Previews

For the past seven years, Bay Area audiences have been benefiting from Kathryn Gould’s Magnum Opus commissioning project as new orchestral works are premiered here. The Marin Symphony will perform the premiere of (not) The Shadow by one of today’s best composers, Avner Dorman.

For many choral ensembles, producing a full concert season is plenty enough work to keep them occupied. Not so for Chalice Consort, which supplements its performance activities with wide-ranging efforts to revive forgotten early-music repertory.

Fans of Halloween creep-outs may enjoy the screening of the newly restored 1920 silent film classic about murder and the evil within us, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, at Davies Symphony Hall, this Sunday.

Up at UC Davis' Mondavi Center, the coming weekend will see several performances on the theme of “Madness and Music.” The one you want to catch, if you can, is Alarm Will Sound, a genre-bending, electrifying, 20-member band that wears its virtuosity lightly and is game for anything.

Last time out, at the Berkeley Exhibition, Musica Pacifica brought you a breezy, delightful set of folktunes from the British Isles. For its upcoming concert, sponsored by the San Francisco Early Music Society, the group goes in the opposite direction, with music about love in all its oft-dysfunctional splendor. Soprano Dominique Labelle will be on hand.

If there’s one thing Lamplighters Music Theatre knows, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan. So it’s not surprising that the lyricist-composer duo’s latest show — the one spoofing vampire-mania and the Twilight books and movies, not to mention San Francisco’s own Mayor Navin Gruesome — is receiving its premiere from them.

“Relevance.” This is the confident answer of Volti’s artistic director, Robert Geary, when asked what people will like about the choral ensemble’s upcoming program. The weekend of Nov. 5-7 will see Volti’s 32nd season open.

The San Francisco Symphony is alive at this concert for the dead.

Benjamin Simon leads his student charges, the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra in a wide ranging program encapsulating pieces from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Super-cellist Michelle Djokic (now with Quartet S.F. and NCCO) solos in Lou Harrison's Suites for Cello and Chamber Orchestra.

Terry Riley is famous in music history for writing In C, one of the most joyous of the seminal works of minimalism. In their upcoming concert, a look back at 20th-century writing for string quartet, the Left Coast Ensemble will go to the dominant, Riley's G Song, originally commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.