MUSIC REVIEWS

I can hear exasperated voices complaining, “Not another Messiah performance!” And still others asking, “Why do it in the spring, when Christmas is so far away?” This weekend, BachCollegium San Diego under the direction of Ruben Valenzuela delivered a stunning account of G. F. Handel’s seemingly inescapable oratorio in three locations around the County. I…

Like Bill Cosby’s 1980s sit-com Huxtable family, mariachi music in San Diego is “movin’ on up.” Saturday (March 16) at Civic Theatre, San Diego Opera mounted its production of the first mariachi opera, Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, by the director of Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, José Pepe Martínez. Using the idiom and instrumentation of…

On a March weekend indulging in St. Patrick’s Day parades and revels, the San Diego Symphony chose the Gallic over the Gaelic, featuring Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos in D Minor, with Music Director Jahja Ling and his concert pianist wife Jessie Chang as soloists. James Gaffigan was the guest conductor. While most singers…

Western music has absorbed influences from other cultures at highly specific junctures. Mozart encountered Turkish Janissary music when he came to Vienna in 1781, and it found its way into his next opera’s percussion section. Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition and it transformed his concept of harmonic progression. When…

On rare occasions, during a rapturous performance of great music, I am tempted to think that I will never again hear this work played so well. This has happened while hearing Yo-Yo Ma play an entire recital of J. S. Bach’s unaccompanied Cello Suites; Christopher Taylor play Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus,” and recently when…

In the mid-20th century, American politicians saw subversion in popular music, from the anti-capitalist stanzas of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” to Malvina Reynolds’ anti-nuclear “What Have They Done to the Rain?” to Bob Dylan’s counterculture manifesto “Blowin’ in the Wind.” But in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin feared the power of classical…