music

Local and coastal—a flood of music festivals From the intimate to the majestic, the Bay Area’s summer music festivals are known for their adventurous spirit. Now in full swing, here’s a look at what’s up. The Mendocino Music Festival is one of my personal favorites for its audacious variety. One may wonder how locale informs programming, and whether the breathtaking views of the Mendocino coast, its wrinkled lands and...

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Women’s voices and difficult choices at Cal Festival. This year’s Ojai at Berkeley festival, a shorter version of the recent Ojai music festival in Southern California, took place at UC Berkeley  ...

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Singers, being creative types, are not necessarily content to stay in one genre. That is very true of the members of the Pacific Edge Voices, formerly known as the Pacific Mozart Ensemble. These dedicated singers are of an unusually high caliber for a group that sings unpaid, and they apparently do it for love (and a recent SF Chronicle article on this group reminds us that amare, or lover, is the source of the word “amateur”). They are classically trained and perform...

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  This past Sunday at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, Voci unveiled the first work in their New Works Project. The project, which is a daring and ambitious idea for a independent chorus, is a commission through which a woman composer is supported to work with the...

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Wow factor in Burlingame Music at Kohl Mansion took note of their patrons’ wishes and brought back a popular group. On Sunday, April 17, the Harlem Quartet returned to a sold out house and played a concert that took on the emotional storms of the classical repertoire along with the joyous strutting of jazz. I last heard this quartet when they appeared here in March of 2011 and was delighted to see them return. Judging by the standing ovations, the audience was...

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Celebrating the end of a run… After 20 years of power and finesse, the Cypress String Quartet announced that they will be retiring as a group at the end of this season. That announcement came at their final “Call and Response” concert last Friday, March 11 at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater. This quartet, internationally famed for their depth and rich soundscape, is also locally known for their generosity to Bay Area students, and...

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