music

Michael Morgan hits a home run Last Friday, March 31, the deep stage of Oakland’s Paramount Theater was filled with the Oakland Symphony, the Oakland Symphony Chorus, and St. Mary’s College Chamber Singers and Glee Club. They had partnered to bring out the depth and power of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum. Programmed to balance that heartfelt prayer was a work of big bones and simple themes, and an audience favorite (and it was actually the...

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Of silken strings and lush voices. For their spring concert, the expressive strings of New Century Chamber Orchestra joined forces with the exquisite vocals of Chanticleer for a “trip” to Paris, stretching from Ravel’s lush songs to Satie’s austere Gymnopédie and from Gershwin’s early jazz to classic French cabaret. These two groups are each at the top of their form, and a number of contemporary composers have...

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Paving the way for Bach… In a concert by the California Bach Society titled “North German Masters before Bach,” we were treated to lovely and little-known music. And that begged a fascinating question: who were the composers that inspired Bach? Paul Flight led a journey through the seventeenth century world of Tunder and Buxtehude, finding Italian influences reshaped by the Protestant Reformation, and a lovely interplay of lines that Bach would...

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A triumphant return to Kohl Mansion. After a poetic performance at Kohl Mansion in February of 2015, the Horszowski Trio was invited to return to the Great Hall of that Burlingame mansion, and on Sunday, Feb. 12 they again delivered a concert that was by turns light-hearted and powerful. Composed of pianist Rieko Aizawa, violinist Jesse Mills and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, this is a threesome as smooth as it gets. Aizawa, though small in stature, is a...

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The colors of air Earplay, the Bay Area’s premiere contemporary ensemble, performed a fiercely intelligent concert at Herbst Theater last Monday, Jan. 30. This is their 32nd year – and it is hard to believe they have been commissioning and playing edgy music for 32 years – in a season titled “Air, Wind, Water.” Each of the three concerts includes works by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, whose work is masterful in its colors and...

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Beyond technique: finding the narrative A passionate performance was rooted in deep interpretation last Wednesday, Jan. 11 at the Center for the Performing Arts at Menlo-Atherton. The Pacifica Quartet, one of the top string quartets of our time, picked three gems of the repertoire for their concert, any one of which would have been the anchor of a normal program. Hosted by Music@Menlo’s Winter Series, (an expansion of their three-week-long summer festival),...

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