SFCV RSS Feed Integration

When it comes to classical music and opera, we enlightened ones are supposed to be color-blind. Regardless of our race, the racial characteristics of singers and musicians are not supposed to matter … some of the time.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is living up the "lucky" part of his name as the world celebrates his 200th birthday. Were he alive, he might revel in the good fortune of being well honored by Vance George and the San Francisco State Chamber Singers.

When Baroque Nouveau’s new disc of Jean Philippe Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert first came across my desk, a cursory glance down the playlist raised a perplexing question: Why did the group present the pieces out of order? There are five concerts in this collection, and the group orders them 4, 5, 1, 2, 3. Listening to the disc dispels any qualms with the arrangement.

Chatting with subscribers who have been with her for all of her ensemble’s 17 seasons, Barbara Day Turner had her mission confirmed. “They’re noting how much being constantly exposed to different things has changed how they listen to music,” Turner reports.

“Spring Symphonies” is the title that Symphony Silicon Valley gave to its May program, which I heard Saturday at the California Theatre in San José. Sure, it’s adequately descriptive for a concert performed in the spring. Yet neither of the symphonies on the program had Spring or Pastoral in their titles, or any other obvious programmatic connection with the season.

America can’t get enough of Mason Bates, the young alchemist who blends the sonority of traditional ensembles like the symphony orchestra with the limitless possibilities of computer-generated “electronica.” It’s almost as if we’ve been waiting for just such a sorcerer to put a bit of groove in our Grieg, to mix up our Messien, to bring something fresh and transformational to the concert hall.

This is a remarkable CD. At first glance, its pairing of Ambrose Field’s live and studio electronics with the voice of former Hilliard Ensemble tenor John Potter singing the music of Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) may seem like an update of Officium, the best-selling ECM early music recording from 1994 that partnered Jan Garbarek’s distinctive saxophone with the voices of the Hilliard Ensemble.

The Presidio is a dark corner of the City by the Bay, surrounded by thick forest, ancient military architecture, and a memorial cemetery. It’s one of the few places on San Francisco’s map where the relentless grid of straight roads gives bending way to some of the steep hills.