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Modern listeners can find 14th-century secular music tough to grasp. Working within highly restrictive formal structures, this era’s composers and poets created elaborate ruminations on wide-ranging themes — love, loss, justice, virtue — in a sound world quite distinct from earlier chant or later imitative polyphony.

The male and female voices of the Sanford Dole Ensemble chorus, 24 strong, had already made a distinct impression in a Palm Sunday concert at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church. Over a groundswell of somber strings in the first section of James MacMillan’s 1993 Seven Last Words From the Cross, the men burst forth with an urgent “Rex Israel.”

You’d hardly know that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Hugo Wolf (1860-1903). Even as orchestras and music publications worldwide extol the praises of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), church bells are hardly pealing Wolf melodies.

There are a lot of brilliant ideas out there about involving children in classical music, but San Francisco Chamber Orchestra can stake a claim for one of the most original: conducting paired with circus clowns.

(Washington, D.C.) — Lately, here in the nation’s capital, we’ve being seeing much of a certain leader from San Francisco. She’s usually pictured at a podium, ominously wielding a piece of carved wood, aiming for radical change, and threatening to whack anyone who doesn’t stay in step.

The second of two San Francisco programs by St.