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Jeffrey Thomas has the touch with Bach's B Minor Mass, a showcase piece combining all the facets of Bach's art into a gigantic musical fresco. Anyone who has heard the American Bach Soloists recording of the piece, with Thomas conducting, knows that the coming concert on Sunday is a must-see.

Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. This weekend, you can hear the San Francisco Symphony play the score live, synching to a showing of the movie, and if you really want to get the full skin-crawling effect of the musical sequences in this cinematic landmark you probably can't do better.

A heavy air of reverence fills the theater space as audience members
quietly take their seats — the viewing ritual of a centuries-old art
form. The lights dim and people are afforded the luxury of whispered
anonymity: “It’s based on a true story, you know.” David Gockley, San
Francisco Opera’s sixth general director, greets the audience with an
introduction to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The orchestra
tunes. Silence descends before the curtain rises.

Less than nine months after her dynamic San Francisco Symphony debut conducting the annual SFS “Day of the Dead” concert, Alondra de la Parra is set to make an even deeper impression on her audiences. As she leads four consecutive concerts with the orchestra, her wide-ranging repertoire — two nights of American and America-associated music, one all-Russian evening, and a refreshing Dolores Park afternoon that mixes Dvořák’s New World with some of Mexico’s finest — will be as rounded as her roster of top-flight soloists. 

Who would think that the “fun” chamber concert at the Carmel Bach Festival will be a ballad opera that is based on an early 18th-century poem about economic theories of the free market and was inspired by the economic downturn in 2008? Hark, The Grumbling Hive, scheduled for the mornings of July 23 and 30.

Before their run at the Carmel Bach Festival, the violinist and cellist talk about their tenure at the festival, how it has changed over the years, being married to a musician, and nostalgia for what will be missed.

Have you ever wondered during a concert what the composer was thinking and feeling while he or she wrote the piece you are listening to? Or what the composer’s home town was like? Or how political events of the day affected the audience’s reception of that work? If you attend Carmel Bach Festival’s “Aha! Beethoven” program, all your questions will be answered in a timely manner amid myriad musical excerpts performed by world-class musicians and singers.

The world of music for two pianists is a rarified one. Established as an art form in the Mozart family for its two talented children, then popularized by Schubert at coffeehouses in Vienna, and finally made immortal by Brahms, the two-piano/four-hands repertoire has occupied an important but often neglected corner in the vast richness of piano music. The Milton and Peggy Salkind International Piano Duo Festival celebrates that repertoire.

At the young age of 16, saxophonist and San Francisco native Rent Romus had already experienced his first taste of producing and putting on shows for fellow artists and musicians. It was this innate passion as well as a love for underground music that inspired Romus to create, 36 years later, the Outsound New Music Summit, a Bay Area-based, artist-organized festival.