Ken Bullock

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

Rob Kapilow, the composer of the Marin Symphony’s latest commissioned work, on the anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, came to the Bay Area to gather ideas from the people who live next to it.

Leon Botstein shared his trademark wit and outrageous opinions with a UC Berkeley symposium on the future of classical music.

OperaLab — high energy, high adrenaline, and intimate new project from Berkeley West Edge is featuring a upcoming musical reading, which features Mozart's Zaide (1780), an opera he left unfinished in favor of other projects.

Break out your horse-head fiddles. This year's Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival lifts the veil on Mongolia and its neighbors.

The traditional Japanese art remains wedded to folk custom, but with a distinctive New World edge.

On a drizzling Sunday, California Bach Society performed two gems of the English vocal repertory: Purcell’s ode Hail, Bright Cecilia and Handel’s Acis and Galatea, a masque. Or is it a pastoral? Or, as Handel once described it, a little opera? Whatever the genre, the Bach Society’s cheerful demeanor and an attentive audience belied the sullen weather.

Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker since 1996, returns to the Bay Area for Cal Performances’ Strictly Speaking series on Oct. 14 to address and sample from his new book. Here, he talks with SFCV about his last tour and the enthusiastic response accorded to his last book, The Rest Is Noise, as well as about what he’ll talk about in October — plus this and that which came up along the way.

A preview of what’s being called a collaborative live opera, Dieci giorni (or 10 Days), by Bay Area composers Erling Wold, Lisa Scola Prosek, Martha Stoddard, and Davide Verotta, conducted by Stoddard and directed by Jim Cave. The production opens on Sept. 10 for a two-weekend run at Thick House on San Francisco’s Potrero Hill.

Chamber Music Day, Live + Free, 2010 — the fourth annual festival of the compositional and performance form with the intimate yet elastic definition of music that fits between four walls, with a single musician playing each part — will take place all afternoon on Sunday, Sept. 12.