Music

Can we ever get enough of Mahler’s massive symphonies, those musical equivalents of, say, a Dostoevsky epic novel? Not likely, and there are three major Mahler performances coming up to prove it. First is Simon Rattle on tour with his Birmingham Symphony for the weird, night music-haunted Seventh at the Music Center (today); next the more popular Fifth with Carl St.Clair conducting the Pacific Symphony at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (June 3-4); and finally Roger Norrington, a specialist in period practice performances, giving us a historical version of the really popular Second (“Resurrection”) to open the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl season (July 7.)

Opera at the Ford Theater is an idea whose time is right. The one-time site of pilgrimage plays is intimate and outdoors, and Angelenos are opera-starved in the summer. A fully staged “Aida” (June 28) will be the ambitious undertaking of the feisty small Bel Canto Opera Co.; a concert version of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” by Lucinda Carver’s class-act Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra will follow (July 10).

New music, given the Hollywood Bowl’s concentration on the classical Top 10, is another usual victim of the Southland summer. Not so this year, though, with two major new music groups from Europe in residence. Klangform Wien will offer works by the further-out young Europeans little known here the first week in June as part of the Resistance/Fluctuations festival at LACE and LACMA. Nieuw Ensemble, a noted Dutch group, will be on hand the first two weeks of July at the Cal State Long Beach Summer Arts festival.