Music at Menlo celebrates 11 years

Creative duo opens a window to the past—and doors to education The peninsula’s Music@Menlo chamber festival, now in the middle of its eleventh season, has proved itself a world-class institution over the last decade. Garnering both critical acclaim and a strong fan base, the festival’s eight main concerts and many recitals and lectures, held at three venues in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, are often sold out.  ...

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Black Cedar Trio at Berkeley’s Arthouse

A curious trio explores a path less trod… Consisting of flute, cello and guitar, the Black Cedar Trio brought their atypical sound palette to an equally unusual subject, contemporary music from the Pacific Rim, at downtown Berkeley’s Subterranean Arthouse last Saturday, July 13. The Black Cypress Trio began as a duet between flutist Kris Palmer and guitarist Steve Lin, naming themselves for the African blackwood of wooden flute and the cedar used...

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Silicon Valley Music Festival

A musical frolic in the South Bay One of the most seriously experimental—and fun—concerts I’ve heard in a while took place in an out-of-the-way church east of San Jose. Last Tuesday, June 18, the Alum Rock Methodist chapel held the opening of the Silicon Valley Music Festival, marking the second year of a new South Bay venture. ...

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Ojai North! at UC Berkeley

Each June, Ojai, CA is a scene of intense music making as musicians and composers gather for the West Coast’s longest-running festival of contemporary music. In the Bay Area we are fortunate that for the last three years Ojai’s four-day festival was followed by a partnership with Cal Performances (renamed Ojai North!) for a second complete run in Berkeley. This year, choreographer Mark Morris (famed here for his Hard Nut), assumed the rotating mantle of Artistic...

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Santa Rosa Symphony in Cotati’s Weill Hall

Russians! Bruno Ferrandis conducted the Santa Rosa Symphony last Saturday with flamboyant gestures and exacting tempi, braving an all-Russian concert. This was the culmination of their first season in the blond magnificence of Weill Hall, recently built on the grounds of Sonoma State, and the hall’s wooden vibrancy may have factored in the success of the program. They began with the Prelude to Khovanshchina, composed by Modest Mussorgsky at the end of...

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SF Bay Choir in Oakland

Two poets, eleven composers and thirty-two lovely voices Two great American poets, set to music by a variety of modern composers, were the subjects of a concert last Saturday at Oakland’s St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Anthony Pasqua led the San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir through the diverse program, rendering hugely difficult harmonies into simple-sounding expressions that packed a wealth of nuance. Centered on poems by Emily Dickinson and...

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