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Over the last 18 years, Maestro Bruno Weil has transformed the Carmel Bach Festival into a major international event. The seaside festival, which celebrates the music of J.S. Bach and the composers inspired by him, is known for the rich range of its programming and the consistent high quality of its performances.

Pentatone Classics has issued a veritable bonanza of recent American song, half of which come from Bay Area composers. And if the Song Be Worth a Smile, which takes its name from a line in Gordon Getty’s setting of his poem “The Ballad of Poor Peter,” features songs by William Bolcom, Jake Heggie, David Garner, John Corigliano, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Getty himself.

“It’s easy to like chamber music because it’s a conversation between a small number of musicians — and everyone knows what talking with a small group of friends is like,” said violinist Simin Ganatra of the Pacifica Quartet, which makes its first appearance at Music@Menlo, the three-week chamber music

In this striking double-disc of contrasting moods and temperaments, violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Martha Argerich take up a program of Schumann and Bartók sonatas. From Kremer’s leisurely, sun-dappled pizzicato statement of the third-movement theme in Schumann’s Violin Sonata No.

Not yet 29, conductor Alondra de la Parra made history as the first woman from Mexico to conduct in New York City. In her short career, she has presented more than 20 world premieres by such composers as Clarice Assad, Enrico Chapela, Paul Brantley, Paul Desenne, and Eugenio Toussaint.

In 2000, de la Parra moved to New York City where she received her B.A.

Most “one-opera composers” are not. They are known for a single work in the theater, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Before opening the annual Midsummer Mozart Festival, there’s a tradition that musicians from the festival orchestra get together for smaller chamber music concerts of the great composer’s music. Because the possibilities are nearly infinite as regards instrumentation, anything can turn up as they preach to the faithful.