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In the middle of an extended weekend’s showcase by Stanford Lively Arts, composer Steve Reich sat down in a hotel lobby to talk about his five decades of exploration in the musical outback.

Film composer James Horner has been in the news a good deal lately. Horner is a versatile and experienced musician, with soundtracks as diverse as Star Trek II and Field of Dreams to his credit.

The music of Steve Reich can sound deceptively simple. After all, for about 50 years, his name has been associated with so-called minimalism. The term vaguely denotes music built from the repetition and layering of simple musical modules over harmonies and temporal pulsations that remain relatively constant.

Composers and directors often combine art forms in their quest for artistic expression and interesting programming. Pairing music and dance, or music with a visual element, spices up a concert. Yet the California Symphony’s concert on Jan.

The Jan. 7-10 San Francisco Symphony concerts were studies in orchestral transformation. What the relatively short program of an hour and 45 minutes, conducted by David Robertson at Flint Center and Davies Symphony Hall, lacked in intensity, it made up for in a rewarding skein of associations.

George Benjamin, the orchestra’s Phyllis C.

On the surface, Friday’s program for a concert at Palo Alto’s First Lutheran Church looked peculiar. The concert consisted of four works, all with the same instrumentation — two violins, one viola, two cellos — all written by the same late-18th- and early-19th-century composer; one who is not perceived as being among the hot shots of classical chamber music.

One of the best one-line put-downs of Romantic poetic excess comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. “Do you yearn?” the poet Bunthorne asks the dairy maid. “I yearn my living,” she replies. Take that, aesthetes.

Patience is as funny as any of the other great G&S collaborations, but unlike the heavy hitters in the canon (The Mikado, H.M.S.

The Santa Rosa Symphony, under Music Director Bruno Ferrandis, has put together a program for Jan. 23-25 that appeals on many levels. Highlights of this special exposition of American orchestral works include a tribute to Samuel Barber, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, and John Corigliano’s music from the Academy Award–winning film The Red Violin.

Acclaimed for his “physical, sensual relationship” with his instrument, British cellist Steven Isserlis is an artist who combines brilliant technique with innate feeling.