Previews

Arnaldo Cohen is rightly esteemed by afficionados of classical piano; now is your chance to catch him in his four-hand recital with up-and-comer Nareh Arghamanyan at Herbst Theatre.

It's dance, it's drumming, it's earsplitting. It's the 2010 International Taiko Festival at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, an event you won't forget.

It's rare that we give a shout out to the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus in this space, but they're a really good group. This weekend, it performs Morton Feldman's deep, meditative work Rothko Chapel, a reason to attend by itself.

She's not a household name, but Elizabeth Blumenstock is a world class violinist who has been wowing Bay Area early music lovers for years. So when she and the Philharmonia Baroque take on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, it's time to declare a holiday and take the kids.

For the past seven years, Bay Area audiences have been benefiting from Kathryn Gould’s Magnum Opus commissioning project as new orchestral works are premiered here. The Marin Symphony will perform the premiere of (not) The Shadow by one of today’s best composers, Avner Dorman.

For many choral ensembles, producing a full concert season is plenty enough work to keep them occupied. Not so for Chalice Consort, which supplements its performance activities with wide-ranging efforts to revive forgotten early-music repertory.

Fans of Halloween creep-outs may enjoy the screening of the newly restored 1920 silent film classic about murder and the evil within us, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, at Davies Symphony Hall, this Sunday.

Up at UC Davis' Mondavi Center, the coming weekend will see several performances on the theme of “Madness and Music.” The one you want to catch, if you can, is Alarm Will Sound, a genre-bending, electrifying, 20-member band that wears its virtuosity lightly and is game for anything.

Last time out, at the Berkeley Exhibition, Musica Pacifica brought you a breezy, delightful set of folktunes from the British Isles. For its upcoming concert, sponsored by the San Francisco Early Music Society, the group goes in the opposite direction, with music about love in all its oft-dysfunctional splendor. Soprano Dominique Labelle will be on hand.

If there’s one thing Lamplighters Music Theatre knows, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan. So it’s not surprising that the lyricist-composer duo’s latest show — the one spoofing vampire-mania and the Twilight books and movies, not to mention San Francisco’s own Mayor Navin Gruesome — is receiving its premiere from them.