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“Miriam’s Well,” billed as “an interfaith collaboration of sacred dance, music, and poetry,” begins and ends with a poem by Coleman Barks, popular scholar of the Sufi mystic poet Rumi:

What is praised is one, so the praise is one, too, Many jugs being poured into one huge basin. All religions, all this singing, one song.

It was an event like no other. Answering San Francisco Opera’s clarion call, on June 13, seven human contestants — two linked by blood — and one irresistible canine of similar Amesian pedigree straggled into the courtyard north of the War Memorial Opera House starting at 11 a.m. or so for SFO’s Wagner Ring Cycle Costume Contest.

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, opened at San Francisco Opera on Thursday night with a thrilling, deeply moving performance that bodes extremely well for the full Ring to be presented in June 2011.

Audience members who may feel tempted to bail out early on San Francisco Opera’s The Girl of the Golden West should be advised that the best — and briefest — act of this often wayward and wearisome production comes last. 

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.

The San Francisco Boys Chorus presents its spring concert this weekend at Mission Dolores, a great venue, where the guys will give you a little of everything they do.

Every year, New Music Bay Area observes the summer solstice with a day of music at Oakland's Chapel of the Chimes. Audience members just walk through and discover different musical groups playing in various areas throughout the building and grounds. Because of the way Julia Morgan designed the Chapel, you don't really hear the other musicians until you're right in front of them. It's kind of like a musical maze.

Frederica von Stade, the beloved mezzo-soprano, is saying good-bye to her fans. She is in the middle of a series of farewell appearances, winding down a 40-year, Cinderella-like career in opera that began in 1970, when she unexpectedly won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and received a contract from Metropolitan Opera General Manager Rudolf Bing.

As she approaches an as-yet-unannounced date in late 2011 when San Francisco Opera will cosponsor her final official concert, von Stade will begin a new chapter in her life.

This 2-disc DVD gives the lie to the notion that opera can remain relevant only if the setting is updated to contemporary times. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s historically based, thoroughly modern sets, costumes, and direction for this 2009 production of Claudio Monteverdi ’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at Teatro Real, Madrid, are so compelling, and the authentic instrument performance by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants is so alive and colorful, that an opera first performed 369 years ago resounds with life and feeling.