Previews

Rarely heard (and some virtually unknown) music from Latin America will be performed at several historic sites.

The Mission Chamber Orchestra of San José kicks off this year’s Portuguese pride festivities in the Bay with its 5th annual Music of Portugal concert,  coinciding with Portugal Day on June 5.

The Rickshaw Stop is presenting Dustin O'Halloran this weekend with the Magik*Magik Orchestra's String Quartet and the Conspiracy of Venus women's vocal group. They'll be playing music off of O'Halloran's latest instrumental album, Lumiere.

It's a little off the beaten path, but if you think you'll be down on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz for part of the Memorial Day weekend, you might want to make time for a concert by the artists formerly known as the Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra, now called Cadenza.

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.”