Michael Zwiebach

Electronic keyboards have a wide range of uses. They are portable, they can be hooked up, via an industry-standard MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) to a computer for composition, recording, and signal-processing. They can synthesize sounds, and have lots of bells and whistles. Some even come with learning software that includes graded lessons. Prices for keyboards range from $200 to about $3,700 for one that’s top of the line.

Thank goodness for the chamber music societies that fill up the calendar with intriguing music for not much money. In November, the Mill Valley Chamber Music Society presents Concertante, a well-established string ensemble that last year finished an impressive two-year commissioning project that included such composers as Lowell Lieberman, Gabriela Lena Frank, Shulamit Ran, Kevin Puts, Tigran Mansourian, and Richard Danielpour.

West Edge Opera (formerly Berkeley Opera) has boldness in its name, a boldness it has earned with productions that rethink operas, from the score to the stage. Now, Artistic Director Mark Streshinsky has upped the casting level, as well, making it a comparable strength and the company’s most notable aspect.

My SFCV colleague Matt Cmiel is also an enterprising composer who, while still a teenager, founded a new-music ensemble called Formerly Known as Classical. Its latest incarnation is the After Everything Ensemble.

Most of us grew up calling the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg “the Kirov” in “Leningrad.” Reverting to the pre-Communist name may have confused some folks, but no matter. It remains one of Russia’s premier performing arts organizations under its charismatic leader, Valery Gergiev.

In another sign of the times the 2010 Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album went to Fernando Otero, a pianist who came to prominence in a tango band, who is a paid-up member of the New York jazz scene, and who uses more formal, classical structures in his compositions in a way that is completely different from the composer who immediately leaps to your mind as a comparison, Astor Piazzolla. He's at SFJAZZ this weekend and if you like contemporary Latin American sounds, you'll definitely be pleasantly surprised at the variety that Otero finds in his Buenos Aires roots.

Although the cunning folks at the San Francisco Symphony are billing this concert as “MTT Conducts Mozart and Stravinsky,” the real excitement is going to come from the local premiere of Thomas Adès' Polaris, a co-commission of the SFS, with video by Tal Rosner. The composer describes the piece in his recent SFCV artist spotlight. “[While composing Polaris], I took my first trip to Grand Canyon. That experience definitely gave me the key to how to end the piece.