In Wednesday’s (7/18) San Francisco Chronicle, Jesse Hamlin writes, “Klaus Geitel, the famed 88-year-old music critic for the Berliner Morgenpost, is not an easy man to please. But he flipped for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, which just finished a smash five-city European tour playing everything from John Adams’ ‘Shaker Loops’ to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 under the skillful baton of Donato Cabrera. Raving about the orchestra’s Berlin Philharmonic performance, Herr Geitel wrote that the music was ‘the likes of which I’ve never heard from a young orchestra,’ which in German sounds even weightier. Critics in Luxembourg and Munich also gave thumbs way up. The review from the Berliner Zeitung critic was particularly colorful: ‘At this concert the listener was impressed by youthful perfection—and by the silvery clear sound of the ensemble. It was as though the endlessly suffering Gustav Mahler had finally found his peace in the California sun, lying on the beach with a perfect tan.’ ”
Posted July 19, 2012
