Music

Following a three-year hiatus, The Hotchkiss School is finally resuming its Summer Portals Concert Series on the stage of The Katherine M. Elfers Hall in The Esther Eastman Music Center on the grounds of the preparatory school’s Lakeville, Conn., campus — but first, it is heading to New York City.

The Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, running from Friday, July 7 through Saturday, Aug. 19, is making big changes to its facility and programming this season. Nearing completion is a $10 million renovation of the Music Shed, which includes air-conditioning, a remodeled entry, new restrooms, a small store and a new green room.

“This season is staying true to the origins of Music Mountain,” Oskar Espina Ruiz, the summer concert series’s artistic director, told me while we sat in the back of Gordon Hall.

This weekend Crescendo will present its final concert series of the season with "In Search of The Bridges." In this piece, Crescendo chorus member Matthew Kreta looks back at the origins of the music organization.

The Berkshire Opera Festival will open its 2023 season with a spring performance, “To Paris With Love: Opera in the City of Light,” on Sunday, April 16, at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Mass.

Engineer and musician Mick Connolly has been collecting instruments, records, and vintage recording gear his whole life. His partner Lucinda Rowe is a singer, guitarist, and entrepreneur.

Two ways to musically ring in the new year — first Crescendo presents “A Story of Hope In the Voice of the New World” with vocal and instrumental music from Colonial Latin America performed by sopranos Rebecca Palmer and Jayne Segedy, tenor José Ignacio Lagos, and baritone José Sacín, with a folk ensemble directed by Christine Gevert.

The fingerpicking technique in jazz, that unique sound that vibrates from ditching the pick in favor of bare skin thumbs or even fingernails on the taut strings, has been used by plenty of legendary jazz guitarists — just look to Joe Pass’s rendition of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the 1929 early swing song that originated in Harlem.