Reputations are funny things. In the classical music world, technical virtuosity can lead to charges of superficiality or emotional coldness. Some listeners, especially opera fans of a particular ilk, prefer guts and heart to good intonation and steady tone. The great Jascha Heifetz had a reputation for playing with more technical perfection than musical soul; today, both Maurizio Pollini and the Emerson String Quartet have sometimes been labeled cold.
An encouragingly large and enthusiastic audience turned out Monday evening in Herbst Theatre for a serious, handsomely chosen program of new chamber music presented by the expanded Earplay ensemble.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performed its first concert of 2008 on Monday. Some last-minute changes to the program affected its theme, as the “Strongbox of American Music” was pried open to accommodate British and French composers who live in the U.S.
Grateful though we must be for the continual flow of new, exciting young ensembles to Bay Area concert halls, it's another and possibly greater pleasure when the most impressive of them drop in a second time.
Virgil Thomson isn't the composer who pops automatically to mind when you think of dance, but he was a major presence at San Francisco Ballet over the weekend.
The next time I hear someone bewailing the moribund state of classical music, I'll point them to the Herbst Theatre, where last Saturday morning (a dreary day) a couple hundred music lovers paid to hear a couple of string quartets and an hour of explanation about them.
Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and British percussionist Colin Currie offered a virtuosic and highly polished performance last Tuesday at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.
