CLASSICAL MUSIC

‘Bernstein: The Best

of All Possible Worlds’

This two-month festival in New York, jointly sponsored by Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic, will open with an all-Bernstein program in Carnegie by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and featuring Dawn Upshaw and Yo-Yo Ma. The West Coast will get a preview when the San Franciscans perform the program a week earlier as part of their hometown concert series. But from then on, New Yorkers are the lucky ones, with concerts, films and educational events at Carnegie and Lincoln Center focusing on the many facets of America’s greatest musician. Included will be a performance of Bernstein’s once-controversial, hippie-ish, antiwar, presciently postmodern, angst-ridden, orgiastic, multi-stylistic “Mass,” involving middle and high school students, the Baltimore Symphony and conductor Marin Alsop.

Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, Sept. 17-19, www.sfsymphony.org, and various New York venues, Sept. 24-Dec. 13, www.carnegiehall.org

Segerstrom Concert Hall’s new Fisk organ

The organ is often hailed as the king of instruments. Kings must have coronations, and coronations must be big deals. So here’s the big deal in Orange County: When the most recent addition to the Orange County Performing Arts Center opened in 2006, one of its visual highlights was the series of towering tin and aluminum leaf organ pipes. But they were just for looks. It has taken two years to install and tune the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall’s new Fisk organ, and now it’s ready. The coronation will take the form of the Pacific Symphony’s opening program of the new season, led by music director Carl St.Clair with New York organist Paul Jacobs as soloist. The program will be all mighty, all organ, all the time, with solo works by Marcel Dupre and Bach, the premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” for organ, brass and percussion, and Saint-Saens’ regal “Organ” Symphony.

Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, Sept. 18, www.ocpac.org

Steven Stucky

On Sept. 18, Stucky -- a fond figure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he has been a composer in residence in one way or another for 20 years -- will need to be in two places at the same time. The Dallas Symphony will be premiering his “August 4, 1964,” while the New York Philharmonic offers the first U.S. performance of his “Rhapsodies.” The first score is an evening-length civil rights drama for singers and orchestra with a libretto by Gene Scheer, commissioned by the Texas orchestra as part of the opening festivities for its new music director, Jaap van Zweden, and in commemoration of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 100th birthday. Four soloists in the oratorio represent the mothers of slain civil rights workers, LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “Rhapsodies” is a co-commission by the New York Philharmonic and the Proms in London, where it had its world premiere last month.

Meyer Symphony Center, Dallas, Sept. 18, www.dallassymphony.com, and Avery Fisher Hall, New York, Sept. 18, www.nyphil.org

The Los Angeles

Chamber Orchestra

Forty is the new who-knows-what age -- no longer young, but these days no longer old either. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at 40 is in fine fettle, and it will begin its round-number season with a birthday present to itself. Forty players will gather at their old stamping ground, the Ambassador Auditorium, with their founding conductor, British maestro Neville Marriner, who is 84 and apparently going strong. Certainly he has chosen an exuberant program, which includes Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with a special soloist -- Jeffrey Kahane, the ensemble’s music director, who has done much to keep it sounding fresh. Local composer Paul Chihara has arranged some Schumann for the occasion. Stravinsky and Kodaly at their most lively complete the bill.

Ambassador Auditorium, Pasadena, Sept. 27, www.laco.org

‘Doctor Atomic’

John Adams’ opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb in New Mexico during World War II is coming to the Metropolitan Opera, and look out. It will receive a new production by Penny Woolcock, a British filmmaker fascinated by urban rough edges. Her cinematic version of Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” certainly pulled no punches. The “Doctor Atomic” production, which will reach movie theaters Nov. 8 as part of the Met’s HD broadcasts, is something of a slap in the face of the brilliant original by Peter Sellars, who also compiled the libretto from historical sources. Still, Sellars will have his say as well: A DVD of his production will be released on Opus Arte this month. And you can read all about the making of the opera in Adams’ memoirs, “Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life,” to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month.

Metropolitan Opera House, New York, Oct. 13, www.metopera.org

Gustavo Dudamel

The Dude will be in town again. The Venezuelan wonder-conductor and music director-designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic will return to the Southland first with a touring Israel Philharmonic in different back-to-back programs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and Walt Disney Concert Hall. Then he’ll stick around to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two weeks of concerts. With the Israelis, Dudamel is stuck, for some reason, on fourth symphonies -- Brahms and Mendelssohn at the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Tchaikovsky at Disney. Bernstein, however, wrote only three symphonies, so Dudamel will also conduct Bernstein’s symphonic “Jubilee Games” at Disney. The two L.A. Philharmonic programs will offer much Richard Strauss (the “Four Last Songs” with soprano Christine Brewer and the “Alpine Symphony”) along with Mozart, Beethoven and a pair of short works by the two greatest post-Bartok Hungarian composers named Gyorgy (Ligeti and Kurtag).

Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, Nov. 23, www.ocpac.org, and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Nov. 24, Nov. 28-30 and Dec. 4-7, www.laphil.org

The Thomashefskys

A legend in his time, Boris, according to his grandson, was a great singer, a great producer, a great lover and self-destructive. A legend in her time, Bessie spawned the likes of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand. That’s Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, stars of the New York Yiddish stage in the early 20th century. The grandson is Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony. MTT has put together a full, funny, touching, illuminating evening of reminiscences and music from his grandparents’ almost forgotten world, “The Thomashefskys.” The show was a hit in San Francisco and at Carnegie Hall in New York. Now MTT is finally bringing it to Disney Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s holiday offerings. With the promise of numbers from “Der Yiddisher Yankee Doodle” and re-creations of Boris as the “Hasidic” Hamlet, what more do you need to know?

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dec. 18-20, www.laphil.org