Of particular interest is Crockett’s Daglarym/My Mountains. Composed on commission from Volti, with texts by Katherine Vincent, the set of five movements is inspired by the folk music traditions of Tuva. Geary praises the beauties of the score, calling it “evocative of sweeping landscapes and a pastoral and meditative existence.”

Paterson’s On the Day the World Ends (another Volti commission) is a cycle of three pieces incorporating poetry by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Elizabeth Frye. Also included are Mechem’s Three Madrigals, a setting of texts by the composer’s father, the poet and author Kirke F. Mechem, and Kernis’ Ecstatic Meditations, which incorporates writings by a 13th-century mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg. Hong’s Emendemus in melius completes the program. Performances are at 8 p.m. on May 15 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley and May 16 at St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco; and at 4 p.m. on May 17 at All Saints’ Church, Palo Alto.

This weekend, meanwhile, audiences can hear a program celebrating the culmination of Volti’s acclaimed high school outreach program. On May 2 at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, the ensemble’s Choral Institute Concert will bring together the combined choirs of the Acalanes High School Chamber Singers, the Head-Royce School Colla Voce, and Piedmont Choirs Ecco with the Jubilate Orchestra in a performance of J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Meine Freude. Geary conducts. Each choir will also perform separately, in repertoire ranging from Claudio Monteverdi to Imogen Heap. The music starts at 8 p.m.

How does she do it? In Flicka’s words: “The career is important and often intoxicating, but nothing is as valuable as family and friends. Life is never in balance, so give up trying to keep it in balance, and accept the chaos. Family first.” Still, it’s striking to realize that the same woman who just took the bus (her car’s in the shop), to visit a gravely ill colleague in the hospital, might be flying out the following day for an appearance at Kennedy Center before the president of the United States. Behind this nonstop compassion is a woman of unbounded energy, grace, diligence, and discipline. No thank-you is left unsaid, no 16th note ignored; everything is given its due value: the maxi-multitasker living in every dimension of her multidimensional world.

Her long-standing collaboration with Jake Heggie, the composer and his music, has brought with it a deeper exploration of her own motherhood. In his opera Dead Man Walking, the mother loses control of the child, watches him suffer, and, as every mother would do, questions her own responsibility: “What decision did she make that could have been different?” What could she have done that might have led to a different outcome? The same question lay at the heart of the recent Heggie production Three Decembers, and the exploration of it has been a focal point for Flicka the woman. This is every parent’s dilemma: a question with no final answer.

Appropriately, then, her forthcoming concert will be a performance, with Kristin Clayton, of four duets by Jake that articulate diverse moments — some funny, some tragic — between a mother and a daughter. One is about a hilarious recurring face of the mother that seems to appear in the daughter’s own mirror; another is about the heartsickness arising from the gradual exclusion of recognition from the mother’s Alzheimer-stricken mind. These duets will be part of a closing-night gala featuring songs, duets, and ensembles by the young composer.

While these works hardly amount to a survey of Copland’s music (no one program could accomplish that), they do illuminate one of the composer’s most fertile periods: the years between 1942 and 1946, when he refined the distinctive American vocabulary — the spare harmonies, spacious textures, forthright melodies, and vital rhythms we have come to think of as quintessentially Copland. Hoe-down, part of an orchestral suite excerpted from the 1942 ballet score Rodeo, paints a vibrant picture of the American West — one that Copland, a Brooklyn-born Jew who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, had never actually seen.

No matter — written for dancer/choreographer Agnes DeMille, who gave the ballet’s wildly successful first performance in New York, the work remains a singularly inventive vision of the American West, and an exuberant example of this composer’s most accessible work. So, too, does Appalachian Spring, also created for DeMille; the austere and serenely beautiful 1944 score, built around the Shaker tune A Gift to be Simple, never fails to move an audience.

The Third Symphony rounds out the program. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky, who called it the greatest American symphony to date, the 1946 score evokes both a mythical America, and a specific one. The fourth movement incorporates music Copland wrote earlier as a tribute to the ordinary men and women who were “doing the dirty work” in World War II — a short piece for brass and percussion he titled Fanfare for the Common Man, which went on to become one of the most popular and oft-performed musical works of the century.

The program concludes Marin Symphony’s 2008-2009 season. Neale, who has a proven track record with Copland’s music, both in Marin and during his previous tenures as San Francisco Symphony’s associate conductor and music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, gives a preconcert talk one hour before each performance.

Frederic Rzewski is still playing his 1975 masterwork, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, 36 variations on a Chilean song associated with the Unidad Popular coalition, which supported the Salvador Allende government.

Rzewski’s piece is virtuosic, imaginative, and accessible, and with the composer’s advocacy at the piano, it has become a staple of the modern piano repertory. At some point, Rzewski is sure to retire from playing, so take the opportunity to hear him at the Mondavi Center.