Previews

National music icon, Iranian singer Mohamad Reza Shajarian is celebrated for his ability to transform the beauty of Sufi poetry into music.

A new wind quintet, City of Tomorrow, aims to challenge the string quartet’s supremacy by bringing to light rarely heard chamber masterpieces, while encouraging the creation of more.

Cantare con Vivo is doing Sergei Rachmaninov’s deeply moving Vespers (All-Night Vigil) as their spring concert. 

Clerestory, the men’s choral group that is partly a spin-off from Chanticleer, is back in action on the weekend, with a program they’re calling “Bacchanalia”, a celebration of spring and music about springtime appetites.

When the exciting new music group Alarm Will Sound visits the Bay Area, tickets are normallyhard to find. 

For its first big concert, the newly-established Young Womens’ Choral Projects starts off with some fancy rhythms from Gershwin, leading to a whole set of Latin American polyrhythms, American spirituals, and other traditional tunes. 

Livermore Opera opens its La traviata with a known quantity, in Rebecca Davis, who has sung Violetta Valery at Opera San Jose and is an alumna of the Merola Opera Program.

Nathan Gunn is a refined, elegant singer of art song, and his Cal Performances recital promises to be a highlight, in a Bay Area season that’s just crammed with great singers.

This is a decorous early-music concert featuring the marvelous soprano Laura Heimes, trumpeter-extraordinaire John Thiessen, and the crew from Voices of Music, faves of SFCV and famed already for their widely-viewed YouTube and Vimeo channels.

Khatia Buniatishvili is the real deal, a pianist who is fleet of fingers, yet with a relaxed, musical touch.