Previews

The little chorus with the highly unusual programming is back this weekend. If you're interested in great music that doesn't get performed that often, you should really be following Chora Nova.

If love is in the air in spring, that must mean that it's tango season in music. At Mission San Jose in Fremont, Aileen Chanco's Music at the Mission series concludes with a cross-genre program centered on tango nuevo creator Astor Piazzolla.

Manuel de Falla's La vida breve is one of those operas you've heard (or heard about) but rarely seen. Enter West Bay Opera's Jose Luis Moscovich, who has ingeniously solved the problem of what to pair with the tale of a woman's abandonment by a fickle lover by presenting it alongside the iconic operatic tale of abandonment, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

Choruses want to do Bach's B-Minor Mass the way that symphony orchestras want to do a Beethoven cycle, or opera companies want to do Wagner's Ring. The trick is not to actually get through it, but to render the seemingly endless details in the piece precisely and clearly while summoning the passion to do this powerful work justice. For the conclusion of its anniversary season, the S.F. Bach Choir will show us how it measures up to the Big One.

New Century Chamber Orchestra has had a few interesting featured composers the last few years, none more so than this year's selection, Mark O'Connor. His new work Elevations premieres this weekend.

The women’s quintet strives to present beautiful singing in well-trained bodies, as they perform medieval music, to approach the “feminine divine.”

Wide-ranging premieres and a remounting of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio (last heard locally two decades ago) mark the concert by San Francisco Sinfonietta.

For their big finale this week, Peninsula Symphony brings in baritone Eugene Brancoveanu and soprano Heidi Moss for a delightful set of opera excerpts from the great repertory warhorses. The 140 voices of the Stanford Symphonic Choir are also on hand to help knock down the walls in the Aida excerpts.

Magnus Lindberg is a major name in composition, and not just because of the “Magnus” part. He's at the Herbst Theatre this Sunday, courtesy of S.F. Performances, as part of a piano trio that also includes Jennifer Koh on violin and Ansi Karttunen on cello.

Volti's odyssey through new and contemporary choral pieces continues this Sunday with the premiere of Matthew Barnson's Genesis. Barnson won this year's Choral Arts Laboratory residency prize. There's more than one premiere on the program, so if you like a bit of mystery and surprise along with really fine singing, you should have this concert on your schedule.