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The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble began its season with a program blending the (relatively) old and the new.

When experience comes to us in fragments, we often set about building them into a pattern that can be easily and neatly understood. That’s part of our human effort to understand the world: the need to find an interpretive key to a confusing set of experiences, but what if?

Someone at San Francisco Performances is keen on completeness.

One of the charges frequently leveled against regional orchestras is that they program only the tried and true. While this may be on point in some instances — particularly in these tough economic times — the Santa Rosa Symphony's November program was both adventurous and free of filler.

The libretto of Gaetano Donizetti's 1832 opera L'elisir d'amore (The elixir of love) has wide appeal. Many of us have suffered the torture of being in love with someone who doesn't know we exist, and worse, wouldn't be interested if they did.

Every so often I come across a musical event that defies all logic. That was the case Sunday afternoon as Benjamin Shwartz conducted the San Francisco Symphony's Youth Orchestra and a 13-year-old boy soloist through a performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto that would be the envy of any leading virtuoso.

Masterworks Chorale, of San Mateo, stuffed Mozart's great big Mass in C Minor, K. 427, into the small confines of Trinity Presbyterian Church in San Carlos on Sunday afternoon. A lively and exciting time was had by all. It's easy to make a secularly appreciative remark like that about this Mass, which Mozart wrote in a burst of enthusiasm over his wedding to Constanze Weber.

I am happy to say that a new ensemble, the Chalice Consort, is the second finest all-volunteer chamber choir I have heard in my 10 years in the Bay Area (I'll take perverse pleasure in letting readers guess the first).

In 1692, one Peter Motteux expressed surprise about having heard trumpets and oboes play elegantly during dinner: "Mr. Showers hath taught [the oboes and trumpets] to sound with all the softness imaginable ...