Reviews

Read what our critics have to say about our concerts, but remember, there’s no substitute for being there!

April 11, 2010
San Franciso Classical Voice
Chamber Music Chums Prove Artful
“This collaboration is what I’m in it for,” declared the clearly delighted soprano Ann Moss, with a sweeping gesture that took in her fellow performers and the audience at the Noe Valley Ministry on Sunday afternoon. READ MORE

October 11-12, 2008
Georgia Rowe
Saintly Inspiration
Choral concerts organized around a single figure can make for a bland evening if not programmed with restraint and consummate care. But the Artistsí Vocal Ensemble (AVE) made Saint Francis of Assisi the focus of a thoughtful, artfully structured, and surprisingly varied concert in two performances over the weekend. READ MORE

April 27, 2008
Noel Verzosa
Souvenirs of Spirituality
On Sunday afternoon, as part of the Noe Valley Chamber Music series, a small gathering in San Francisco was treated to ìTraveling Polyhymnia,î a program of chamber music assembled by the Adorno Ensemble. The program was promoted as presenting ìjourneys on a sacred path with sounds of the spirit from Buddhism to Azerbaijani culture.î True to its promise, the concert took its audience on a whirlwind world tour through works by Chinese-American composer Zhou Long, Argentinian-Jewish Osvaldo Golijov, native Californian Kurt Erickson, and Azerbaijani-born (and Berlin-based) Franghiz Ali-Zadeh. READ MORE

Febuary 10, 2008
Joseph Sargent
Renaissance Faire
In an increasingly crowded field of Bay Area choral ensembles, certain groups have devised creative methods of garnering attention. The three-year-old San Francisco Renaissance Voices, still a new kid on the block, takes the novel step of re-creating historical performance environments for its concerts. READ MORE

November 4, 2007
Benjamin Frandzel
Bracing Performance From a Young Quartet
Amazing young string quartets seem to appear at a steady pace these days, and it was a great pleasure on Sunday to see another one added to the local crop. The Afiara String Quartet, four Canadians who came together through various positions at the San Francisco Conservatory, emerged in their Sunday recital on the Noe Valley Chamber Music series as a terrifically unified, versatile, idiomatic, and moving ensemble. READ MORE

July 8, 2007
Jake Heggie
Let Her Entertain You, Please!
THE Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra was tuning up one day last month at the Ravinia Festival in suburban Chicago when Patti LuPone walked onstage in her let’s-get-serious glasses and prepared to sing from a score plastered with Post-it notes. Among the ensemble’s strange, outmoded, “original” instruments — the feral horns, sour violins, wooden flutes, cellos without endpins — she seemed right at home, despite her Broadway provenance. She too is a strange, outmoded, original instrument: a musical star built for another age, an Ethel Merman without portfolio. Which partly explains what she was doing there: following the unpredictable trail of interesting work wherever it led. In this case that meant “To Hell and Back,” by the composer Jake Heggie and the librettist Gene Scheer. Reframing the Persephone myth as a contemporary tale of domestic abuse, they had conceived the 38-minute operatic piece with Ms. LuPone specifically in mind to sing the role of the battered wife’s mother-in-law. READ MORE

January 8, 2007
Emil Miland, Sarah Cahill, Carey Bell and Paul Ehrlich
The Attraction of the New
It’s probably time to lay to rest the myth that contemporary concert music is box office suicide. Of course, it still matters exactly what types of “new music” are being offered. The term can be ridiculously broad, encompassing everything under the sun in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Noe Valley Chamber Music concert on Sunday offered a slate of neoconservative — or vanguard (or a combination thereof, depending on the point of view) — composers that filled the Presbyterian sanctuary to capacity. The recital starred the wondrous duo of cellist Emil Miland and pianist Sarah Cahill, and it featured vibrant contributions by clarinetist Carey Bell and violist Paul Ehrlich. READ MORE