Previews

When you combine a lot of great Bay Area instrumentalists with a lot of Bay Area institutions of higher learning, you wind up with way more concerts than you can conceivably get to. But if you like your J.S. Bach, here's one you might want to consider.

One of the recent Merola Program stars-in-waiting, Heidi Melton is a soprano with a big career ahead of her singing the big Wagner roles. You can wait to shell out $100 to see her at the Metropolitan Opera, a football field away from your seat, or you can hear her sing in this recital.

The Red Poppy Art House is a nice space for music and Charith Premawardhana and Classical Revolution have done a great job presenting young and inspiring acts there. This week, they bring in another strong group of musicians, the Vinca Quartet.

There are musicians, there are virtuosos, and then there is that special class of transcendent musician for whom only superlative adjectives suffice. The double bass player Edgar Meyer is just such a performer, hailed as “the best bassist alive” (San Diego Magazine) and “the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument” (The New Yorker). 

Chanticleer’s concerts often take on wide swaths of musical history, and the ensemble’s opening concert of its 2010/2011 season, “Out of This World!” is no exception.

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.

Terry Riley, one of the most inspiring of the so-called minimalist composers, will be playing piano at the Berkeley Art Museum, lighting up the museum's late night hours, with an informal concert. At 75, this pioneer has still got plenty of gas left in the tank.

Superb violinist Ian Swensen may be more self-effacing than his better-known contemporaries, but that's all to the advantage of San Francisco Conservatory students, who will get to play with him in a rare performance of the French Romantic Ernst Chausson's Concerto.

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.