The cultural-event marathon is one of the most absorbing pleasures in the world of the arts, a chance for fans of a genre or a specific body of work to immerse themselves and give themselves wholly over to the featured creations.

Pianists have milestones such as the complete Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach or all 32 of the Beethoven sonatas, for instance, and cellists also have those two composers to thank for the equivalent in their field of a Fellini retrospective or a showing of all the paintings Van Gogh did at Arles.

Robert deMaine, who has been principal cellist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra since 2002, is playing all eight of the works Beethoven composed for cello and piano in two nights of recitals Thursday and Saturday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Boca Raton. That includes five sonatas and three sets of variations on tunes by Handel and Mozart.

Although he's played the complete Beethoven cello works before, he said he was hesitant to do so the first time he tried.

"The very first time I embarked on it, I didn't really think I would be into it. I feel like it's a little bit too much for the audience, to give them too much of one thing," deMaine said last week from his Michigan home. But he’s found it was well worth the effort. "People will do the six Bach suites, which I'm actually doing this year, precisely because of how rewarding my experience doing all the Beethoven works was."

DeMaine, who will be joined by pianist Heather Coltman, chairwoman of the school of music at Florida Atlantic University, will open Thursday night with a set of variations on Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, Papageno's aria from Act II of Mozart's The Magic Flute, then continue with Sonatas No. 1 (in F, Op. 5, No. 1), 4 (in C, Op. 102, No. 1) and 3 (in A, Op. 69.)

Saturday night, he plays two variation sets: one on See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes, from Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabeus, and the other on Bei Männern, welche Liebe Fühlen, the Pamina-Papageno duet from Act I of The Magic Flute. He'll also play the Sonata No. 2 (in G minor, Op. 5, No. 2), and close with the Sonata No. 5 (in D, Op. 102, No. 2).

The Third Sonata, written in 1807, is perhaps the best-known of these works, and "is probably one of the happiest pieces he ever wrote," deMaine said. That it came during a prolonged custody battle the composer was waging for his nephew Karl makes its amiable disposition even more remarkable, he said.

It bears noting that Beethoven is something of a pioneer of the cello sonata. Except for three viola da gamba sonatas by Bach, there is almost no precedent for Beethoven's decision to write cello sonatas, and indeed, two of the variation sets and first two sonatas date from 1796, early in the composer's career. "Beethoven was the first composer of his stature to write specific solo pieces for cello," deMaine said.

"I love playing those pieces. We're so lucky to have these sonatas ... for piano and cello, because that's how he specifically titled them. Because the piano is an equal partner, it's not just a piano accompaniment," he said.

"In the first two sonatas, it's quite the opposite. The piano is definitely the predominant instrument, and the cello is really kind of a basso continuo with the occasional melody thrown in," deMaine said. "So you get two sonatas from his early period, one supreme sonata from his middle period, and then these two very beautiful, rather cryptic works from his late period. So it's kind of a microcosm of his life.

“The three variations sets are less well-known, but they are important pieces nevertheless, deMaine said.

"I look at those as his sandboxes. He was getting ready. Just like in his string trios that he wrote early on: those were his dress rehearsals for his string quartets," he said. "They're very thickly fleshed out among the three instruments and you can glimpse the greatness that's to come.

"And with the variations, it's twofold: It's an experiment, to see what the possibilities are between cello and piano, and also [they are] a great exercise in homage," deMaine said. "To write a set of variations on See,the Conqu'ring Hero Comes is a great, special tribute to pay to George Frideric Handel, an incredible homage ... He's testing the water at this point. And yet these pieces are masterpieces."

DeMaine, 39, who was born in Oklahoma City to a musical family, studied at Yale, the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School, where as a teen in the pre-college program he worked with Leonard Rose, one of the finest of all American cellists and pedagogues. He has won numerous awards and competitions throughout his career, and in addition to his work at the Detroit Symphony he is highly regarded as a recitalist and chamber musician. He lives outside Detroit with his wife, Betsy, a horn player, and their children Paul, 4, and Annie, 2.

DeMaine also is a composer with many works for cello to his credit, including a set of a dozen Etudes-Caprices published as his Op. 31. During an October 2005 recital at the Unitarian Fellowship, deMaine played three of these pieces, including No. 12, a bravura set of variations on The Star-Spangled Banner. He is quick to discount his own compositions as anything other than work done for fun on the side, but he said it does give him more insight into what Beethoven and other canonical composers have accomplished.

“It's given me such an appreciation for those great masters, and it's an incredibly humbling experience to try to organize a phrase and get it down on paper," he said. "At the same time, they're the best composition teachers one can have."

Today's technologies have enabled classical music to have perhaps the broadest reach it's ever had, and the accompanying entrepreneurial approach some classical musicians have taken leaves deMaine somewhat uneasy.

"Sometimes I feel like my head is still buried in the sand. I'm really old-fashioned, a bit of a holdout. People playing in nightclubs: I've done my share of that, too, playing in black-box theaters where people have drinks at the table; it's more or less like a cabaret act," he said.
"To me, I'm conflicted. Part of it to me just reeks of desperation. We're trying so hard to reel in more clientele," deMaine said. "People are always saying, well, classical music is dying. And you do see a lot of gray hair or no hair in the audience, but hasn't it always kind of been that way?"

Newcomers to the Beethoven sonatas and variations should keep in mind that the instruments for which they were written were not quite the powerhouse instruments they are today. Even so, there's always a challenge of balancing the piano's much bigger apparatus with that of the cello.

"The piano that we use today is going to win," deMaine said. "No matter how souped-up or pimped out the cello might be for volume, the piano is always going to be the victor in that arrangement. So there's always a tightrope walk of balancing the two instruments."

Yet audiences should be able to appreciate Beethoven's skill at managing the two instruments, he said, especially in the first two sonatas.

"When the cello is the main event, the texture lightens up all of a sudden and the cello comes through like a beam of sunshine. The expertise that he has in lightening up the texture ... is something that so easily can be taken for granted because it's so skillful."

After the recitals, deMaine will put in two days of master classes in Miami Beach with students of the New World Symphony before going back home. Preparing for the concerts has had him thinking in recent days about a trip he took this summer to Vienna, the Austrian city that for much of the 18th and 19th centuries was the musical capital of the world.

While there, deMaine visited the Central Cemetery, where the graves of Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms sit close to one another.

“I was moved to tears," he said. "It makes this performance, for me, that much more meaningful.”

Robert deMaine and Heather Coltman will perform at 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Boca Raton. Pre-concert lectures begin at 7:15 p.m. before each recital. Tickets are $75 apiece, and $40 apiece for church members. For more information, call 482-2001 or visit www.uufbr.org/

Location, location, location. It's the well-known rule of real estate, but it also applies to musical institutions of higher learning.

Witness the case of the Henry Mancini Institute. Founded by composer/conductor Jack Elliot in 1997 to honor its namesake Grammy-and-Oscar-winning composer (who died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer at age 70), the institute provided fully funded scholarships to more than 800 young musicians, plus hands-on educational programs to more than 30,000 students in Southern California schools, over the course of 10 years.

Yet the summer institute, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, ceased operations Dec. 31, 2006, citing the all-too-familiar bleak outlook for arts funding.

That bleak outlook continues, but so does the Henry Mancini Institute, now that it’s moved to South Florida.

The University of Miami has become the institute’s new home, and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra has already started fall semester performances through UM's Frost School of Music. The school is building toward its goal of 65 HMI Fellowships by 2012, and already is more than halfway there.

But was all of this because Miami's economic climate is decidedly better than that of L.A.? No. The factor that overruled economics was indeed location, location, location -- specifically the location of Shelly Berg, who succeeded the retiring Bill Hipp as dean of the Frost School of Music in 2007.

"I would say that it was a good foot in the door," says Berg, who'd become familiar with the HMI while he was a professor and chair of jazz studies from 1991-2007 at another fine musical institution -- the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.

"I have a close relationship with the Mancini family. We've vacationed together, and I've performed and recorded with [jazz vocalist and daughter] Monica Mancini. So that relationship was a foundation. But I would also say that the family believed in what the University of Miami's Frost School of Music already stood for, and also how I wanted to leverage that into a Mancini Institute presence. They believed in the vision that I had, and they're excited to see that vision come to pass here."

Ginny Mancini, Henry Mancini's widow and a former vocalist with Mel Tormé's "Mel-Tones," agrees.

“There was a huge outcry from the arts community after the Mancini Institute's demise," she says. "The alumni, faculty, and patrons of the organization were all searching for answers as to how it could be saved. But I was inspired by the passion of Shelly Berg, and gave him my blessing to restart it in Miami."

The Frost School of Music at UM certainly wasn't the only suitor.

"The Manhattan School of Music, University of Utah, and the University of Southern California all wanted it," Mrs. Mancini says. "But I trusted that Shelly would carry on with a reflection of who Henry was -- the man, the musician, the writer, the teacher. Music without walls, categories and preconceptions is what the Henry Mancini Institute is all about. And I know that it's in good hands with Shelly."

Berg's hands-on approach includes switching the HMI from a summer institute at UCLA to a full part of the curriculum at the Frost School of Music.

"As the dean, I felt that the school should be doing what the Mancini Institute was doing as a summer institute in L.A.," he says. "I thought it should be embedded in what the school does year-round. One of the reasons I became dean here was that, whether or not we got the Mancini Institute, I intended to implement what it stood for."

"The people who ran the institute saw that musicians were being trained in conservatories for a very narrow slice of the music world," Berg continues. "And they felt that it was important to take some of the best people from conservatories and give them an experience where they worked with film composers, and world and jazz musicians, and looked at things like improvisation and entrepreneurship.

“They allowed people who were in the very best conservatories to take eight weeks in the summer and get this kind of perspective on music. But they were also essentially having to create a university from scratch every summer, which is a tremendously expensive undertaking. We already had that university in place."

The Frost School of Music also now houses the HMI library, which features hundreds of orchestral pieces by Mancini and other composers.

"It's fantastic," Berg says. "There are not only all those pieces of orchestral music, but also a commensurate number of archival recordings of performances that the institute did in L.A., with some of the greatest musicians in the world. So for research, study and performances, it's a treasure trove."

Berg is a renowned pianist, composer, arranger and author as well as an educator. His self-titled jazz trio features Monica Mancini's husband, drummer and producer Gregg Field. But if you think that the HMI relocated to Miami solely because of the Mancini family's friendship with Berg, then you haven't looked at the accomplishments he had leading up to that decision.

The 54-year-old Berg was born in Cleveland, coincidentally the hometown of Henry Mancini (who grew up in Pennsylvania), although the two never met. Berg's father, trumpeter Jay Berg, inspired his son early enough so that, at age 6, he was accepted into the gifted program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. After the family had relocated to Houston, the young Berg turned down a job with Woody Herman's Thundering Herd orchestra to continue his musical education.

His own career as an educator started when the University of Houston offered him a teaching fellowship. Berg also recorded with country star Mickey Gilley while in Texas, and his resume as a composer and arranger now includes work with artists as diverse as Kurt Elling, Bonnie Raitt, Elliott Smith, and KISS. He's contributed to films (Men of Honor), television series (Dennis Miller Live), and has several ADDY awards for his commercial jingles.

Berg was also president of the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) from 1996-1998, and has authored several acclaimed educational books. As a pianist, he really didn't focus on jazz until 1988, when he made the finals of the Great American Jazz Piano Competition. But he's played and recorded with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Buddy DeFranco, Tierney Sutton, Patti Austin, Bill Watrous, Ray Brown, John Clayton, Ed Thigpen, and Peter Erskine. The Shelly Berg Trio (with Field on drums and Chuck Berghofer on bass) will release its latest CD, Follow the Sun (Concord), in 2010.

If there was a blueprint for Berg's multi-faceted career, it may have been created by Dr. Billy Taylor. The 88-year-old pianist likewise played with musical icons before becoming a prolific educator, and the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

"Billy is a dear friend, and someone that I've admired for decades," Berg says. "With all of his history, he's amazing. He just booked my trio for a show at the Kennedy Center in March."

Founded in 1926, the Frost School of Music also has a storied history among America's top schools for musical education. Its reputation for preparing students for all aspects of the music industry was an attraction to Berg.

"I've had a long-held belief that most schools should be doing things differently," he says. "Most have performance at the top of the pyramid, and largely separate from the rest of the school. So the scholarships and resources are placed there, and the rest of the programs help to finance that. I feel the different areas should be more integrated, and we were already a school that was broad in its scope.

”We were the first school in the country to have music business as a degree, and the first to have music recording and engineering as a degree. We've always had one of the top jazz programs, as well as a strong classical performance program."

"But the pools of opportunity for musicians are shrinking, and are being replaced by puddles of opportunity," Berg continues. "At the Frost School, we train musicians more broadly in technology, styles of music and entrepreneurship to allow them to find their niche. So we were a school that had all the pieces in place for the Mancini Institute."

"Shelly told me that he was essentially going to do at the Frost School of Music what the Henry Mancini Institute did at UCLA," Mrs. Mancini says. "Only now there's an additional degree component to it, which makes it even more valuable. So I felt giving him my blessing was entirely appropriate."

Berg, and the Henry Mancini Institute, may prove to be the additional pieces needed to push one of the leading music schools in the country into elite status. Signs are pointing toward such an ascension.

"There does seem to be a buzz about the school lately," Berg says. "My plan is to stay here at least 10 years, and my goal is simple -- to make sure that it won't take too many of those years before people think Eastman, Juilliard and Frost, and that they also think that we're the most exciting of those options."

Bill Meredith is a freelance writer based in South Florida who has written extensively on jazz and pop music, including for Jazziz and Jazz Times.

You can't get a majority of people to like Schoenberg, it seems, even 100 years later, but that should not obscure the main impression left Saturday night by the Lynn Philharmonia -- that this is an orchestra that keeps going from strength to strength.

The Lynn orchestra, like all such student groups, has a continually changing roster, but the ensemble's quality has grown steadily in recent years, and with the first concerts of the current season it has taken things another step higher. The Philharmonia opened its season with the Five Pieces for Orchestra, a major work of early atonality by Schoenberg, and closed with a powerful, persuasive reading of the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony.

Neither of these two works is easy in any respect, nor was the third selection, Mozart's Prague Symphony (No. 38 in D, K. 504). And while the performances lacked some of the lived-in polish that comes with prolonged exposure and practice, more important were the things you didn't hear: No major missed entrances, no obvious disagreements about tempi, and most importantly, no section that was noticeably weaker than another.

Conductor Albert-George Schram told the audience at the Roberts Theatre to concentrate on the sound pictures Schoenberg had painted as they are, rather than how they relate to consonant music. "Think of it as The Twilight Zone without the movie," he said, to appreciative laughter, but Schram doubtless knew the Five Pieces (Op. 16, composed in 1909 and heard in their 1949 chamber orchestra version) would be a tough sell.

That's unfortunate, because the Philharmonia played these absolutely original, groundbreaking works rather well. This version of the score doesn't have the monumentality or the extravagance of the original, but it still has plenty of impact. The first piece (Premonitions) came across with plenty of nervous energy, and the second (Yesteryears) had some good string playing in the most contrapuntal part of the piece that gave the music a strong sense of regret and loss.

The great upward swoop of sound that closes the fourth piece (Peripetia) was most effective, and the fifth (The Obligatory Recitative) had a squirmy energy that could have evaporated more convincingly had the closing bars been judged better. The third movement (Colors) was more monochromatic than it should have been, but if it didn't deliver what its composer had in mind, it was of a piece with the overall cautiousness the Lynn displayed throughout the work.

As expected, the audience gave the Schoenberg only tepid applause, and many grousing remarks about it could be heard at intermission, perhaps proof that there are some innovations that just won't take no matter how much time they've been around. Still, on a technical level this was impressive music-making, and it could be that this afternoon's performance will be more confident from an interpretive position and help the five pieces stand out with greater singularity from one another. The

The Mozart symphony that followed might have been chosen for its relative brevity, having only three movements instead of four. But it's a marvelous work, and Schram's approach was on the fast and nimble side, which suited it. Ensemble was solid right from the opening bars, with the up-rolling triplets in synch, and each subsequent entrance accurate carefully placed. It's in these very exposed slow introductions of the Classical period that an orchestra's weaknesses are often cruelly apparent, but there was little to none of that here.

The outer fast movements had vigor and plenty of punch, and the fugal section of the first movement bustled along with clarity and snap. The middle movement was less slow than it was lilting, thanks to Schram's brisk tempo, and while there was some unsteadiness at the outset about the actual pace of the movement, it cleared up quickly (the same thing happened in the finale).

This was good Mozart, with excellent ensemble throughout, particularly in the violins, and an unsentimental interpretive overview that brought the variety of the composer's invention to bracing life.

The second half was dominated by the Fifth Symphony (in B-flat, Op. 100) of Sergei Prokofiev, written in 1944 and premiered just days before the fall that compromised the composer's health for the remaining nine years of his life. It is strong, virile, brash music, replete with Prokofiev's muscularity and his enviable gift for tunes.

Both the first and fourth movements feature chattering motifs in the strings, music that sounds like sarcastic commentary on the previous bars, and the precision and ensemble of the Lynn violins was impressive. Just as impressive was the brass playing in the first movement in the chorale moment near the end; the trumpet tone in particular was round and rich, not merely loud and forceful, and it's that kind of detail that make music deep rather than only entertaining.

Schram's tempo for the second movement was very fast indeed, but it held together without flagging, and there was good solo work from clarinet and horn in addition to the famous carnival-style tune in the middle, which showcased exemplary unity in the woodwinds. Some fine work from the cellos stood out early in the third-movement Adagio, as did the brass-and-percussion explosion of the funeral march passages and the smooth lyricism of the violins.

The fourth-movement finale also had good solo string playing at the opening, and a strong solo from the principal clarinet. The cohesiveness of the Philharmonia by this point was nearly unbudgeable, and the members of the orchestra drove this restless, exciting music to its powerful conclusion as one.

A conservatory orchestra content to serve only as a sonic outlet for required credits does not necessarily pursue the Prokofiev Fifth or the Schoenberg Five Pieces when a Beethoven will do, but this is a group with serious chops, and the Prokofiev in particular was everything it should have been for a 20th-century masterwork in a sometimes difficult idiom. It raised the bar for the rest of the Lynn Philharmonia season, and should raise the orchestra's profile in the minds of the local concertgoing public.

The Lynn Philharmonia Orchestra repeats this program at 4 p.m. today at the Roberts Theatre at St. Andrew's School in Boca Raton. Tickets are $30, and can be had at the door or by calling 237-9000 or visiting www.lynn.edu/tickets.

The night belonged to Gregg Allman.

He sits at his Hammond B-3 as if he's riding a chopped Harley, sometimes hunched over the keyboard as if he's looking for cops, sometimes laid so far back his foot barely reaches the pedal. On Melissa, he took a turn on acoustic guitar. But what really set the night apart was Gregg's vocals, an emphatic punctuation to the penultimate performance on the Allman Brothers Band's 40^thAnniversary Tour.

From the plaintive “I have not come . . . to testify” on Not My Cross To Bear to the defiant “Might be your man, I don't know” of One Way Out, the only living Allman in the band sounded half the age of a man who'll turn 62 on Dec. 8. A man who's battled drugs, failed marriages, tragedies, the endless misery of hepatitis C, has been bent but not broken. Somehow he summons the strength, using the detritus as a palette to create aural art as inspiring as an Old Master's canvas.

It helps to be surrounded by men who've been with him in those hells and faced hells of their own. They know how to grab suffering and from it create art.

The nearly sold-out crowd was reminded of that early on as the overhead screen flashed photos of the band's iconic founder, Duane Allman, who died 38 years ago, just as they were hitting their stride. More tributes abounded with videos of ancient bluesmen and former band members capped by a Warren Haynes' solo in Nobody Left To Run With Anymore. It seemed eerily in sync with Duane's on-screen playing, although the song wasn't even written until 1994.

Of the 16 selections in the set, Gregg wrote seven, including a collaboration with Haynes on Soulshine; six were written by long-dead bluesmen Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Blind Willie McTell, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson. Curiously, two others came from one of the band's other tragic figures. Dickey Betts, who grew up in West Palm Beach, wrote the rousing Jessica in the early '70s and the prescient Nobody Left to Run With in 1994. Despite producing some of the band's best songs, Betts wouldn't cope with his own demons, and the other original members – Gregg, drummers Butch Trucks (who now lives in Palm Beach) and Jaimoe forced him out.

His specter still hovers over the band like a poisonous spider, but his songs can't be ignored, and Haynes and co-lead guitarist Derek Trucks did them justice.

Obviously, 40 years later, the skinny longhairs who posed naked in a forest pool for their first album are craggier, heavier, balder and, they hope, wiser. The entire band is sober and has been for years, Trucks said in a recent interview. They have children who now have their own bands and sometimes sit in with their folks.

Their bodies ache: “I wish I could retire,” Butch Trucks said in the back lot after driving down from Palm Beach with wife Melinda. But he knows Hollywood is the penultimate stop on the tour and he'll be able to make return to southern France to check on the old farmhouse he bought.

The “dream house” was built in the 7^th century; a second floor was added in the 16th century; the walls are 3 feet thick. “I will build Melinda an artist’s studio where she can finally get away from the constant distractions endemic to Palm Beach,” he said recently, “and I will build a horse stable where I can get back to my love of playing cowboy. I also plan, when I retire in a few years, to do a lot of writing. I believe I have several books in me that are busting to get out.”

Except that the music and the band keep pulling him back.

The Allmans stay young in spirit – OK, they don't rap, and you won't hear any hip-hop or techno – but with the infusion of younger members such as Derek Trucks (Butch's nephew), who just turned 30, bassist Oteil Burbridge, 32, and percussionist Marc Quiñones, 41, they've retained a youthful perspective and attitude.

Each goes his own way after the tours – Haynes, who may be the hardest working man in rock 'n' roll, to his other band Gov't Mule; Derek to a tour with his own band and with blues singing wife Susan Tedeschi or perhaps backing and even upstaging Eric Clapton; Gregg to his band, and so on.

But on this night, in an arena filled with love, they are the Allman Brothers Band, ripping through Trouble No More, Come & Go Blues, Leave My Blues at Home, Hoochie Coochie Man, Statesboro Blues and Desdemona as if they had just been discovered. Two and a half hours of relentless music/blues/rock 'n' roll.

The road may not go on forever, but the end still is beyond the horizon.

Thom Smith is a freelance writer based in South Florida.

The coming opera season has been scaled back somewhat in both of the major local companies, but opera devotees will still have plenty to look forward to.

In addition to the seven local productions, there will be five others from two different trunk companies, and 11 high-definition broadcasts of live performances from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, screened at the Society for the Four Arts and a handful of commercial theaters.

Farther afield, true opera fanatics can take a pleasant journey of two to three hours across the state and see Victor de Renzi’s impressive Sarasota Opera, which continues its complete Verdi cycle with the Italian master’s rarely heard Giovanna d’Arco, his 1845 treatment of the Joan of Arc story.

Palm Beach Opera: For the first time since the early 1990s, the Palm Beach Opera will present just three full productions, and in place of the fourth plans a season opener of two concert performances of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, with the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra and chorus, and soloists including soprano Ruth Ann Swenson, mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens, tenor Clifton Forbis and bass Morris Robinson. The two performances will be led by Bruno Aprea on Dec. 11 and 13 at the Kravis Center.

The PBO’s first opera will be Verdi’s Otello, perhaps the finest work of this composer, a shatteringly beautiful, powerful adaptation of the Shakespeare play about the Moor who loved not wisely but too well. American tenors Carl Tanner and Alan Glassman share the role of Otello, while Desdemona will be played by the Slovenian soprano Sabina Cvilak and Canada’s Michele Capalbo (Jan. 22-25).

Mozart’s supreme Don Giovanni takes the stage next, with the Albanian baritone Gezim Myshketa and another singer to be announced as the lecherous nobleman who comes to such a sorry but spectacular end. Pamela Armstrong and Alexandra DeShorties share the role of Donna Anna, with Julianna DiGiacomo and Michele Losier as Donna Elvira (Feb. 26-March 1).

The company wraps the season with one of the most durable of all operas, Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The Hungarian mezzo Viktoria Vizin and Poland’s Magdalena Wor share the role of the free-spirited Sevillian cigarette worker, and tenors Andrea Care and Rafael Davila trade the role of Don Jose, the obsessed soldier who won’t let go. The opera will be conducted by Jean-Luc Tingaud (April 9-12). Finally, the Grand Finals vocal competition, the 41st of its tribe, is set for April 25.

Florida Grand Opera: Not long ago, the FGO was doing six productions a season, one of them a world premiere (David Carlson’s attractive Anna Karenina, in 2007). But these days the venerable Miami company is keeping things safe and concentrating on good box office.

It opens with a double bill: Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, paired with Puccini’s Suor Angelica (instead of the usual Cavalleria Rusticana of Mascagni); soprano Kelly Kaduce stars as the suffering nun in Angelica, and then plays Nedda to the jealous Canio of tenor Jay Hunter Morris (Nov. 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, Arsht Center; Dec. 3, 5, Broward Center).

Eglise Gutierrez returns to the FGO stage for its second production, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a tale of passion and madness drawn from a Sir Walter Scott novel based on a real incident. Tenor Israel Lozano is Edgardo, and baritone Mark Walters is Enrico. For the performances on Jan. 27 and 30, Lucia will be sung by Maria Alejandres, Edgardo by Mark Pannucio, and Enrico by Jeremy Kelly. (Jan. 23, 26, 27, 29-31, Arsht Center; Feb. 4, 6, Broward Center).

Rossini’s Barber of Seville, easily the most performed and familiar of the Italian composer’s works, takes the stage next, with Sarah Coburn as Rosina, the woman at the center of the amorous and comic intrigues of this 1816 opera buffa. English baritone Roderick Williams is Figaro, and Frederic Antoun is Count Almaviva; the eminent baritone Sanford Sylvan, beloved for his decades of work on the Boston early music scene, plays Bartolo. On Feb. 24 and 27, Kyle Pfortmiller sings Figaro, Andrew Bidlack is Almaviva and Lielle Berman is Rosina. (Feb. 20, 23, 24, 26-28, Arsht Center; March 4, 6, Broward Center.)

To end its season, FGO, like Palm Beach, has chosen Bizet’s Carmen. The title role will be sung by Kendall Gladen, with Adam Diegel as Don Jose. Miami-born soprano Elaine Alvarez appears as Micaela, the peasant girl adopted by Don Jose's mother who tries in vain to summon the prodigal son home. (April 24, 28, 30, May 2, 4, 8, Arsht Center; May 13, 15, Broward Center).

Guest companies: The Teatro Lirico d’Europa, founded by a French ballet master and Bulgarian tenor and now based in suburban Baltimore, does 70 full-scale productions a year of various well-known operas, and is a regular guest company each season. The company also has a working relationship with the Coral Springs-based Gold Coast Opera, and all told the two troupes will present five different operas, though two of them are the Barber of Seville and Carmen.

First, Teatro Lirico mounts Verdi’s La Traviata on Nov. 18 at the Kravis Center, and reprises it March 27 at the historic Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce. Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus is presented under the Gold Coast Opera umbrella Jan. 25 (PBCC’s Eissey campus), 27 (FAU in Boca), and 28 (Broward Center).

Rossini’s Barber is scheduled by Gold Coast for Feb. 22 (PBCC/Eissey), 24, (FAU/Boca) and 25 (Broward Center), and on Feb. 26, Teatro Lirico mounts Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Sunrise Theatre. Finally, the Gold Coast returns with Bizet’s Carmen on March 22 (PBCC/Eissey), 24 (FAU/Boca), and 25 (Broward Center), closing out the season.

One local company currently in hiatus for the season is the Treasure Coast Opera Society of Fort Pierce, which had to suspend operations after 31 years of bringing opera to northern St. Lucie County.

Sarasota: The Sarasota Opera this year mounts its second season of fall productions, with Verdi’s La Traviata on the boards for six performances from Oct. 30-Nov. 11. Georgian soprano Lena Tetriani sings Violetta; Edgar Ernesto Ramirez is Alfredo.

The opera company’s winter festival opens in early February with the traditional double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (10 performances, Feb. 6-March 21). The Magic Flute, Mozart’s great Masonic-flavored singspiel, is next, with Maria d’Amato as Pamina, Joshua Kohl as Tamino, and Lindsay Ohse as the Queen of the Night (10 performances, Feb. 13-March 21).

Engelbert Humperdinck’s classic children’s tale of Hansel and Gretel is scheduled third, sung in English rather than the original German. Mezzo Heather Johnson is Hansel, and soprano Angela Mortellaro is Gretel (6 performances, Feb. 27-March 13).

But the special glory for opera junkies of the Sarasota company is its Verdi cycle, which will conclude in 2013, the year of the composer’s birth bicentenary. This year, the company mounts Giovanna d’Arco, an early and little-played opera about Joan of Arc. It’s a must-see for lovers of Verdi and doubtless will shed some new light on the composer’s work; soprano Cristina Castaldi sings the title role, with tenor Rafael Davila as Carlo VII, king of France (6 performances, March 6-20).