Marvelous Mendo music: The 40th annual Mendocino Music Festival is officially underway. Running through July 25 in several spots and famously covering myriad genres — jazz, big band, folk, bluegrass, pop, piano, chamber music, opera and symphonic — this year’s programming focuses on Beethoven.
Classical fans who missed festival co-artistic director Susan Waterfall’s opening program, a lecture and documentary on the master, can stream the film for free (though donations are encouraged). The 2:30 p.m. July 21 chamber program in Preston Hall features Waterfall and Julian Pollack performing the Sonata for Piano 4 Hands in D Major, Op. 6; Sam Weiser, accompanied by keyboardist Carolyn Steinbuck, playing the Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Major, “Spring”; and violinist Terrie Baune, cellist Stephen Harrison and pianist Elizabeth Dorman playing 1811’s “Archduke Trio.”
The festival closes at 7:30 p.m. July 25 with a Festival Orchestra program featuring the iconic Ninth Symphony conducted by Allan Pollack in the Festival Tent. These concerts represent the tip of the iceberg; other upcoming shows include folk rock band Steel Wheels on Thursday; Cajun band BeauSoleil with Michael Doucet on Monday; singer-songwriter-pianist-radio host Laila Biali playing Joni Mitchell and the Canadian songbook on Tuesday; and boogie and bluesman Tom Rush on July 23.
Tickets are $15-75 at mendocinomusic.org.
Triumph of the vines: San Francisco composer Jake Heggie and his frequent partner librettist Gene Scheer have collaborated on a new opera that commemorates the victory of the New World at a 1976 legendary blind tasting of Napa Valley wines versus the best from French vintners.
The world premiere of “The Judgment of Paris,” commissioned for the 20th anniversary season of Festival Napa Valley, is at 6:30 p.m. Saturday on the festival stage at Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena, with none other than Kent Nagano, for 31 years beloved music director of the Berkeley Symphony, conducting. The one-act opera summons the mythical Venus and Bacchus from Olympian heights to observe what these mortals were up to.
Soprano Danielle De Niese plays the goddess of love, and baritone Quinn Kelsey sings as the god of wine; tenor Nicholas Phan is Steven Spurrier, the English wine merchant and educator who organized the blind tasting, along with his colleague Patricia Gallagher, being sung by mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh.
Tickets are $35 for general admission, with an $85 option to add on a pre-show glass of champagne and a charcuterie box followed by a post-performance tasting of wines from Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, top prize winners at the original Judgment of Paris. Find tickets and more information about this event and many other festival performances at festivalnapavalley.org.
Love and its entanglements: San Francisco’s energetic little company Pocket Opera has a Giacomo Puccini classic on tap for its next presentation. Bowing first at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m. Friday is the beloved Italian composer’s “La Rondine,” or “The Swallow,” so titled because its lead character, a bored courtesan named Magda, flies away from her comfortable life in Paris to chase after love in the south of France.
Soprano Michelle Allie Drever sings the title role, while tenor Maxwell Ary is Ruggero, the object of her conflicted affections. Meanwhile, Melissa Sondhi as her maid Lisette and Alex Taite as the poet Prunier have a little romantic escapade of their own going on. Mary Chun conducts the production directed by Elly Lichenstein.
The performance repeats at 1:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley and at 1:30 p.m. July 26 at the Legion of Honor’s Gunn Theater in San Francisco. Tickets are $26-$99.50, available through pocketopera.org.
Broadcast bash: Once upon a time, radios were among the most important and relied-upon sources of news, information and entertainment, creating a powerful, magical world in which images were formulated by listeners’ brains: Consider that Orson Welles once convinced millions of Americans that Earth was under attack by angry Martians in a 1938 broadcast.
Unlike the internet, which offers content as expressly individualistic as people demand, radio serves up broadly shaped broadcasts created for a mass audience or a specialized group of very loyal listeners. In Alameda, there is a museum devoted to the history of Bay Area radio hosting its annual festival on Saturday. Radio Day by the Bay features live music from Don Neely’s Rhythm Aces playing classics from the ‘20s (as in the 1920s), a live radio play re-creating the famed “Thin Man” radio mystery program, the Top Shelf Classics band, Bay Area radio DJs and all manner of radios and radio equipment on display and in some cases, for sale.
If you’re a radio buff or just interested in celebrating a medium that was once foundational to the American experience, head to the Bay Area Radio Museum and Hall of Fame, 2152 Central Ave., Alameda, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. More information is at californiahistoricalradio.com.
Freebie of the week: Why, yes, of course the San Francisco Mime Troupe addresses artificial intelligence in its new free production, “Wreckage,” being performed at parks and other locations around the Bay Area this summer through Sept. 7. The rabble-rousing theater/comedy troupe has for decades been performing its politically charged musicals around the Bay Area in its annual tour, which this year runs through Labor Day weekend.
But just because the troupe, which formed in 1959, has its roots in Bay Area left-leaning political tradition and bases its performance style on classic commedia dell’arte doesn’t mean its shows are glued to its flower-power, tie-dyed past. For one thing, the company creates a new show each year — often written by Michael Gene Sullivan — and makes every attempt to rip its storyline off the day’s headlines while remaining true to its mission of delivering broad and very silly belly laughs.
Consider the Mime Troupe’s own description of the show: “Mari, a flower seller barely managing to hold on in an increasingly unaffordable city, must defend her street corner from invading evangelical Felicity, who is herself torn between joyfully anticipating the Rapture and the discrepancies she’s found in her church’s accounting. Meanwhile Bobbie, a successful software developer who realizes his new AI agent is far from intelligent, is caught between telling his bosses at Anthropomorphic the dangerous truth, or delivering a dud that will — despite endangering the world — boost the stock.”
This weekend, the troupe brings “Wreckage” to Berkeley’s Live Oak Park for performances at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free, but donations are welcome. There is live musical accompaniment and a short concert before the show starts. For more information, go to www.sfmt.org.
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