July 11, 2017
Cahill Trio at Mendocino Music Festival
Celebrating an unusual life – the Lou Harrison centenary
All year we’ve seen events about West Coast composer Lou...
music
July 9, 2017
Festival Orchestra in Mendocino – opening the Big Top
A festival on the edge of the Pacific
Cross-pollination was the perfect theme for the Festival Orchestra’s opening night on Sunday, July 9, in the Big Tent on the Mendocino Headlands. The Mendocino Music Festival is currently celebrating its 31st season, and opened Saturday with two concerts: a famed classical quartet and an a cappella group whose polished arrangements are widely used.
On Sunday this multi-genre festival returned partway back to...
July 3, 2017
Top 2017 Bay Area Summer Music Festivals
Taking it on the road – classical and beyond
It’s that time again – Summer Music Festivals – and the Bay Area is popping. Here is our short list for summer fun.
Coming right up is the Mendocino Music Festival, which opens with a bang with a dinner and Zydeco dance party this Friday, July 7, and then segues into three events on Saturday, July 8. There is a free orchestra rehearsal in the morning for the Sunday concert...
June 23, 2017
MTT and SF Symphony in “Music for a Modern Age.”
A spectacle! A spectacle!
Michael Tilson Thomas and the SF Symphony put on a grand show last Friday, June 23, that went considerably beyond inventive and at times approached genius. Billed as “Music for a Modern Age,” the program opened with Charles Ives’ 1908 musings on tonality and life, and then ended with George Antheil’s 1925 in-your-face Jazz Symphony. In between were the West Coast Premiere of Michael Tilson Thomas’ own...
May 19, 2017
The Oakland Symphony in “Guys and Dolls”
Slam dunk!
The Oakland Symphony finished their season in style last Friday, May 19, at the Paramount Theater with a concert version of Guys and Dolls, a musical by Frank Loesser that premiered in 1950. Although unstaged and heavily cut, this was an opportunity to hear the music in all its sparkle and lushness, neither confined by the pit nor upstaged by costumes or clever dialogue. (And one must add that the choir did manage full costumes and the...
April 23, 2017
Roomful of Teeth in the Taube Atrium
Dreams and sonnets
Roomful of Teeth brought their vocal magic to the Bay Area on Sunday, April 23, courtesy of the SF Opera and SF Performances, who joined together to welcome this exhilarating octet. Performing to a sold out show in the newly renovated Taube Atrium Theater above Herbst, it was clear from their first entrance that the four women and four men who make up this group have created a canvas for the human voice that partakes of the whispering of rock stars...