Previews

Sipping some of the world’s best wines, right where they’re cultivated and cultured, is also one of the best ways to take in some of the world’s best small ensemble music, of various vintages. Welcome to Napa Valley’s Music in the Vineyards festival.

Too often the summer season finds music ensembles going on physical or artistic hiatus, taking an extended vacation or programming concerts heavy on lighter repertory. Not so the San Francisco Choral Society, a symphonic chorus under the musical direction of Robert Geary, which bucks the tide with substantial works by Beethoven and Britten on July 31 and Aug. 1 at San Francisco’s Calvary Presbyterian Church.

Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise (The Winter journey) exercises a remarkable pull on singers. The great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded the 24-song cycle seven times while his equally iconic predecessor and contemporary, bass-baritone Hans Hotter, left us with three. On July 25, at Music@Menlo, baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Gilbert Kalish will join the long list of artists who have attempted to enthrall listeners with this chilling masterpiece about lost love.

It’s time for sentimental pirates, crazy cops, gleeful maidens, an incompetent Major General, and a spirited chorus to tread the boards, as Lamplighters Music Theater opens its 2010-2011 season July 29 with the comedic Gilbert and Sullivan favorite The Pirates of Penzance. Its jokes, which have tickled funny bones for over 130 years, are still funny. That is, thanks to the impeccable timing and expertise of actors/singers in a company that remains one of the foremost Gilbert and Sullivan repertory troupes in the U.S.

San Francisco native and Julliard grad Wayne Lee returns to his old stomping grounds to join pianist Wayne Graber in a complete traversal of the Beethoven violin sonatas in three concerts, beginning on Friday July 19 at the Crowden School in Berkeley.

Jeffrey Thomas has the touch with Bach's B Minor Mass, a showcase piece combining all the facets of Bach's art into a gigantic musical fresco. Anyone who has heard the American Bach Soloists recording of the piece, with Thomas conducting, knows that the coming concert on Sunday is a must-see.

Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. This weekend, you can hear the San Francisco Symphony play the score live, synching to a showing of the movie, and if you really want to get the full skin-crawling effect of the musical sequences in this cinematic landmark you probably can't do better.

Who would think that the “fun” chamber concert at the Carmel Bach Festival will be a ballad opera that is based on an early 18th-century poem about economic theories of the free market and was inspired by the economic downturn in 2008? Hark, The Grumbling Hive, scheduled for the mornings of July 23 and 30.

Have you ever wondered during a concert what the composer was thinking and feeling while he or she wrote the piece you are listening to? Or what the composer’s home town was like? Or how political events of the day affected the audience’s reception of that work? If you attend Carmel Bach Festival’s “Aha! Beethoven” program, all your questions will be answered in a timely manner amid myriad musical excerpts performed by world-class musicians and singers.

At the young age of 16, saxophonist and San Francisco native Rent Romus had already experienced his first taste of producing and putting on shows for fellow artists and musicians. It was this innate passion as well as a love for underground music that inspired Romus to create, 36 years later, the Outsound New Music Summit, a Bay Area-based, artist-organized festival.