Music at Menlo celebrates 11 years

Creative duo opens a window to the past—and doors to education The peninsula’s Music@Menlo chamber festival, now in the middle of its eleventh season, has proved itself a world-class institution over the last decade. Garnering both critical acclaim and a strong fan base, the festival’s eight main concerts and many recitals and lectures, held at three venues in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, are often sold out.  ...

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Black Cedar Trio at Berkeley’s Arthouse

A curious trio explores a path less trod… Consisting of flute, cello and guitar, the Black Cedar Trio brought their atypical sound palette to an equally unusual subject, contemporary music from the Pacific Rim, at downtown Berkeley’s Subterranean Arthouse last Saturday, July 13. The Black Cypress Trio began as a duet between flutist Kris Palmer and guitarist Steve Lin, naming themselves for the African blackwood of wooden flute and the cedar used...

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Goat Hall’s “Fresh Voices” in San Francisco

Fresh and in the Mission. Who says opera has to be stuffy? Goat Hall Productions, in its thirteenth year of “Fresh Voices” programs, tweaked the noses of the earnest with three delightful short operas last weekend at San Francisco’s Community Music Center. During the program, titled Mischief and Mayhem, a music educator, medieval Italian Plague survivors, and “Quark Sisters” from a parallel universe took turns regaling the...

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