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Patrons flipped over the first half of Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert. A premiere by Victor Kissine pleased all listeners I chatted with, from the conservative to the avant-garde.

Mandolin, usually of the flatback variety, is a given to stand in for fiddle in bluegrass or country swing, yet not so much for violin in classical music — nor as a solo instrument with orchestra.

After last year's hip, happening Switchboard Music Festival, one of the event's cocreators, Jonathan Russell, moved to Washington D.C and another, Ryan Brown, decamped to Princeton, New Jersey.

Quartet San Francisco is definitely not your grandmother’s string quartet. While other ensembles stick to classical masters like Beethoven and Brahms, this ensemble’s tastes also lean toward blues and bluegrass — not to mention jazz, pop, funk, and even tango.

Sunday evening at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra treated an enthusiastic audience to a Francophilic romp through Europe, titled “The French Suite in Europe.” We started in Stockholm, of all places, with Guillaume Dumanoir’s 17th-century Suite du Ballet de Stockholm.

New Century Chamber Orchestra’s current program, titled “Serenades and Dances,” bookends a pair of shorter, lighter works around a core of two large-scale mainstays of the standard repertory, Antonin Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.

I would hazard a guess that rarely has a local music festival been so intriguing and provocative as San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, which is headed by the insightful and interesting Charles Amirkhanian.

With pianist Peter Serkin as its guest artist, the Orion String Quartet brought a pantheon of composers to its Stanford Lively Arts concert on Wednesday at Dinkelspiel Auditorium: Bach. Beethoven. Brahms. ...

The yin and yang of musical fashions and fads shift every 20 or 25 years, and always have done. In the 1950s, concert music fledged itself from new music in traditional tonal style and notation toward an increasing respect for serial music, and in the process up popped Elliot Carter, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, and the like.