MUSIC REVIEWS
Payare Celebrates Shostakovich and Britten in Second Festival Performance
Culinary comparisons may be approximate at best, but if Music Director Designate Rafael Payare’s Thursday San Diego Symphony program was a buffet of tantalizing appetizers, his Friday program (January 11) at Copley Symphony Hall was clearly the substantial main course.
Read MorePayare and Weilerstein Soar in Tchaikovsky in the San Diego Symphony’s Hearing the Future Festival
Brandishing his new title as Music Director Designate, Rafael Payare opened his weekend blitz of San Diego Symphony performances with a stunning concert Thursday at Copley Symphony Hall, the first performance on the orchestra’s month-long “Hearing the Future” festival.
Read More2018: A Year of Winning Musical Collaborations Across the City
In 2018, the key players of San Diego’s classical music scene struck gold by collaborating with each other. Enlisting some 10 musical organizations in its month-long “It’s About Time Time” festival in January, the San Diego Symphony set a high bar of cooperation for the coming year, but other organizations readily took up the challenge with rewarding results.
Read MoreSan Diego Pro Arte Voices’ Musically Rich Evening of Readings and Carols
Although most of the Christmas music performed during the holiday season was originally intended for church services, in these secular times music lovers tend to hear this repertory in concert settings. A felicitous compromise is the Service of Lessons and Carols, an English invention that simply alternates seasonal music and Biblical readings like a very…
Read MoreSacra/Profana Redeems the December Holiday Concert
Following the success of Sacra/Profana Artistic Director Juan Carlos Acosta choral direction of San Diego Opera’s “All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914,” the San Diego choral director returned with the Sacra/Profana chorus in a fine concert last weekend that smartly exceeded the expectations of traditional holiday programming.
Read MoreBach Collegium San Diego’s Stirring J.S. Bach ‘Christmas Oratorio’
Ruben Valenzuela’s Bach Collegium San Diego gave an electric performance of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio Friday (December 14) in the capacious sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of San Diego. Sung in German by a strong 19 member chorus, accompanied by a fleet 25-piece period instrument ensemble, and guided by Artistic Director Valenzuela’s acute sense of Baroque period performance practice, this concert brought the audience amazingly close to Bach’s musical world.
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