Previews

“The Tender Land resonates much more with us now than it did in the 50’s,” said Jonathan Khuner, Berkeley Opera’s musical director, of the company’s next production, April 10-18, in its new home at the El Cerrito Performing Arts Theater. “It’s intimate, not filled with the big themes, just about people deciding what to do with their lives.

There are a lot of brilliant ideas out there about involving children in classical music, but San Francisco Chamber Orchestra can stake a claim for one of the most original: conducting paired with circus clowns.

“All we conductors have a vision of how the music should sound ideally,” he says on the patio of the near idyllic, precariously perched Berkeley hills rental he shares with his cellist wife and children.

If you plan to drive up I-80 to the next concert of the Vallejo Symphony to hear virtuoso Meredith Brown, you must be prepared to play her second-most-important instrument. No, not the French horn, but the one in which “Freeway Philharmonic’” members are extremely practiced: the steering wheel. 

It’s not your standard concert evening — and that’s just the point.