Previews

Turtle Island Quartet has been touring the U.S. for the past several months playing selections from their Jimi Hendrix album Have You Ever Been...? This weekend they return to California with a set at Yoshi's S.F.

The Merola Opera Program steps out with Rossini's oft-played masterpiece The Barber of Seville, an easy recommendation, and an all-star cast: The Merolini are singers you will soon be seeing in major opera houses around the globe.

Here's a summer concert that's easy and cheap: for just $15 you can get in to the Piedmont Piano Company to hear excellent pianist Eliane Lust play Joplin, Gershwin, and a variety of tangos.

Music in the Vineyards' first weekend brings a delightful trio of twilight concerts, one at Robert Mondavi the other at Regusci Winery and one at Rubicon Estate.

Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’etoile, his first opera, was written for Jacques Offenbach’s Bouffes Parisiennes and premiered there in late 1877. If you’ve never seen or heard the piece, it’s worth the trouble to seek it out.

Although not everybody is happy to acknowledge it, John Williams is likely the most popular American composer of classical music alive today. The San Francisco Symphony winds up its Summer and the Symphony series with a jaunt through the Williams canon, with a few nods to his compatriots in what is some of the most sophisticated and brilliantly orchestrated movie music ever.

Pamela Z’s — whose Room Series continues this weekend with “Poetry and Motion” at the Royce Galler — is apparently an inexhaustible fount of great ideas, bringing together three musicians and three dancers in the Japanese Butoh tradition.

With a lot of good music and a little fine wine, Music in the Vineyards beckons enthusiasts of the good life.

Frank Loesser’s delightful musical The Most Happy Fella, headed for the Lesher Center, mixes genres with its wide variety of memorable songs.

Casablanca may be the most popular movie ever made in old Hollywood. It has everything — a great story, stars, script — and one of the most memorable scores of the period. This Friday, the S.F. Symphony performs the magical score synched to the film itself.