ArtsSF

As Yuja Wang and Encores Bring Down the House The Russian National Orchestra has a field day playing on tour. On the same San Francisco program, they present USSR-era composers who were citizens in good standing (Khatchaturian), citizens who were slapped down and denounced (Shostakovich), and citizens who were deemed taboo as émigrés (Stravinsky). However you feel about Russian politics today, you have to admire their current catholic spectrum coming from varied pan-Russian sources. Also they are inordinately generous in…

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In a Vietnamese Outpouring OAKLAND—Despite very meager attendance on the eve of Valentine’s, the Vietnamese new year, and President’s Day, an alluring Viet lady named Vo saved the day and night for the perennially hard-struggling Oakland Symphony. A helter-skelter concert program and an army of fervent volunteers trolling the aisles for donations didn’t deter from a rousing finale of Vietnamese music that enkindled the faithful scattered around the huge Paramount Theatre Feb. 12. By the time the encore rolled around,…

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But Half a program Saved by Emergency Conductor BERKELEY—A podium substitute saved the day for the Berkeley Symphony when Lisbon-based Joana Carneiro had to cancel on doctor’s orders. Though the music director is still well short of the big four-oh birthday, her health remains a question mark. Management was tight-lipped about when the popular conductor might return to action here. The surprise emergency guest was New Yorker Tito Muñoz, music director of the Phoenix Symphony, making his local debut. His…

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BERKELEY—There’s been no composer quite like the French mystic Olivier Messiaen. He wrote long pieces on bird calls, on visions of Heaven, on memorable environments. He was a true believer in many areas, even in the whole-tone scale exploited by his countryman Debussy. Like Scriabin, Messiaen had synesthesia—the rare quality of seeing colors on hearing music, and vice versa. After hearing his immense, 92-minute tone poem “From the Canyon to the Stars,” I concluded that having the synesthesia gene would…

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BERKELEY—Mahler’s massive Symphony No. 5, heard here with the inspiring St. Louis Symphony the other day, is an extraordinary work, written during the creative euphoria of the Austrian composer’s recent marriage and honeymoon. Its long 68-minute musical path reminds me of a journey starting in a depressing, grimy industrial district (say, in Linz), and heading toward the dreamland of sunny Lake Worth, meandering through picturesque old towns (Hallstatt), bath resorts (Bad Ischl), and thriving vineyards, in anything but a crow-flies…

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