ArtsSF

The maestro with the motionless baton brought his Chicago Symphony on tour to California with predictable old-line programs and polished performances. That maestro is the veteran Italian Riccardo Muti, 76, music director of this esteemed orchestra since 2010. He offers listeners a surprise: He stops all movement of his baton several times a night and lets the ensemble fend for itself for several seconds. It’s as if to say, do you see what an incredible group of players we have,…

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After a considerable 2016-17 absence given the birth of her triplets, Music Director Joana Carneiro was back on the podium this week looking as fit as a Guarneri fiddle. It’s a Bay Area first: There’s no record of any symphony conductor here ever having borne triplets and then returning to the podium. Her program at the Berkeley Symphony was unusual, with an avant-garde world premiere, an early Beethoven, and modern pieces requiring rounding up a quartet of saxophones.

The San Francisco Symphony pulled out all the stops this week. Naturally, because Berlioz was featured as composer. Often derided as an anachronism, Hector Berlioz (1803-1879) was in truth a figure far ahead of his time, a futurist in that he brought the romantic era in music to full fruition. He’d have been very happy in our environment here today, I believe, always wanting things to be bigger and better.

His Prolific Mentor’s Centennial Michael Tilson Thomas showed incredible composure leading a program of music by his longtime mentor, Leonard Bernstein, commemorating the latter’s 100th birthday. When many lesser conductors might have melted completely with the first bars, MTT kept at it, dry-eyed, even in pieces where he had shared duo-piano duties with Bernstein himself, just a couple of years before the latter’s death in 1990. Spanning five decades of Bernstein’s creative life, the works included two of his most…

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Gala symphony-season openings have less to do with music than with entertainment, revelry, and a fashion show. But the infinitely gregarious cellist Yo-Yo Ma did his utmost to carry off the music at the San Francisco Symphony opener, illuminating with his unique persona not one but two works each running about 20 minutes, neither of them a true concerto. He deserved more than the half-minute ovations that turned off abruptly as the festive audience in formals reverted to selfies, animated conversation and exits toward the dance floor.