We may be immersed in December’s holiday madness, but San Diego Symphony Music Director Jahja Ling has clearly delegated all the orchestra’s seasonal celebration to conductor Matthew Garbutt and his Holiday Pops battalions. No “Messiah” (full or lite), no Christmas oratorios, no seasonal choral samplers this year. Instead, Maestro Ling selected a banquet portion of old favorites for this weekend’s (Dec. 14-16) installment of the Jacobs Masterworks Series: the evergreen Berlioz “Sinfonie fantastique,” Verdi’s roiling Overture to La forza del destino, and Mozart’s cheery Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 467. In terms of musical performance, this choice was a…

An ad campaign some years back cleverly proclaimed “You don’t have to be Jewish to like Levi’s Jewish Rye Bread.” You certainly don’t have to be Russian to play the music of Sergei Prokofiev, but after hearing Yefim Bronfman’s commanding, exuberant performance of Prokofiev’s Eighth Piano Sonata Friday (Dec. 14) at La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium, I could be persuaded that being Russian gives an inside track to interpreting this music. When the 54-year-old Bronfman was born in Tashkent, it was part of the Soveit Union, and the young pianist grew up in the same repressive Soviet culture in which Prokofiev…