Jeff Kaliss

She drew global attention to her win in Moscow in the International Tchaikovsky Competition 15 years ago, but violinist Jennifer Koh has since developed a reputation as a standard bearer for the nonstandard repertoire. A closer look at her performance programming reveals her conviction that there’s a vital link between past and present. Here she talks with SFCV about her choices.

The multitude of musicians and aficionados swarming, free of charge, through the San Francisco Conservatory last Sunday afternoon displayed how far the annual Chamber Music Day has outgrown the chamber it began in.

Musical genres are concepts that may be crawling toward extinction in the new millennium, or so pianist Billy Childs believes. Looking to a more integrated era, he’s positioning his jazz quartet alongside the classically trained Kronos Quartet for the premiere of his commissioned composition, on Sept. 18 at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

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.

What if you were confronted with a dozen spirited saxophonists, male and female, embracing a stunning range of pitch and a delightful variety of repertoire? That wouldn’t be too much sax, would it? Not in the case of the Selmer Saxharmonic.

Three centuries ago, Antonio Vivaldi was able to find musical magic in all four of the Mantuan seasons. Our own summer gifts kids with more time to to pursue the classical muse: They're temporarily freed from the classroom, evening homework, and the need to go early to bed. It’s high time, then, to take a look at a panoply of kid-and-parent-friendly and mostly free-of-charge musical activities around the Bay Area.

Declared sister cities in 1980, San Francisco and Shanghai have been celebrating that relationship all year, starting in February with a spectacular gala and exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in the former city’s Civic Center. In musical mode, there’ll be an East Meets West Chamber Concert at the Museum on July 10, featuring the American premiere of Joan Huang’s Shanghai Trilogy, performed by the Bridge Chamber Virtuosi.

There seemed something prescient in one of the 17th-century motets presented by Magnificat on Monday night at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

We’re blessed here in the Bay Area with a bounty of good, small companies that get us up close and personal with opera in good, small venues. How much better the blessing is, then, when the operatic material is as powerfully and finely wrought as Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, now enjoying a three-week West Coast premiere run at Petaluma’s intimate Cinnabar Theater.

It’s a story of unknowing maternal incest in mid-19th-century Maine, but composer Tobias Picker thinks it will be right at home in Petaluma’s Cinnabar Performing Arts Theater, and he’ll be there next week during dress rehearsals to help parent the West Coast premiere of his creation.