Symphony

The May 6 Santa Rosa Symphony concert began and ended on two different mountains, with several perilous ascents and descents marking the space between. The first mountain was Ukraine’s Bald Mountain, as depicted by Modest Mussorgsky in “Night on Bald Mountain,” and the second mountain was Heimgarten...

Symphony

Alasdair Neale’s final program as director of the Marin Symphony April 22, was, simply put, a triumph. Mr. Neale is leaving after 22 years for Paris and the next stage of his career, and he will be sorely missed. It has been Mr. Neale’s practice to introduce from the stage Symphony programs, and t...

Opera

The Santa Rosa Symphony scored a triumph April 15 in Weill Hall with its concert presentation of Mozart’s final opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), completed and premiered only months prior to the composer’s death in December of 1791. The collaboration with Mozart’s librettist and fellow Free...

Choral and Vocal

The choral music of British composer John Rutter holds a special place in the hearts and voices of choral groups worldwide. Like his American counterparts Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen (to name just two of a very large field of the most popular living choral composers) Rutter has spent a lifeti...

Chamber

The Telegraph Quartet, resident quartet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, created a “Journey for the String Quartet” for Chamber Music Marin April 2 that put the expressive versatility of the form on full display. Compositions by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Gabriela Frank were played with muc...

Symphony

Closing a long season April 1 the Sonoma County Philharmonic, the North Coast’s premiere nonprofessional orchestra, performed just two large-scale works that demanded committed instrumental playing. Before 200 in the Jackson Theater conductor Norman Gamboa had his hands full with the eight-part Fan...

Symphony

What can be sandwiched between two waltzes and followed by a concerto? The answer is a short symphony. Or at least that was the answer given by the Santa Rosa Symphony during its March 26 program in Weill Hall. The waltzes were the canonical “Artist’s Life” and “Blue Danube” masterpieces by Johann S...

Chamber

In Japanese, sakura means the five-petaled cherry blossom, and members of SAKURA Cello Quintet treated their Chamber Music Marin audience March 12 to a rare musical flowering. All but one of the eleven selections in the program were arrangements, not surprising because until SAKURA formed, f...

Chamber

Russian pianists on American tours often play blockbuster programs, so it was no surprise that Alexander Malofeev’s s recital in Healdsburg’s posh 222 Gallery had Rachmaninoff’s monumental B Flat Sonata as the capstone. The 21-minute work in the 1931 version received a thunderous reading that favor...

Chamber

The chance of having two virtuoso cello recitals in the North Bay in less than 30 days was not good. The sensational Steven Isserliss Napa recital Feb. 14 simply couldn’t be bettered, but Edward Arron’s Music at Oakmont recital March 9 came close. Very close. With pianist Jeewon Park Mr. Arron ma...

Symphony

Remarks from Conductor Alasdair Neale introduced Marin Symphony’s March 4 French-themed concert by extolling the “glittering orchestral colors” of Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps (Of a Morning in Spring), begun in 1917 as a duet for violin and piano and completed as an orchestral tone poem ...

Symphony

In his spoken introduction to a Vallejo Symphony audience Feb. 26 conductor Marc Taddei pointed to the afternoon’s program with a wedding epigram: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Well, the comment held true for the semi old (Grieg’s Piano Concerto) and the semi ne...

Other

It was a welcome surprise to review a Feb. 23 recital given by two new Sonoma State voice faculty colleagues, Christa Durand and Krista Wigle, with pianist Yvonne Wormer. Since being recently retired from a performing and teaching career, I was curious to speak via a video chat with these next gener...

Symphony

The evening of Feb. 19 was a pleasant one on the Santa Rosa Plain. The sun was shining, and the temperature hovered in the low 50s. Inside Weill Hall at the Green Music Center, the Santa Rosa Symphony prepared to begin its latest concert as the audience buzzed about guest conductor Bruno Ferrandis, ...

Chamber

There were no real surprises in cellist Steven Isserlis’ Napa recital on Valentine Day, and perhaps none was expected. After all, he is among the elite of the world’s cellists, and in the crescent-shaped First United Methodist Church the full-house audience knew well the elevated musical experience...

Chamber

Per Nørgård scored one of my favorite films, “Babette’s Feast,” but on Feb. 12 I got to know Nørgård better. In a Chamber Music Marin concert the Trio con Brio Copenhagen played the Danish composer’s mesmerizing 1973 composition Spell, 18 minutes of an astral journey that could have been modeled o...

Other

A fortepiano recital is a rare thing indeed, and other than the frequent performances on the instrument by the splendid Berkeley-based artist Eric Zivian, one cannot think of a formal North Bay fortepiano event in decades. Enter the enterprising folks at Healdsburg’s Raven Theater when they present...

Chamber

Composer Matthew Rupert’s Cicadas, Op. 7, opening ECHO Chamber Orchestra’s “The Creation of the World” February 4 program at San Anselmo’s First Presbyterian Church, started so modestly that many in the half-full audience were unaware the concert had begun. It certainly did, with a swelling buzz, ...

Symphony

On paper Sonoma County Philharmonic’s Feb. 1 concert didn’t look too promising – lightweight works by Grofé and Gotschalk, and four new short pieces set to local poetry. That view was misguided, and though the playing was not always revelatory, it indeed gave considerable pleasure to an audience of...

Choral and Vocal

American Bach Soloists, led by Jeffrey Thomas, performed six masterworks by Bach, Vivaldi and Telemann on February 3 in Tiburon’s St. Stephen’s Church. Opening the famed ensemble’s 34th subscription season, the program was generously conceived and beautifully executed, and required five different ...