Jeff Kaliss

What if you were confronted with a dozen spirited saxophonists, male and female, embracing a stunning range of pitch and a delightful variety of repertoire? That wouldn’t be too much sax, would it? Not in the case of the Selmer Saxharmonic.

Three centuries ago, Antonio Vivaldi was able to find musical magic in all four of the Mantuan seasons. Our own summer gifts kids with more time to to pursue the classical muse: They're temporarily freed from the classroom, evening homework, and the need to go early to bed. It’s high time, then, to take a look at a panoply of kid-and-parent-friendly and mostly free-of-charge musical activities around the Bay Area.

Declared sister cities in 1980, San Francisco and Shanghai have been celebrating that relationship all year, starting in February with a spectacular gala and exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in the former city’s Civic Center. In musical mode, there’ll be an East Meets West Chamber Concert at the Museum on July 10, featuring the American premiere of Joan Huang’s Shanghai Trilogy, performed by the Bridge Chamber Virtuosi.

There seemed something prescient in one of the 17th-century motets presented by Magnificat on Monday night at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

We’re blessed here in the Bay Area with a bounty of good, small companies that get us up close and personal with opera in good, small venues. How much better the blessing is, then, when the operatic material is as powerfully and finely wrought as Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, now enjoying a three-week West Coast premiere run at Petaluma’s intimate Cinnabar Theater.

It’s a story of unknowing maternal incest in mid-19th-century Maine, but composer Tobias Picker thinks it will be right at home in Petaluma’s Cinnabar Performing Arts Theater, and he’ll be there next week during dress rehearsals to help parent the West Coast premiere of his creation.

Ever-curious and adventurous, violinist Rachel Barton Pine reunites with Michael Morgan, her former mentor, and the Sacramento Philharmonic to showcase a suite by African-American classical composer William Grant Still and a concerto by Sergei Prokofiev.

When considering this well-performed recording, don’t place too much significance in its title. Geographically, historically, and stylistically, the five compositions are stretched so far that they defy any programmatic theme, though the Germans may have bought into the cutesy, New World concept more quickly than those of us who actually live here.

Andrew McKenna Lee has always been drawn to the sort of "rolling polyphony" of the classical guitar. For his Old First Concerts recital here on May 21, Lee will span the guitar repertoire, from Scarlatti to Milhaud, and he’ll showcase his own physically demanding and aurally dynamic Five Refractions of a Prelude by Bach. 

In the late '50s, musician and scholar Gunther Schuller attempted to formally integrate jazz and classical music under a concept he dubbed Third Stream. It was a turbulent but persistent confluence, which will be in evidence in an upcoming San José Chamber Orchestra concert.