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Decades after its ascension to the glittery throne of Glam Rock, the band Queen continues to resonate loudly in pop culture. You could hear Queen’s imperative Don’t Stop Me Now resonating from the loudspeakers at AT&T Park last week as hoi polloi sought their seats for a preseason skirmish between the San Francisco Giants and the visiting Oakland A’s.

Two up-and-coming talents, the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, took over last week’s San Francisco Symphony subscription concerts, and in the process sounded like major stars of the future.

Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote is a great artist. In an unforgettable San Francisco Performances recital Friday in Herbst Theatre, which also marked her local recital debut, Coote and her equally brilliant accompanist, Julius Drake, lavished on their audience an entire evening of songs in English, giving more attention to tone and color than I have heard in many a year.

There are a lot of reasons to attend the next performance of the Gold Coast Chamber Players. They’re playing in their new performance space, which violist Pamela Freund-Striplen calls “just wonderful.” They’re featuring a rising classical music star, soprano Leah Crocetto.

Musicians and dancers will come together in a new and engaging way in the spring season of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet, which runs April 16-25 at the Novellus Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The season features the premiere of a work that partners the ballet ensemble with several San Francisco Opera Adler Fellows.

As an accomplished violinist and pianist, the young Felix Mendelssohn took to piano-and-strings chamber music almost immediately. It’s not an accident that his first three published works are all quartets for piano and string trio.

Known as a phenomenon both in his native country of Macedonia and increasingly around the globe, pianist Simon Trpčeski makes his third appearance with the San Francisco Symphony on April 1-3, performing the Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16.

“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.

Beethoven cast an enormous shadow over the composers of his era, as well as those who followed; Brahms, who was particularly intimidated by the master, despaired of ever writing a symphony.

As someone coming from that neck of the woods, I will walk the plank with this about Eastern Europe: Notwithstanding the many splendid composers of the region, it has not done well as a source of great operas.