Previews

Composer and SFCV contributor Matthew Cmiel and director/ choreographer Wolfgang Thompson have put together an evening of music and words that sounds exciting in its mix of different approaches with works ranging from a choreographic work that uses Anne Sexton’s poems as a score, and a staging of a work by Elliott Carter.

What distinguishes an Open Opera performance is both its professional pedigree and the relaxed viewing environment — audience members are invited to move around. The Bay Area nonprofit organization that performs opera, free, for the public and makes use of the region’s great local talent, students and professionals alike will mount four fully-staged performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni starting this weekend.

There's a new choral group in town with a name that might make a PR consultant despair. The group is EUOUAE, is medieval shorthand for “saeculorum amen,” the last Latin words in the common doxology. It's a fit name for a group that, for it's first concert, is resurrecting a medieval mass that you find in history books but rarely in performance.

Festival Opera of Walnut Creek is continuing its summer season with Gaetano Donizetti’s masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. The production opens Aug. 7, and the four performances will feature almost entirely Bay Area artists.

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.