Völs Quartet at Berkeley City Club

Lively concert in lovely hall Last Tuesday Berkeley Chamber Performances inaugurated a new season with the Völs String Quartet at the sumptuous Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club. The program wandered through the twentieth century with satisfying variety. Two seasoned performers teamed up with two more youthful for a sound that was both mature and delectably energetic. La Oracion del Torero by Joaquin Turina opened and closed enigmatically. The quartet...

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San Francisco Electronic Music Festival

The SF Electronic Music Festival kicked off its ninth season last Wednesday at Project Artaud’s Florida Street theater. Partnered with the ODC dance collective, the festival this year marks a new collaboration with SFSound, a group of high caliber musicians who specialize in extemporaneous extended technique electronically amplified contemporary music. That is to say, they blow softly and carry a big woofer. Staffed entirely by volunteers, the festival showed off 15 very different takes on...

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Menlo Festival—exploring Contemporary

Final concert shows Music@menlo is simply the best The peninsula’s prestigious Music@Menlo festival capped off three weeks of events with a spectacular final concert, concentrating on contemporary music, and three of the four composers were in attendance. Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most performed living composers, offered Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, written in 1999. Five very different moods were evoked by the Borromeo String Quartet and pianist...

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Music@Menlo—The Rise of Modernism

Huge Line-up Continues at Menlo Festival Music@Menlo’s fourth concert showcased seven works from the early twentieth century. Debussy ushered in an age of world wars with his Violin Sonata, written in 1916-17, late in his life. Fighting a final illness, he composed this piece with the gentle joy which inhabits much of his later work, using an “impressionist” palette, one of his legacies to music. Ian Swensen, a hometown violinist profiled in the July 30...

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Festival del Sole in Napa

Stars Shine in Castle Courtyard— Joshua Bell headlines talent-rich cast at Napa Festival Built two years ago in Calistoga out of 14th century stones, bricks and beams, with reinforcing and modern amenities tucked out of sight, Castello di Amorosa is a faithful representative of an ancient Italian castle. Sentries wearing the garb of ushers forsook their crenelated guard towers to guide us into the Great Hall, a stupendous beamed chamber which would comfortably hold my...

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Solstice celebration at mausoleum

  ‘Garden of Memory’ Festival draws performer/composers in Oakland This year’s solstice celebration, Garden of Memory, was again held at the Chapel of the Chimes, a Julia Morgan designed columbarium and mausoleum whose...

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