Whether it’s 2 x 6 or 3 x 4, the math works out for music lovers this week as two masters of the six-string guitar and three great string quartets grace stages across Minnesota and beyond. Let’s run the numbers:

Guitarist Jason Vieaux (“Perhaps the most precise and soulful classical guitarist of his generation,” according to NPR) visits Grand Forks at the North Dakota Museum of Art on Sunday, April 13, no doubt featuring highlights from his recent J.S. Bach recording. Meanwhile in St. Paul, the Minnesota Guitar Society presents Kevin Loh to wrap up its International Artist Series.

The Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet returns to Minnesota for Dvořák and Shostakovich at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis. Also this weekend, there’s the eclectic, mononymic quartet called ETHEL, known for collaborations, including with Kurt Elling, Joe Jackson, Todd Rundgren and David Byrne. On Friday, April 11, ETHEL shares the stage with master musician, storyteller and Taos Pueblo elder Robert Mirabal at Luther College.

Rounding out our string quartet hat trick is the Mill City Quartet. Actually, it’s a quintet with the addition of soprano Stacey Mastrian for an evening of Ottorino Respighi, Clara Schumann, Jesse Montgomery, Caroline Shaw and more to round out this season of the Chamber Music Society of St. Cloud.

Time for another MSPIFF — the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. With hundreds of titles screening April 2 through 13, you’ll want to plan ahead. Here are three movies about music — and one with live music — plus links to more info and show times:

Right in the Eye: Live Movie-Concert of Georges Méliès Films: Right in the Eye is a live music performance set to 12 films by Georges Méliès, a pioneer of the cinema and a wizard of special effects. Created by Méliès’ great-great-granddaughter, three virtuoso musicians use an extraordinary range of instruments — including piano, percussion, guitar and unique oddities like the aquaphone, theremin and even plastic takeout lids — to bring new life to Méliès' films in the spirit of the technical wizardry and playful creativity that defined his work.

Flicka: Flicka is the inspiring documentary about the incredible career of opera singer Frederica von Stade. After her opera career, she focused on bringing musical training to underprivileged students and even to the unhoused. Archival footage and interviews capture her irresistible personality, her enthusiasm for every project and her joyous love of music.

Ai Weiwei’s Turandot: Renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei turns his attention to directing Puccini’s opera Turandot at the Rome Opera, only to be thwarted by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which affected artists in the production. What finally emerges is a Turandot as beautiful as it is political.

John Cranko: Famous for his production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet, this drama is a dance-infused tribute to the virtuoso choreographer driven by a quest for perfection in both art and love.

Call it the British Invasion of Minnesota this week when two distinguished choirs and one distinguished composer, all from London, grace stages around Minnesota.

Voces8 lands in St. Michael for the annual choral festival on Thursday, March 27. Then it’s on to St. Peter and Gustavus Adolphus College, where on Friday, March 28, the group will collaborate with high school choirs, followed by a Saturday concert with the Gustavus Choir.

Meanwhile in Collegeville, the Westminster Cathedral Choir fills the Abbey Church at St. John’s University on Saturday afternoon.

More than a decade ago, James MacMillan was called into a private meeting and asked to compose a piece of music based on Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite scripture passage. The piece sat quietly for years until 2022, when it was performed for the first time by the Choir of Westminster Abbey at the Queen’s funeral. 

MacMillan’s religious faith is also at the core of his upcoming concerts conducting the Minnesota Orchestra. The program features his own music, as well as Wagner’s Good Friday Spell and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture. Want to listen from home? Don’t miss our live broadcast of the Minnesota Orchestra Friday night on YourClassical MPR.

Before the fabulous pianist Simone Dinnerstein plays at Lincoln Center this spring, you can catch her this weekend at an even more intimate and beautiful setting: the North Dakota Museum of Art, just a stone’s skip across the Red River from Minnesota. Her Sunday Concert in the Gallery with violinist Rebecca Fischer is preceded Saturday by a free family concert at the Grand Forks Public Library, and by master classes for women musicians and music students.

If Grand Forks is a bridge too far, set your navigation for Mankato, where the Mankato Symphony’s Music on the Hill chamber music series gets deep into Mozart, Shaw and Shostakovich.

Finally, if you’re a Shostakovich die-hard, the Jerusalem String Quartet kicks off a survey of all 15 Shostakovich quartets performed across five concerts in St. Paul. This Sunday’s show is sold out, so be sure to get your tickets for the other shows running through April, thanks to the Schubert Club.

As Oscar Hammerstein II put it:

The music is sweet
The words are true
The song is you…

And there are songs to be sung for you — and by you — all around Minnesota this week.

Ahead of its concert performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem, you can join in a free community sing-along with the Bach Society of Minnesota this weekend in St. Paul.  Meanwhile, the Choral Arts Ensemble offers a concert about kindness and respect, qualities that seem in short supply of late. The singers of Cantus collaborate with the legendary Swingle Singers this weekend in St. Paul, with streaming options wherever you are.

Meanwhile, a sense of place roots the Winona Symphony’s concert with Minnesota mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, singing Raspberry Island Dreaming, by Minnesota composer Libby Larsen. Another superb Minnesota mezzo, Alma Neuhaus, has a career trajectory that’s taken her from her Minneapolis home, to her student days at St. Olaf College, to her current position at the Vienna State Opera. She makes a homecoming in a free recital at the Bethlehem Music Series (also with streaming options). Finally, catch the superb soprano Julia Bullock with the Minnesota Orchestra. Last year, she won the Grammy for best classical solo vocal album, and the past few summers she’s been a marquee talent at the Lakes Area Music Festival in Brainerd. Catch her on our live Minnesota Orchestra broadcast this Friday.

This week, you have a chance to encounter both timeless classics and forgotten masterpieces at the cinema.

Macbeth, starring the superb David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, screens in cinemas around the world from London’s Donmar Warehouse. The stage production featured innovative sound design, which the cinema capture works into the mix. These two veteran actors bring tremendous charisma and connection to their roles, and they’re also both movie buffs! It is not to be missed; check online to find out if your local movie theater is screening it.

Then, if Shakespeare’s witches, murder and revenge aren’t enough to satisfy your darker cinematic cravings, check out Highways of Doom: The 16th Film Noir Festival in the Twin Cities. It’s a full month of classics and rarities featuring five thrilling incarnations of this theme: doomed couples and individuals hoping against hope that they can outrun fate.

Meanwhile, “something wicked this way comes” to theaters next month with Seven Veils, a gothic take on Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. It stars Amanda Seyfried as a theater director haunted by the trauma of her former mentor's most famous work. Learn more, including watching the creepy trailer.

While Wicked defies gravity at the box office, make sure to take time this week to watch a Netflix movie about a real-life hero who defied the odds to become the first woman musician in the New York Philharmonic.

Trailblazing double bassist Orin O'Brien was never one to seek the spotlight, but when Leonard Bernstein hired her in 1966, she inevitably became the focus of media attention and, ultimately, one of the most renowned musicians of a generation. Now, a new Netflix documentary, The Only Girl in the Orchestra, tells the remarkable tale. You can watch the trailer here.  

Meanwhile, Maria, the new biopic of opera diva Maria Callas, opened last weekend to mixed reviews. Critics find Angelina Jolie’s performance spellbinding, while the movie itself is more problematic. The LA Times’ Amy Nicholson said, “Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note,” while Richard Brody in The New Yorker finds that, “Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance.”

To publicize the movie, Angelina Jolie attended the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Puccini’s Tosca with the New York Times. Jolie went backstage to meet the star soprano Lise Davidsen, and you can read how it went here. And you can see Davidsen sing Tosca, too, in this week’s encore screening in HD in cinemas around the country.

In a month marked by big elections, big news, big meals and big family gatherings, may I humbly suggest that small is beautiful? That certainly applies to classical music, where the intimacy and honesty of chamber music promises an antidote to loud voices and big egos. As the composer Paul Hindemith suggested:

Your task, it is, amidst confusion, rush and noise
To grasp the lasting, calm and meaningful
And finding it anew, to hold and treasure it. 

Here are some places to find the small beauty of chamber music this week:

• In Minneapolis, Accordo offers the rarely heard Gustav Mahler Quintet, plus Claude Debussy’s Cello Sonata, a candle flame of hope during World War I.

• The Winona Symphony and Minnesota Marine Art Museum present string quartets, including the Samuel Barber quartet containing the original version of his iconic Adagio for Strings.

• Artaria Quartet continues its season with Sound & Syntax, where Sergei Prokofiev meets the pop inspired music of Sri Lankan-born composer Dinuk Wijeratne.

• Leaving its home base in Mankato, the music ensemble ProMusica Minnesota, including several members of the Minnesota Orchestra, heads to the Chamber Music Society of St. Cloud to perform two of the greatest quintets ever written: Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet.

• The Music in the Park Series rounds out the weekend in St. Paul with W.A. Mozart and Johannes Brahms from a new, all-star group that lives up to its name: Espressivo!

If political news this week eclipsed the Grammy nominations, here’s a catch-up and a heads-up on where to hear two of them live this week.

• Violinist Leonidas Kavakos, nominated for best chamber music performance for his album Beethoven for Three with Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, plays two all-J.S. Bach solo concerts in St. Paul this week for the Schubert Club.

• Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, nominated for best classical instrumental solo for his Bach: Goldberg Variations album, played the Goldberg Variations in St. Paul for the Schubert Club in March and was kind enough to stop by YourClassical MPR to make a video of highlights.

• Pianist Michelle Cann, nominated for best classical solo vocal album for Songs of Florence Price, plays Price’s Piano Concerto and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue this weekend with the Lacrosse Symphony Orchestra.

As a Young Artist in Residence for APM’s Performance Today, cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing was only 16 when she performed for entranced school students. Two years later, the pandemic forced her 2021 concert for Duluth’s Matinee Musicale to be delivered virtually from her living room. Now, she will finally be live and in person, performing in Duluth this Sunday.

Meanwhile, some even younger musicians tour Minnesota this weekend, putting audiences in the holiday spirit: the Vienna Boys' Choir, with its angelic voices as young as 6. Look for them Friday in Grand Rapids at the Reif Center, Saturday in St. Cloud at the Paramount Center for the Arts, and Sunday in Minneapolis at Bethlehem Music Series.

“Anything you can sing… I can singer higher/louder/better!” That’s the premise of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s comic opera The Impresario, in which a long-suffering theater director tries to juggle divas dueling for the same role. It’s a one-act opera, so this weekend’s performance in Duluth by LOON (Lyric Opera of the North) adds another one-act to the program, the world premiere of Circe on Superior Peter Hilliard. You may recall Circe from The Odyssey, in which she turns men into animals. It’s a comedy, of course.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Opera revisits the classic tragedy Romeo and Juliet, Charles Gounod’s romantic opera of William Shakespeare’s classic. It will be presented in four performances opening Saturday, parting with such sweet sorrow by Nov. 10.

This weekend, the fall season looks back and ahead in time for two excellent Minnesotan choral groups.

VocalEssence opens its 56th season by returning to its 1996 U.S. premiere of Kristina Från Duvemåla, a musical composed by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of the Swedish pop group ABBA. It tells the story of a family of Swedes who found their way to Minnesota territory in the mid-18th century.

In Rochester, the Choral Arts Ensemble celebrates its 40th anniversary season with new artistic director Ryan Deignan and a fresh new program evoking life as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of a child.

This week, take a moment to allow some timeless beauty into your life. And there’s a lot of beauty to choose from as classical musicians start a new season filled with fresh inspiration:

• The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra started its season last week. This week its musicians continue their exploration of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s greatest work, his Haffner Symphony, alongside Mozart’s friend (Joseph Haydn) and Haydn’s student (Ludwig van Beethoven).

• The Minnesota Orchestra opens its season with a celebration of Italy. And you can find out why Yunchan Lim’s performance at the Van Cliburn Competition has been viewed more than 14 million times on YouTube when the 20-year-old phenom plays Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the orchestra. Catch our live broadcast Friday night on YourClassical MPR.

• While the Minnesota Orchestra explores Italy, the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra makes it an all-American opener on Saturday with Gershwin’s 100-year-old Rhapsody in Blue, as well as a new piece commissioned for the occasion called Rhapsody in Red, White & Blue, by Peter Boyer. Also on the program is Antonín Dvořák’s American Suite and a symphony by Samuel Barber.

• In the Twin Cities, you can enjoy a new season from a new professional orchestra just launched by the Classical Music Project. Hear Dvořák, Niccolò Paganini, Rachmaninoff and more from some of the best musicians in the Twin Cities.

• Some of the best musicians from Spain call themselves Spanish Brass, and they launch a new season of Concerts in the Galleries at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. It’s a jewel of a series that brings pianist Simone Dinnerstein and guitarist Jason Vieaux to the galleries later this year.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” Enjoy the fresh start — and the fresh sounds!

As the delights of summer recede in the rearview mirror, here’s a heads up for the excitement of fall and a new concert season with much to look forward to.

Friday the 13th is your lucky day at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The ensemble’s performance is headlined by concertmaster Steven Copes and artistic partner Tabea Zimmermann in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s profoundly gorgeous Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra.

Also this weekend, an old friend returns to Minnesota. Soprano Frederica von Stade first performed for the Schubert Club in St. Paul in 1979 and has been a regular visitor since then for various projects, including commissions from the Minnesota Orchestra. Now 79 years young, she’s still singing and teaching, and returns to the Twin Cities for a series of nine benefit concerts and master classes, including several public recitals.

And this is only the beginning of a great season. Join me on the radio this week at 8:45 a.m. for more of our fall season preview.

The great poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described the string quartet in the following way: “You hear four sensible persons conversing, you profit from their discourse and you get to know the characteristics of the instruments.”

In this election year, we need all the sensible conversation we can get. Fortunately, the next few weeks offer lots of string quartets — and other similarly sane and subtle chamber ensembles.

On Thursday, August 8, in Lanesboro, the annual Stringwood Chamber Music Festival wraps up with headliner Frank Almond. You may remember Almond as the violinist who was attacked with a taser in a parking lot after a concert, so thieves could abscond with his $5 million Stradivarius. That story had a happy ending, as told by the FBI Art Crime Team.

This Friday in Brainerd, the Lakes Area Music Festival presents a recital by Grammy-winning soprano Julia Bullock. In addition to appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, you might have spotted Julia on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, or on television performing in the Kennedy Center Honors’ tribute to Renee Fleming.

Last but hardly least, the Duluth Chamber Music Festival returns to the Twin Ports with a week of concerts spanning August 12 to 16. It’s the third year of the festival, which is a labor of love created by friends who love classical music and Duluth!

“Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” asserts Dr. Pangloss in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. You can hear how that turns out for his young charges when the Northern Lights Music Festival stages this delightful and wacky operetta in Aurora and Chisholm this weekend.

Minnesota is among the best of all possible worlds to be in for summer music festivals, with several other highlights this week.  On Thursday, the Minnesota Beethoven Festival continues with piano favorite Awadagin Pratt performing a little Ludwig van Beethoven and a lot of Franz Liszt — including the Hungarian composer’s massive Piano Sonata in B minor — alongside Russian romantics and American innovators such as Philip Glass and Fred Hersch.

And when it comes to American innovators, few are more inventive and engaging than the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, performing a beautiful and eclectic program Saturday at Madeline Island Chamber Music.

As Dr. Pangloss once said:

“Once one dismisses
The rest of all possible worlds
One finds that this is
The best of all possible worlds!”

In 1918, Giacomo Puccini introduced Il Trittico (The Triptych), a collection of three one-act operas including Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi.  This week in Minneapolis you can see two of the three, with innovative productions.

Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) is set in the cloisters of a 17th-century nunnery near Florence.  So why not perform it in a spectacular cathedral? That’s precisely the sort of challenge David Lefkowich loves. As the artistic director of Out of the Box Opera, Lefkowich is the person who has staged operas in the Mill City Ruins Courtyard, a boxing gym and a hotel lobby. But he’s never done anything like Suor Angelica at the Basilica of St. Mary. No one has, because the basilica has never allowed an opera on its site before! It promises to be an immersive experience. Singers and full orchestra perform in three different spaces in the basilica, and the audience moves with them through the performance, ending in the soaring nave.

The music is soaring too, as I learned in an intimate studio session with Lefkowich and soprano Alexandra Loutsian, who sings the title role. Listen to our session using the player above.

Gianni Schicchi is the essence of operatic romantic comedy, and a new adaptation called Johnny Skeeky gets a phonetic spelling, and a hilarious but “true to the source” adaptation at Theater Latte Da. It was adapted by two of the smartest people in the Twin Cities theater scene, Bradley Greenwald and Stephen Epp, with some of the best singers in town. Check out the preview video, too. It runs through July 7.

“O mio babbino caro”—“Oh, my dearest Daddy”— sings Lauretta to her father, Gianni Schicchi, in Giacomo Puccini’s opera of the same name. In that famous aria, she’s pleading for his approval to be with the one she loves. And if she doesn’t, she’s headstrong enough to threaten to jump off the Ponte Vecchio (the Old Bridge in Florence) into the Arno River!

It’s the essence of operatic rom-com, and a new adaptation called Johnny Skeeky gets a phonetic spelling and a hilarious but true-to-the-source adaptation at Theater Latte Da in Minneapolis. It was adapted by two of the smartest people in the Twin Cities theater scene, Bradley Greenwald and Stephen Epp, with some of the best singers in town. Check out the preview video, too. It runs through July 7.

If that comedy whets your appetite for Puccini’s more tragic side, have your heartstrings pulled by the Lyric Opera of the North in its first production of La Boheme, opening Friday in Duluth. There are two performances only, and one is already sold out, so run — don’t walk!

Time flies when you’re having fun, and it’s been a fun two decades for the Singers, wrapping a celebratory 20th-anniversary season this weekend with a special finale, including a world premiere and an alumni choir.

It’s a farewell finale for the Choral Arts Ensemble in Rochester, as founder Rick Kvam conducts his final concerts and passes the baton for the 40th season to new director Ryan Deignan, from the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

The La Crosse Symphony Orchestra celebrates its 125th anniversary on the Mississippi River with a world-premiere arrangement of Madrigal Divine, by Nathaniel Dett and Russian pianist Andrey Gugnin. 

Last year, pianist Kirill Gerstein celebrated the 150th anniversary of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s birth with a series of recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic. This weekend the party continues with the Minnesota Orchestra as Gerstein plays Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1.  Catch the live broadcasts on YourClassical MPR.

Time for another Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF). With hundreds of titles screening Thursday to April 25, you’ll want to plan ahead. Here are three highlights, with links to trailers and dates:

• Maestra (not Maestro): Classical music fans were captivated by Bradley Cooper’s biopic of maestro Leonard Bernstein. Now a new documentary called Maestra profiles five female conductors in France’s La Maestra conducting competition. Judges participating include Marin Alsop (a Bernstein protégé) and Deborah Borda, the recently announced Performance Today Classical Woman of the Year.

• Days of Happiness: A fictional drama about a conductor named Emma, a shining star in Quebec’s classical music scene. Her father is also her agent and controls her every move. Then Naëlle, a cellist and single mother, enters the picture and Emma sees a new world unfold.

• Mad About the Boy: The Noel Coward Story: Coward grew up in poverty to become a world-famous wit, playwright, composer, producer, actor and singer who gave the world Mad Dogs and Englishman and Blithe Spirit.

Remember to get popcorn, and see you at the MSPIFF!

When the chorus in Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem sings “How Lovely Are Thy Dwelling Places,” it lifts you up to a heavenly realm.  And three choral groups explore those heights in concerts this week.

• Cantus presents Mountain Nights, a program inspired by mountains as metaphor for inspiration, challenge and wonder. And if you can’t ascend this musical mountain in person, Cantus streams the concert, too.

• University of Minnesota choirs fill the Cathedral of St. Paul with their annual concert, Music for a Grand Space. Heavenly and free!

• The Singers perform My Soul’s Repose, taking heavenly music to new heights with the world premiere of “The Windowsill of Heaven,” by Remel Derrick, along with contemplative music for the Lenten season, including Herbert Howell’s tender Requiem.

• And that heavenly Brahms German Requiem lifts the South Dakota Symphony and Chorus with distinguished guest conductor John Nelson.

See you on the summit!

Everyone loves a good pair: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney, Barbie and Ken, and don’t forget Calvin and Hobbes! The power of two equals great classical concerts in Minnesota this weekend, with collaborations old and new.

The Twin Ports’ Duluth-Superior Symphony offers Brahms’ Double Concerto for violin and cello, featuring the return of Geneva Lewis and Gabriel Martins, a couple on stage and in real life. Some listeners might remember Geneva Lewis as our Young Artist in Residence for Performance Today (on the cusp of the pandemic, no less).

Another old favorite, Bach’s Double Concerto for two violins, is the grand finale of a marvelously eclectic program by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

The Fargo-Moorhead Symphony offers two double concertos for two violins! Music director Christopher Zimmerman brings his son, Kit Zimmerman, and Vietnamese musical friend, Chuong Vu, to perform Vietnam’s Four Seasons, by Dang Hong Anto, as well as Concertante for two violins by Jonathan Leshnoff. Both will be U.S. premieres.

“Double your pleasure,” as the song says, with these exciting upcoming performances!

The phrase “embarrassment of riches” comes to mind when you look at the wealth of orchestra concerts across Minnesota this weekend. But you can’t help feeling proud to live in a place with so much to offer.

• Old friends: Osmo Vanska returns to the Minnesota Orchestra, while Richard Egarr is back and baroque with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Additionally, the Rochester Symphony continues its season search for a new conductor and this weekend introduces Kelly Corcoran from the Nashville Symphony.

• Mozart matters: Mozart’s immortal Requiem anchors a concert of musical meditations by the St. Cloud Symphony inside St. John’s Abbey Church. The Duluth-Superior Symphony’s Reflections concert takes up Mozart’s sublime Solemn Vespers, while the joyful side of Mozart occupies the Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra.

• Piano classics: John Kimura Parker takes up Gershwin’s Concerto in F with the Austin Symphony and Joyce Yang embraces Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Sioux Falls.

• Red carpet: The Fargo-Moorhead Symphony is getting a jump on the Academy Awards with its annual musical celebration, A Night at the Oscars.

And with all of this going on, remember that Sunday’s concert by Cantus and Canadian Brass is also available for streaming until March 3.

cham·ber mu·sic
/ˈCHāmbər ˌmyo͞ozik/
Noun: Instrumental music played by a small ensemble, with one player to a part.

Or perhaps the poet Goethe put it more poetically when he said, “It is a musical conversation played by several musicians. One hears rational persons conversing together … gains something from their discourse and becomes acquainted with the peculiarities of their different instruments.” In other words, the perfect civilized antidote to a stupid, narcissistic world.

So where does one find this magic elixir? This week, you’ll discover it in chambers both familiar and new.

Start at the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul, elegant home the Schubert Club’s free Thursday lunchtime concerts. This week it’s the Isles Ensemble, a group that makes its musical home base at Lake of the Isles Lutheran in Minneapolis. Saturday afternoon they launch a new venture in a venue not usually known for classical music: Crooner’s Supper Club. It’s the start of a new series presented by the Schubert Club and hosted by soprano Maria Jette.

Then on Sunday afternoon in New Ulm, ProMusica Minnesota turns the chapel at Martin Luther College into a time machine with 1930s Russia and America, an afternoon of Copland, Prokofiev and Gershwin. That’s what I’d call a Super Sunday!

Looking out at late January fog as I write this, February promises to be similarly atmospheric for music lovers around Minnesota and environs.

The Italian Saxophone Quartet warms up the Red River Valley as it returns to the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks on Sunday afternoon. Last time it played the Sunday Concerts in the Gallery, the audience got into the act with a movie music track from its album The Italian Way. Fellini never had it so good!

Movie lovers will find plenty of atmosphere in the monthlong Film Noir Festival, which kicks off this week at the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights and the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis. Run, don’t walk, as Chinatown is already sold out and the rest of the series looks terrific, too.

An atmosphere of hope and healing permeates programs by the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra this week. The SPCO looks to the poet Rumi for inspiration, with music from medieval to modern. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Orchestra teams up with the Sphinx Virtuosi for a concert that includes Michael Abels’ Global Warning, composed originally to respond to the end of the Cold War. Now it has new meaning in relation to climate change. You can hear the Friday night concert broadcast live on YourClassical MPR.

And by “science” I don’t mean Thomas Dolby’s blinding 1980s essay. This time, it’s the intersection of music and science at Carleton College.

This week, its music department welcomes pianist, composer and cognitive scientist Vijay Iyer. He’s a MacArthur “genius grant” winner who fully inhabits the appellation: bachelor’s degrees in math and physics from Yale? Check! Master’s degree in physics from UC Berkeley? Check! Doctorate in technology and the arts? Check! Faculty at Harvard? Check! Award-winning jazz pianist? Check! Classical composer for Brooklyn Rider, Imani Winds, American Composers Orchestra, the Metropolitan Museum and Wigmore Hall? Keep checking.

At Carleton College on Wednesday and Thursday, Iyer will be interviewed about cognitive science, give a master class to jazz students and perform with his trio.

And if you’re looking to be further “blinded by science,” here’s a recent enlightening session from Yo-Yo Ma at CERN: Music and Physics: A Spacetime Voyage Back to Our Origins. 

It’s poetry in motion …   

The Dublin premiere of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah in 1742 was a humanitarian charity concert to benefit hospitals and prisons. To accommodate a larger audience, ladies were asked to wear skirts without hoops, and gentleman were asked to leave their swords at home. More than 700 people crammed into a hall designed to seat 600, while many others were turned away.  

Since then, Handel’s Messiah “has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan […] more than any single musical production in this or any other country,” as the historian Charles Burney observed.

There’s still time to catch the glory of a live orchestra and chorus performance of Messiah. The Mankato Symphony performs it Saturday and Sunday in St. Peter and Fairmount, respectively. Meanwhile, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Singers collaborate to end their holiday season with a traditional Messiah on Thursday and Friday at the gorgeous cathedral environs of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis and at home Saturday and Sunday at Ordway Concert Hall in St. Paul.

Let the Messiahthon begin. Rejoice greatly!

“He who sings scares away his woes.” ― Miguel de Cervantes

Cervantes wasn’t being Quixotic when he said that. You can scare away woe, and welcome the season, by singing along this weekend with the Duluth Superior Symphony’s Holiday Spectacular in Duluth or the Heartland Symphony’s Winter Concert Shall We Sing? in Cross Lake, Little Falls and Brainerd.

And if you prefer to leave the vocalizing to the professionals, take in Handel’s Messiah with the South Dakota Symphony and Chorus in Sioux Falls or What Sweeter Music: Christmas with the Singers in the Twin Cities.

“Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.” ― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

It’s a week of superb soloists with area orchestras. If you haven’t heard of these three yet, hear them now and you’ll appreciate discovering wonderful young talent.

Pianist Avery Gagliano will feature as a soloist with the Rochester Symphony. She’s still in school (at the famous Curtis Institute in Philadelphia) but already a veteran of Carnegie Hall and the 2021 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Fresh from last month’s Paderewski Festival in Poland, she will play Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto Saturday night, with the orchestra’s latest conductor candidate, Rober Kahn.

Alexi Kenney brings his violin to the La Crosse Symphony for Mozart and Stravinsky. (By the way, he loves Clara Schumann, too.) This Avery Fischer Grant recipient is hot off the heels of a concert with the Rochester (New York) Philharmonic and former St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conductor Hugh Wolff.

Eric Haugen roams the world with his cello but returns to his Bemidji hometown roots with the Bemidji Symphony this weekend for the world premiere of Leviathans, composed by fellow Bemidji Symphony alumni Max Wolpert.

And if you want to counterbalance all this fresh, young talent with a couple of living legends, remember Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks are in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday. Has it really been 50 years since Piano Man? A good run for a kid whose dad was a classical pianist, inspiring Joel to write a classical album of his own.

On Thursday, the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights screens a delightful vintage classical music movie that’s been unavailable in cinemas for decades — until now: 100 Men and a Girl. Deanna Durbin plays Patsy, the daughter of a down-and-out trombone player, John Cardwell (Adolphe Menjou). John lies to Patsy that he's got a job with top conductor Leopold Stokowski (who plays himself). When Patsy finds out the truth, she's far from disappointed — instead, she cooks up a plan to land work for the 100 musicians and is determined to convince Stokowski to take them on.  

It’s amazing that Durbin was only 16 when she made the film. By the time she was 25, she was the second highest-paid woman in America, just behind Bette Davis. Durbin was making the equivalent of $4.5 million in today’s dollars, a box office draw that saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy. And yet, within two years she retired, moved to France and disappeared from public view. It was quite a vanishing act for a woman who was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. She was such a gifted singer that the Metropolitan Opera was following her career. The Met would never have allowed a soprano to sing Puccini's famous tenor aria "Nessun Dorma," but Hollywood did!

Also opening Thursday, the movie of the Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. It’s the World War II story of Marie-Laure Leblanc, a blind French girl taking refuge with her uncle, and Werner Pfennig, a brilliant German teenager with an expertise in radio repair. Through a shared secret connection, they find faith in humanity and the possibility of hope. Music plays a role, too, and if the trailer is any indication, we’ll see an uptick in sales of Debussy’s Claire de Lune!