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The Mendocino Music Festival closes with a performance of Mozart's Requiem Mass. Completed by his pupil, Francis Xavier Süssmayer, it is still one of the two most popular Requiems in the classical repertory. But even Mozart would have forked over some cash to be able to hear it in a tent overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with a fine team of professional soloists.

“What have you been smoking?” you say. But I saw the following with my own eyes at last Saturday’s San Francisco Symphony concert:

• A sold-out Davies Symphony Hall where I could find only four people over 50 who were not employees or ushers. Almost everyone was under 35.

The music of the Grateful Dead, arguably rock ’n’ roll’s first jam band, is staging a second coming, in symphonic garb, in the land where the band began, 44 years ago. Composer Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6, based on the Dead canon, will be showcased on Aug. 9, the third day of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz.

With its feast-for-the-senses blend of performance, art, and culinary events, Festival del Sole has become an attractive summer destination for music lovers throughout the Bay Area and beyond. The annual Napa Valley extravaganza, a spinoff of Italy’s Tuscan Sun festival, has also turned out to be a great place to experience the work of up-and-coming conductors.

Chronologically and in many other ways, it’s a long way from Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) to Pierre Jalbert (born in 1967), but Music at Menlo will bring the two together.

The contemporary chamber music concert that I attended Sunday evening was refreshingly free of gimmickry. For example, it took place in the ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco’s Mission District: a humble, but also accommodating, performance space. The program, by sfSound, also did not boast any flashy title or unifying theme.

George Cleve is the conductor and founder of the Midsummer Mozart Festival. He was conductor of the San Jose Symphony for 20 years, and continues to conduct both in the U.S. and abroad.

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Congratulations on the 35th season of the Midsummer Mozart Festival. What factors do you consider when programming the festival after all of these years?

John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony is an orchestral reduction, the soundtrack in a sense of his 2005 opera.  The work presents episodes from the opera, with three movements titled “The Laboratory,” “Panic,” and “Trinity.”