SFCV RSS Feed Integration

Music festivals, whether of the mini or maxi kind, invite audiences to think of music as part of an entire experience. For most of the year, we're content just to hear a concert. But the summer festival experience is also partly about location and lingering twilight.

Chamber music gluttons can always find satiation at the American Bach Soloists' SummerFest concerts.

The German composer Hans Werner Henze, considered one of Europe's major composers of the '60s, '70s, and beyond, rarely gets a hearing in the U.S. One fan, however, will not take this neglect (is it simply old-hattedness?) lying down.

Hundreds of thousands, millions, perhaps billions of people around the globe, had just taken the seven-point Live Earth Pledge to do their part to avert global warming. But in Walnut Creek on Saturday night, at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, it was business as usual.

The eminent Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos raises his baton on opening night at Symphony Hall in Boston. Before a single note sounds, a cell phone rings. Frühbeck's shoulders slump, and he waits appropriately for a new starting point. As he raises his baton once more, the same cell phone rings again.

In 1781, Joseph Haydn announced the appearance of a new set of string quartets, "composed in a new and special way, because I have written none in 10 years." The six quartets would appear as Opus 33, and would be Haydn's first authorized quartet publication in accordance with the terms of a contract he signed in 1779 with Prince Nicolaus Esterházy. With one of these works, No.

The eminent Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos raises his baton on opening night at Symphony Hall in Boston. Before a single note sounds, a cell phone rings. Frühbeck's shoulders slump, and he waits appropriately for a new starting point. As he raises his baton once more, the same cell phone rings again.

The San Francisco Symphony's festival this month, "Russian Firebrand, Russian Virtuoso: The Music of Prokofiev," conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, features, quite appropriately, four pianists (Yefim Bronfman, Vladimir Feltsman, Mikhail Rudy, and Ilya Yakushev) who, like Prokofiev, grew up or received their musical training in Ru

As the lights were going down in Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday night, I caught a line in the program book asking "What are we to make of Prokofiev ..." but had no chance to read further before the hall went dark. The question — after a childhood of mandatory Prokofiev in a Soviet-occupied country and a subsequent lifetime of listening to him by choice — didn't make sense.

Festivals should celebrate something that doesn't happen every day.