Previews

It’s play time for the Ives Quartet. This time, in the second of its three-concert series titled “The Nature of Playing,” the Ives will explore how to play well with others.

Not that that’s really a problem; ensemble playing is not exactly a sand box. “Playing,” in all senses of the word, is something the quartet already does well.

Old First Concerts on Jan. 24 will do what it does best: promote talented, emerging young musicians, when it presents pianist Elizabeth Dorman in chamber concert with cellist Robert Howard and violinist Dan Carlson.

Composers and directors often combine art forms in their quest for artistic expression and interesting programming. Pairing music and dance, or music with a visual element, spices up a concert. Yet the California Symphony’s concert on Jan.

One of the best one-line put-downs of Romantic poetic excess comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. “Do you yearn?” the poet Bunthorne asks the dairy maid. “I yearn my living,” she replies. Take that, aesthetes.

Patience is as funny as any of the other great G&S collaborations, but unlike the heavy hitters in the canon (The Mikado, H.M.S.

The Santa Rosa Symphony, under Music Director Bruno Ferrandis, has put together a program for Jan. 23-25 that appeals on many levels. Highlights of this special exposition of American orchestral works include a tribute to Samuel Barber, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, and John Corigliano’s music from the Academy Award–winning film The Red Violin.

David Harrington points out that a lot of musicians don’t “play” music, but that he’s always wanted to have fun with what he does as founder of and violinist with the Kronos Quartet. He spent his New Year’s Eve morning playing a kelp horn and a dripping water drum created by San Francisco composer and performer Cheryl Leonard, and chatting with San Francisco City College student and electronic sou

“This tour is based on the simple idea that high art and accessibility are not mutually exclusive.” So says the German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser, in his straight-to-the-point manifesto for “The Sounding Off Tour: A Fresh Look at Classical Music.”

Moser has joined forces with keyboardist and performance artist Phyllis Chen for a six-city U.S. swing that lands in San Francisco Jan. 19-20.

There’s a good reason that Pennsylvania-born Paul Jacobs, 32, is frequently dubbed an organ evangelist. Even before he made music history at age 23, when he played J.S.

As memories of holiday carols and sing-alongs fade into the distance, harbingers of enticing performances for the new year are beginning to take their place.