Michael Zwiebach

New music collective sfSound comes to Old First Concerts this week. For all you adventurers out there who like an intellectual challenge, this is the antidote to the easy listening summer pops season you’ve been waiting for.

Fremont Opera opens its La traviata next weekend. Local they may be, but they’ve scored with their Violetta: Danielle Talamantes, an up-and-comer slated to understudy at the Metropolitan Opera this season. 

For years now it’s been obvious that the classical orchestral concert is in need of some rethinking for modern audiences. And no one has been more out in front of this issue than the S.F. Chamber Orchestra, which began its popularizing mission by giving all its concerts away for free. Its current music director, Ben Simon, has gone the full monty, trying out a variety of new ideas. Simon’s new venture, “You Gotta Hear This” at the Rrazz Room in S.F. is an expansion on his original ideas.

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.

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.

Michael Lawrence's BACH & friends documentary created a big
splash with the audience at the West Coast premiere that took place at
the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco last Wednesday evening.
Presented by San Francisco Classical Voice as a fundraiser for
the organization, the film about Bach's
impact on music and musicians was greeted with cheers, laughter, and
occasionally, stunned silence from the sold-out crowd.

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.

Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. This weekend, you can hear the San Francisco Symphony play the score live, synching to a showing of the movie, and if you really want to get the full skin-crawling effect of the musical sequences in this cinematic landmark you probably can't do better.

If you want to jazz up a birthday party or anniversary, do something unexpected or plan a surprise. Pianist Daniel Glover is doing something like that with the otherwise dull-as-dishwater Frédéric Chopin commemorations this year, by pairing Chopin with Samuel Barber, another anniversary boy. His recital for San Francisco’s Old First Concerts promises to reveal some interesting connections.