Previews

San José-based Lyric Theater is taking a chance on a San Francisco venue: the Southside Theater at Fort Mason. They’re bringing a forgotten operetta, Leo Fall’s The Dollar Princess, which was a hit on Broadway in 1909 in an English revision.

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. 

Tickets for the performing arts can be expensive, though Cal Performances’ “Fall Free for All” is a day of gratis performances open to the public.

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.

What distinguishes an Open Opera performance is both its professional pedigree and the relaxed viewing environment — audience members are invited to move around. The Bay Area nonprofit organization that performs opera, free, for the public and makes use of the region’s great local talent, students and professionals alike will mount four fully-staged performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni starting this weekend.

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.

Festival Opera of Walnut Creek is continuing its summer season with Gaetano Donizetti’s masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. The production opens Aug. 7, and the four performances will feature almost entirely Bay Area artists.

Sipping some of the world’s best wines, right where they’re cultivated and cultured, is also one of the best ways to take in some of the world’s best small ensemble music, of various vintages. Welcome to Napa Valley’s Music in the Vineyards festival.

Too often the summer season finds music ensembles going on physical or artistic hiatus, taking an extended vacation or programming concerts heavy on lighter repertory. Not so the San Francisco Choral Society, a symphonic chorus under the musical direction of Robert Geary, which bucks the tide with substantial works by Beethoven and Britten on July 31 and Aug. 1 at San Francisco’s Calvary Presbyterian Church.