SFCV RSS Feed Integration

What distinguishes an Open Opera performance is both its professional pedigree and the relaxed viewing environment — audience members are invited to move around. The Bay Area nonprofit organization that performs opera, free, for the public and makes use of the region’s great local talent, students and professionals alike will mount four fully-staged performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni starting this weekend.

There's a new choral group in town with a name that might make a PR consultant despair. The group is EUOUAE, is medieval shorthand for “saeculorum amen,” the last Latin words in the common doxology. It's a fit name for a group that, for it's first concert, is resurrecting a medieval mass that you find in history books but rarely in performance.

Music@Menlo continued its traversal of geographically inspired programs Saturday night with a focus on music from Vienna. Looking at the festival’s range of programs, this approach seems, as often as not, to raise a new banner under which the organization presents a fair amount of familiar repertoire.

Festival Opera of Walnut Creek is continuing its summer season with Gaetano Donizetti’s masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. The production opens Aug. 7, and the four performances will feature almost entirely Bay Area artists.

One of the persistent pleasures in listening to whatever comes your way is that any random find may lead you to treasure. You pick up a stray gem, track its source, and suddenly uncover an entire vein of music as good. It was like that for me with Georg Philipp Telemann’s orchestral suites.

Once upon a time, six long years ago, there was a little opera company in Berkeley tackling a huge project, called the Legend of the Ring, making waves far and wide. And now, on Saturday, here was a little company again, taking up the same challenge: David Seaman’s condensation of Richard Wagner’s four-opera, 15-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle into a four-hour evening.

If you head to iTunes, you can check out a great new recording of American compositions in the live DG Concerts series, for which John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his own work. It used to be that new classical pieces, if they got recorded at all, took years to get on a CD. But things aren’t the way they used to be, thanks to the advent of the download.

Philip Glass needs no introduction as one of today’s most influential composers. He’s a chief architect of the minimalist style, though today he reserves that term for his earlier compositions. As comfortable collaborating with conductor Dennis Russell Davies as with rock icon David Bowie, he composes works that blur the boundaries between classical music and contemporary culture. Here, he talks with SFCV about his busy touring schedule, the possibility of wedding bells, keeping a vegan diet, and how he has changed as a composer.

After two centuries of an increasing reputation as a “Land Without Music,” whose homegrown composers weren’t considered worth importing by disapproving Germans, England suddenly flowered with a blossom of great composers starting around the turn of the 20th century. A garland of works by three of these masters formed “The English Voice,” the second of this year’s Music@Menlo chamber music festival main concert programs.