San Francisco Classical Voice, for which I write reviews, has just published their Best of 2024 roundup. As explained in the introduction, they asked five of their reviewers to pick the three best concerts they attended in the Bay Area this year, and I was among the five.
Like others, I go to a lot more concerts than I review for SFCV. Looking over my reviews for the year and my blog posts on other concerts, I decided that, though I'd enjoyed just about everything I reviewed, only one of those concerts really met the highest level. Fortunately Lisa Hirsch, also one of the five, had reviewed both the others I picked, and she agreed that they were excellent.
They were SFS in January (Dvorak and Beethoven), the Ustvolskaya piano recital in October, and the Redwood Symphony in November (Shostakovich and Mozart), the last being the one I reviewed. If I'd had five choices, I'd have added the Esme Quartet in October, and the California Symphony in Beethoven's Ninth in September, neither of which SFCV reviewed at all.
We toted up our picks in a shared document, so as to avoid overlap, and then turned in our writeups. For the two I didn't review, I just boiled my blog posts on them down to the requested word length, and for the other, I took my review and looked for synonyms.
Since two of my three were major hefty symphony performances, and two of my three were Soviet-era music, I'm glad that others had different tastes, so that we got a variety. I attended two of the other reviewers' choices: the April SFS concert chosen by Rebecca Wishnia, though I preferred its Prokofiev Third to the Walton Viola Concerto that she emphasized; and Kaija Saariaho's opera Innocence at SFO in June, chosen by Steven Winn, and I agree with him that it was a stunning and awesome event.
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