance to observe three of the Symphony’s staff conductors — Benjamin Shwartz, Ragnar Bohlin, and James Gaffigan — conducting back to back.
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Review

Seeing Music as Drama

Lisa Hirsch - June 10, 2008
The Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, held in alternate years, typically features at least one program that's as much theater as music. In past years, the early music extravaganza had the horse ballet "Le carousel du roi" and the "Carnaval Baroque".
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Review

Heavenly Music in the California Hills

Brett Campbell - June 10, 2008
For a new music fan, Southern California’s Ojai Festival is about as close to nirvana as it gets. For 62 years now, this little artsy town in the hills near Santa Barbara has been bringing contemporary music to the outdoor Libbey Bowl, an acoustic shell in a sylvan park setting as idyllic as the music can be challenging.
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Review

Stages of Love

Anna Carol Dudley - June 10, 2008

The Concord Ensemble is aptly named. In a Berkeley Festival concert Wednesday night in Hertz Hall, the individual voices of the ensemble's six men produced a wonderful concord of sound and style. The program of Spanish secular music during the Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries) was organized into six sections, showing the course of true love through its various stages: Courtship, The Lovers, The Wedding Banquet, The Betrayal, A Bitter End, and Fortune's Whims.

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Review

Enlivening a Legend

Scott L. Edwards - June 10, 2008
I would have liked to see Davitt Moroney's reaction when it dawned on him precisely what that dusty box of partbooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale contained.
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Review

Musical Charms, Spoken Words

Jonathan Wilkes - June 10, 2008
The Adorno Ensemble broke new ground at the de Young Museum on Friday, May 30, presenting musical, scholarly, and literary "Odes to Neruda." The Koret Auditorium, part of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, is a comfy little venue with giant padded seats. It feels like a library reading room that has been tiered steeply toward a stage.
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Review

Mythic Splendor

Janos Gereben - June 3, 2008

The Ring of Richard Wagner's four-opera, 15-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen"is an instrument of pure evil. It represents extreme greed and the drive for absolute power. This Ring corrupts and destroys its owners, be they dwarfs, giants, heroes, gods or, at the end, in the flames of The Twilight of the Gods, the old world order itself.

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Review

Fringe Benefits

Michelle Dulak Thomson - June 3, 2008
I'm not sure what it says about the Berkeley Early Music Festival that you can find a performance of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespro della beata Vergine not actually on the Festival program, but among the associated “fringe” events.
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Review

A Choir Apart

Thomas Busse - June 3, 2008
What's old becomes new. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines schola cantorum as "A choir that performs Gregorian chant." A 19th-century French institution founded by composer Vincent d'Indy took up the title to revive the art of plainchant and to "instruct" (not perform) in church music and counterpoint. Sunday's affair at San Francisco's St.
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Review

Who's Screwy Now?

Jason Victor Serinus - June 3, 2008
It was a bit like "second-try night." Only last fall, three of the principals in San Francisco Lyric Opera's current production of Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw — Anja Strauss (the Governess), Brooks Fisher (Miles), and Madelaine Matej (Flora) — appeared in the same roles in Oakland Opera Theater's abysmal production of that opera.