Michael Zwiebach

Filmmaker Michael Lawrence’s Bach and Friends has been making waves among classical listeners and audiences who might never have suspected they would have a connection to J.S. Bach’s music. In advance of the SFCV-sponsored premiere on July 14 at San Francisco’s Kabuki Cinema, Lawrence sat down to answer some questions about the film and his take on Bach’s music.

Back when Milton and Peggy Salkind teamed up as a piano duo in the early 1950s, there were just a handful of piano duo acts — Rosina and Josef Lhevinne, Gaby and Robert Casadesus, and a few others. The Salkinds helped to blaze the trail that others, most famously the Labeque sisters, have since trod. San Franciscans have a chance to enjoy a rare duo on the weekend of July 8-10.

For some it will be an opportunity to hear bass John Relyea, and soprano Patricia Racette, who is one of the artists who could capture my attention even if she was only singing the phone book. But the July 4 concert at Stern Grove with the San Francisco Opera will also present a program of American operatic classics, which are rare on the world's stages.

San Francisco Classical Voice lost one of its finest writers and an even dearer friend when Heuwell Tircuit died last Monday. His body was discovered in his apartment by his longtime friend Hal Cruthirds on Wednesday. He was 78 years old.

The San Francisco Boys Chorus presents its spring concert this weekend at Mission Dolores, a great venue, where the guys will give you a little of everything they do.

Every year, New Music Bay Area observes the summer solstice with a day of music at Oakland's Chapel of the Chimes. Audience members just walk through and discover different musical groups playing in various areas throughout the building and grounds. Because of the way Julia Morgan designed the Chapel, you don't really hear the other musicians until you're right in front of them. It's kind of like a musical maze.

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.

Sign of the times: The Berkeley Festival and Exhibition is going mostly local this year. That’s in response to the depressed funding cycle that coincided with the serious recession of the past two years. Questions linger about the festival’s stability and long-term organization, but fortunately they stop at the concert hall doors.