MUSIC REVIEWS

We know the end of the San Diego Symphony season is near when Music Director Jajha Ling brings out the Russian Romantic warhorses. This weekend’s program offered Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-the-sleeve Fourth Symphony and Olga Kern as the winning soloist in Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto.

After a significant absence from Art of Élan’s stage, the organization’s co-founder flutist Demarre McGill returned with some of the region’s finest chamber players for a concert that started with G. P. Telemann and ended with David Bruces’s 2011 octet “Steampunk.”

Grand opera is a term used to classify a style of opera that flourished in 19th-century Paris, but you don’t have to be a musicologist to know that everything about Guiseppe Verdi’s Aida is calculated on a grand scale. The Pharaoh’s resplendent palace, imposing military parades, pagan temples bustling with…

Anton Webern, the Austrian composer who took the 12-tone method of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg to dazzling heights, met a sad and untimely end. Although he survived World War II as a civilian, a few months after the Nazi surrender he was…

If you have ever observed the brass section of a typical North American symphony orchestra, you know that the trumpet, trombone and tuba enclave is decidely male-dominated. My own professional experience with trumpet players has reinforced their gentlemanly macho profile. English trumpet virtuoso Alison Balsom, who performed with the Scottish Ensemble Saturday (April 6) at…

A classic struggle of church and state: claiming allegiance to Divine authority, Roman Catholic bishops adamantly oppose the will of the head of state. That scenario may bring to mind the recent conflict between President Obama and the Roman Catholic hierarchy over certain aspects of Obamacare. It also describes the central theme of Italian composer…