The major musical event of the winter/spring season, by my lights, is the San Francisco Symphony's transcontinental American Mavericks Festival, which begins at home on March 8, stops in Ann Arbor and Chicago, and ends at Carnegie Hall on March 30. In addition to four richly stocked MTT/SFS programs — who could say no to an evening of Ruggles's Sun-Treader, Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, and Henry Brant's metamorphic orchestration of the Concord Sonata? — Carnegie has assembled a neat array of auxiliary events, including a So Percussion Cage tribute, an Alarm Will Sound show, a night with the indie bands WHY? and Danielson, a program of William Basinski and Tristan Perich, a JACK Quartet adventure (the great Ruth Crawford Seeger quartet!), and a recital by Lisa Moore. I covered the original Mavericks festival for the New York Times.... When the Berlin Philharmonic comes to Carnegie later this month, Deutsches Haus at NYU will mount an exhibition of David Friedemann's portraits of Philharmoniker musicians from the nineteen-twenties, with a chamber performance appended.... Seated Ovation smartly critiques Carnegie's 2012-13 season announcement — which, Beethoven excess aside, does have a strong lineup of premieres, not to mention a Joyce DiDonato recital entitled "Drama Queens".... Great Performers 2012-13 will bring, among other things, Paul Lewis playing the Schubert B-flat-major Sonata, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Wozzeck, Herreweghe conducting the "Christmas" Oratorio, a Timothy Andres recital, and the New York premiere of John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary.... Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain is played by Sound Icon in Boston this Friday.... Beginning on Friday, the Dessoff Choirs mount a festival around Bach's Mass in B Minor, with various contemporary works in the mix, including Ingram Marshall's September Canons and Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs. Dessoff director Chris Shepard blogs about the festival here.... The second edition of the Ecstatic Music Festival opens on Saturday, with works by Jherek Bischoff and company.... The fine young Icelandic cellist Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir gives a free recital tonight at New York's Scandinavia house, celebrating her new recording of the Britten cello suites, on Centaur.
