Tag Archives: bach

A Reopened Carnegie Hall

On Thursday night I took a friend to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play a concert of Bach, Busoni, and Shostakovich. My friend hadn’t heard live music in nearly two years, and she was utterly thrilled to be back … Continue reading

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Joy, Delight, and Jeremy Denk

Okay, granted it’s been fifteen months since anyone in San Francisco was able to attend a live concert in Davies Symphony Hall. Granted that we were all starved for a real musical performance—not live-streaming, not carefully curated videos of past pinnacles, but … Continue reading

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Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic

A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out, has accrued to me over the years through my attendance at Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken … Continue reading

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Great Performers

In this wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center. Both of them, not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name. The first, on March 28, featured my favorite … Continue reading

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SoundBox

There’s a wonderful new place to listen to music in San Francisco, and it’s called SoundBox. Formerly an acoustically dead rehearsal area at the back of Davies Hall, it has been transformed through the miracles of deconstructed architecture, rock-concert lighting, … Continue reading

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Tetzlaff in San Francisco

There could be no finer way to spend a Sunday evening than listening to Christian Tetzlaff perform Bach’s solo pieces for the violin, and Sunday, May 11 was no exception to this. Davies Hall did not fill up completely, but … Continue reading

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Arcangelo

Going to hear a musical group you’ve never heard before always entails a risk, but the risk tends to be less with Baroque music, which—if it is played at all—is usually played at a fairly high standard. The risks in … Continue reading

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Lightning Strikes Twice

To attend an astonishingly good concert is always a surprise. If one chooses carefully, one expects competent and even enjoyable performances; but to expect overwhelming delight and reverberating emotional depth would be useless and self-defeating, since these come so rarely. … Continue reading

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