Reviews

American Ballet Theatre, fresh from its fall season in New York City, brought two programs of mixed repertory to Zellerbach Hall last week, presented by Cal Performances. This was in itself reason for celebration. That the ballets were set to richly varied music proved to be the icing on the cake.

Playing string quartets once was no one's full-time job. The professional string quartet whose players spend essentially all their professional time concertizing, recording, or teaching as a quartet is a historically recent development.

San Francisco Opera has described this as “A Season of Glamour,” and that boast was certainly fulfilled with the company's new and exuberant production of Puccini’s La Rondine. It was long overdue, the last having been in the War Memorial Opera House House in 1934, with Lucrezia Bori and Dino Borgioli in the leading roles and S.F.

Ah, the tunes! People were singing them in the subway on Saturday, humming them home in the BART seats behind me.

Mix equal parts youthful joie de vivre with mature warmth and you have an idea of what the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra accomplished Sunday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall. The ensemble's sheer warmth of timbre, under Conductor Benjamin Shwartz, highlighted a program of essentially lush Romanticism, from first note to last.

Time for full disclosure. As much as I admire the Oakland East Bay Symphony, I asked to review its season opener, "A Grand Opening: Beethoven and Bernstein," for one specific reason: to have the opportunity to reassess the artistry of soprano Hope Briggs.

The unlikely Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela seemed to be having an even better time in Davies Symphony Hall Sunday evening than the audience, even while it drove the audience into something approaching a hysteria of enthusiasm. In 50 years of covering orchestral concerts on four continents, I have never encountered anything even close to such unlikely musical splendor.

When Jean Sibelius died in 1957, he had not completed a major work since the late 1920s. Nonetheless, his music dominated the Finnish musical scene until the coming of serialism and modernism around the time of his passing.

Amazing young string quartets seem to appear at a steady pace these days, and it was a great pleasure on Sunday to see another one added to the local crop.

Watching Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra working with a guest director is always fascinating, but there's something special about the band's relationship with its own director, Nicholas McGegan, that makes his every appearance something to anticipate.