Previews

Twenty-five pieces by 25 composers: That's the formula behind the equation for San Francisco Choral Artists’ 25th anniversary concert, titled “25 X 25.”

It’s one of the world’s more prestigious competitions for young musicians, and it takes place right here in San Francisco. The Irving M. Klein International String Competition, held annually on the campus of San Francisco State University, attracts the crème de la crème of string players, ages 15 to 23, for two days of intensive music-making.

Pink Martini, the self-described “house band of the United Nations,” is back for their third tour of duty with the San Francisco Symphony. The eclectic mix of world music and pop is hip on its own, but their arrangements, already for an expanded band, make them a great fit for an orchestra.

I'm not normally one to recommend complete sets of anything. The complete choral works of Samuel Barber, an odyssey that Voices of Musica Sacra and their music director, John Kendall Bailey, undertake beginning this weekend, is a bit different. The real reason to seek out these concerts is that you probably haven't heard most of the works that are being given a rare outing here.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and apparently more than one way to pick a guitar. At the San Francisco Guitar Summit, guitarists will perform works that pick, strum, bend, scrape, soothe, and electrify the senses, in almost the widest range of musical styles possible in one evening. From classical to world fusion, this concert provokes new ideas of what the guitar is all about.

This is not your grandmother’s chamber music.

Sure, there are some similarities. When the Double Duo, the newest chamber music grouping of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, takes the stage at Old First Concerts on June 4 and 6, you’ll see concerts designed to explore both the range of conventional instruments doing unconventional pieces and the combination of conventional and unconventional instruments.

If any Renaissance composer can be said to have the “wow” factor, it would be Carlo Gesualdo. His brilliant Tenebrae Responsories for Good Friday and Holy Saturday, performed by AVE on June 10, offers an outstanding introduction to the upcoming Berkeley Festival and Exhibition.

A panorama of the creative smorgasboard from the 16th century will be on display in Chanticleer’s final season concert, “For Thy Soul’s Salvation: Music for England’s Monarchs,” presented June 2-5 in Berkeley, Sacramento, San José, and San Francisco.

It’s a story of unknowing maternal incest in mid-19th-century Maine, but composer Tobias Picker thinks it will be right at home in Petaluma’s Cinnabar Performing Arts Theater, and he’ll be there next week during dress rehearsals to help parent the West Coast premiere of his creation.

The upcoming San Francisco Opera production of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, aka Girl of the Golden West, aka “Puccini's American opera,” returning here after an absence of 31 years, is the epitome of ”Italian-American.”