SFCV RSS Feed Integration

The Cypress Quartet is rethinking the traditional concept of concerts, in which the musicians play a piece typically written some 150 years ago, the audience listens and then claps their hands, the performers bow, and everyone goes home. The Cypress is turning that experience into a two-week project that involves the entire community.

Like other great countertenors before him, David Daniels established his career singing works from the Baroque repertoire. Since then, he’s made a point of expanding his horizons — and the public’s perception of what the high male voice type can do — with composers from other eras up to the present.

The March 25-28 concerts of the San Francisco Symphony, under guest conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, offered a masterpiece, a super masterpiece, and one outright dud. Along the way, we heard a new wunderkind pianist and an up-and-coming bass-baritone as soloist, plus astounding mastery from the Symphony Chorus.

Valery Gergiev, one of the heavyweights on the international music scene, does have his detractors. Just within the context of his Sunday-Monday appearances in Davies Symphony Hall, leading the London Symphony Orchestra in two eventful concerts, there were numerous items possibly contradicting what may well be a general enthusiasm about the conductor.

The production may be unique, but it’s not just the computer animation, puppetry, and “authentic” musical approach that make this week's staging of a great Baroque opera so special.

A rare opportunity to hear one of the 20th century’s underplayed composers. Though Niccolò Castiglioni (1932-1996) isn’t often mentioned in histories of 20th-century music, his music seems more contemporary than many composers who are.

In the old days, when classical music was reserved for upper-crust audiences, a lot of music got one or two performances and then was put away in a library and forgotten. That’s why a group like Magnificat, Warren Stewart’s 17th-century music band, is so much fun to see. Often their performance of a piece is the only chance you’ll get to experience it live.

The San Francisco Piano Quartet discovered American music on Sunday afternoon at the Noe Valley Ministry in the city, as part of the Noe Valley Chamber Music series. That is to say, they presented a program tracing the discovery of self-awareness of Americanism in the works of several generations of composers.

The San Francisco Bach Choir celebrated the 324th anniversary of Bach's birth on Sunday afternoon in Calvary Presbyterian Church by presenting three of his cantatas and three of his even finer motets. Actually, the concert was a repeat of their Saturday performance, his actual birthday.