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Peter Pastreich agrees with those who call the Bay Area’s prized Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra “America’s leading period-instrument ensemble.” But if you asked concert presenters at top international venues like London’s Barbican Centre to name the really important orchestras, “we might not be on that list,” says Pastreich, the esteemed arts executive who became the PBO’s executive director last spring.

Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker since 1996, returns to the Bay Area for Cal Performances’ Strictly Speaking series on Oct. 14 to address and sample from his new book. Here, he talks with SFCV about his last tour and the enthusiastic response accorded to his last book, The Rest Is Noise, as well as about what he’ll talk about in October — plus this and that which came up along the way.

A formerly internal rift between several California Symphony board members and Music Director Barry Jekowsky opened wide enough this week to swallow up the 24-year-long relationship between the orchestra and its founding maestro, the man who put the organization on the country's musical map.

The advance ads might have convinced you that the main event on this week’s San Francisco Symphony program was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. To be sure, Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra performed the work as planned, conferring considerable eloquence and brio on Tchaikovsky’s monumental masterpiece. But the program’s greatest rewards came in a trio of American works by Aaron Copland and Lou Harrison. It may be some time before audiences hear any of these works played in the Bay Area again — or hear them played this well.

When an opera is as brilliant as Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and everything onstage and in the pit clicks, the results can be magical. Such is the case with one of the most animated and delightful productions of the masterpiece that I have ever seen.

Other Minds and Sarah Cahill are curating this festival to a man who was the inspiration and example for many other American “maverick” composers, including Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. Dane Rhudyar is definitely an original, someone whose music will open your ears — and not in a trivial way.

The Ives Quartet opens its season by previewing the Other Minds Dane Rudhyar Festival that takes place a few weeks from now. They will play Rudhyar's Crisis and Overcoming, (String Quartet No. 2, 1979). Quartets by Haydn and Dvořák complete the program in Occidental, where they are being presented by the Redwood Arts Council. 

Her voice was ineffably moving, her appearances were the stuff of legend. She gave nearly 600 performances over an 18-year span. In one appearance, she received 27 curtain calls in an outpouring of adoration lasting more than 40 minutes. For many opera lovers, there is and always will be only one true diva: Maria Callas, known to her legions of fans simply as “La Divina.” A special exhibition devoted to Callas arrives in S.F. this month.

Time has smiled sweetly on Anonymous 4. Twenty-four years after their founding, three of four members of this chart-topping a cappella women’s vocal ensemble remain, sounding as good as ever ... and as simple as ever.