Nicole Cabell and Arturo Chacon-Cruz star in Palm Beach Opera's 'Romeo and Juliet'. (Chris Salata / Palm Beach Daily News)

After World War II and the fall of Benito Mussolini, Italy underwent a time of seething political turmoil before the "economic miracle" that took hold in the 1950s.

For director Kevin Newbury, it seemed like the perfect setting for reexamining perhaps the most famous literary love story of them all, Romeo and Juliet.

"I thought the (late) ’40s would be interesting, because it is a fascinating time in European history, particularly in Italy, with all these different families and political parties vying for power," Newbury said. "It just seemed like a very potent place to set Romeo and Juliet. And it feels immediate enough that the audience has some connection to it."

Add to that story the fervent musical language of French Romanticism, and you have Romeo and Juliet, the opera by Charles Gounod, which takes the Kravis Center stage this weekend for three performances by Palm Beach Opera.

‘Romeo’: Timeless love in time of turmoil | Directions, invite a friend

Premiered in Paris in 1867, Romeo and Juliet has remained one of two repertory operas by Gounod; the other is Faust, which first hit the boards in 1859, and remains the most popular worldwide of Gounod’s 12 operas.

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Patrick Dupre Quigley, founder of the Miami concert choir Seraphic Fire, went to Los Angeles this past weekend for the Grammy Awards, and while the choir came back empty-handed, he had a great experience nonetheless.

"It was marvelous. I’ve got my Grammy nominee medal in a Tiffany & Co. box," Quigley said Tuesday, the first day he’s been able to rest for some time. "Certainly, I’d be more excited if we’d won Sunday, but it was our first time nominated, and I think it’s motivation to continue making discs. Someone’s listening out there."

Seraphic Fire had been nominated for two of its records, the London version of the Brahms German Requiem and a collection of holiday music called A Seraphic Fire Christmas. Producer Peter Rutenberg was nominated for Classical Producer of the Year.

For now, the chorus plans to keep making its self-released discs on Seraphic Fire Media, with the next one being a recording of the upcoming March concert, a survey of English music from the Tudor period, including pieces by Thomas Tallis, Christopher Tye, William Byrd and others. Its performance at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton is set for March 15.

"It’s thrilling to know that we were the one choir from the United States (nominated) that was representing the 33 million people who sing in choirs in this country," Quigley said. "You sort of felt that you were there for a little more than yourself. And it was great, and we’re going to try to keep doing it."

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Viewers of the movie Shine, the story of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, will remember the central place in the film occupied by a piece of music: The Piano Concerto No. 3 (in D minor, Op. 30) of Sergei Rachmaninov.

The Rachmaninov deserves its reputation as one of the towering monuments of late Romantic piano writing, not just for its haunting opening theme and vivid solo and orchestral writing, but also because it’s tremendously difficult.

On Friday, Feb. 10, the task of scaling this Everest of music falls to Christopher Murphy, a 22-year-old senior at Palm Beach Atlantic University and winner of the West Palm Beach college’s most recent concerto competition. He’ll play the concerto on an all-Russian program with the PBA Symphony under its director, David Jacobs.

Murphy, a West Palm native and Dreyfoos School grad who studied briefly at Boston’s Berklee College of Music before returning to South Florida and PBAU, said he heard the piece last year at a live performance in Boca Raton.

"I just basically fell in love with it, and I had to play it," Murphy said, and took the score to his PBA piano teacher, Marlene Woodward-Cooper, who advised him to enter the school’s concerto competition.

One of the things that makes the Rachmaninov so tough is that the composer himself was a tall man with very large hands that could span a 12th on the keyboard, and he wrote for his physical gifts.

"I didn’t completely realize that until I started playing the third movement," Murphy said, adding that the music also requires many octaves played at rapid speed. "You have to build up your endurance for that. I think one of the biggest difficulties is the endurance, combined with having to produce a good musical tone. I’ve never played something like this before. It’s an incredible piece."

The orchestra also will play two infrequently heard works by colleagues in Russia’s "Mighty Handful" of native composers, starting with Mili Balakirev’s Overture on Three Russian Themes, and including the Symphony No. 3 (in A), of Alexander Borodin, which was unfinished at the composer’s death in 1887 and was later completed by Alexander Glazunov.

The concert begins at 7:30 Friday, Feb. 10, at the DeSantis Family Chapel on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic. Tickets are $10. Call (561) 803-2970 or visit www.pba.edu/performances.

Seraphic Fire: Miami’s Seraphic Fire concert choir will offer three performances of the monumental Mass in B minor (BWV 232) of J.S. Bach, one of the great works of the musical West. Sunday night, Feb. 12, is the Grammy Awards, and Seraphic Fire is up for two of the awards (and its producer is up for a third). Founder and director Patrick Dupre Quigley will be in Los Angeles for the ceremony, which means he won’t be leading that night’s performance at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton.

That task will fall to Scott Allen Jarrett, who plays one of the two pianos on Seraphic Fire’s recording of the London version of Brahms’ German Requiem, which is one of the two discs that have been nominated for a Grammy. The choir will be joined by its instrumental ensemble, the Firebird Chamber Orchestra.

The Sunday, Feb. 12 concert begins at 4 p.m., and by the end of it around two hours later, the audience at St. Gregory’s should know whether they’ve been listening to a Grammy-winning ensemble. It promises to be a night of great music, beautifully performed, and a night of huge excitement for a South Florida institution receiving major national recognition.

The Boca performance is the last of three. The choir performs the work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 10, at Fort Lauderdale’s All Saints Episcopal Church (sold out), and at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, at First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables. Tickets are $50. Call (305) 285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.

Palm Beach Symphony: Conductor Ramon Tebar, who hails from Valencia, Spain, offers a program of Spanish and Spanish-inspired music for the orchestra’s concert Monday, Feb. 13. Joaquin Turina’s well-known Bullfighter’s Prayer (La oracion del torero, Op. 34) is on the bill along with Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s arrangement of music from Carmen, Frenchman Georges Bizet’s beloved Spanish-themed opera.

Tebar also has programmed the Italian Luigi Boccherini’s Night Music of the Madrid Streets (La musica notturna delle strade di Madrid), written during Boccherini’s decades of service for the Spanish nobility. The other piece is a true rarity in American concert halls, the Acuarelas Valencianas (Valencian Watercolors) of the long-lived Eduardo Lopez-Chavarri (1871-1970). His musical language is conservative, much like his fellow Valencian Joaquin Rodrigo, and full of national color.

The orchestra performs at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church on Palm Beach. Tickets are $50. Call (561) 602-6720 or visit www.palmbeach symphony.com.

Delray String Quartet: The foursome travels into the land of the fivesome beginning Sunday, Feb. 12, welcoming guest violist Chauncey Patterson into their ranks for two supreme quintets of the Romantic literature. Patterson, a familiar face in South Florida music circles, is the former principal violist of the Denver Symphony and was for 17 years the violist in the Miami String Quartet. He joins the Delrays for the String Quintet No. 3 (in E-flat, Op. 97) of Dvorak, and the String Quintet No. 1 (in F, Op. 88) of Brahms.

Also on the program is a Sandor Devich arrangement for string quintet of Brahms’ Sonatensatz, originally for violin and piano. The group will play this program three times, once each in Fort Lauderdale (Feb. 17), Coconut Grove (Feb. 26) and at 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 12, at The Colony Hotel in Delray Beach. Tickets: $35. Call (561) 213-4138 or visit www.delraystringquartet.com.

The Super Bowl is upon us this weekend, and few people know that better than one of the newer residents of Indianapolis.

"Let me tell you, it’s crowded over here," says Areta Zhulla, a Greek-born violinist who moved to the Indiana city last year as a newlywed. But as it happens, Zhulla will be out of town for football’s big day. She’ll be in Boca Raton, performing the Violin Concerto (Op. 14) of Samuel Barber with the Boca Raton Symphonia.

Zhulla, 25, a native of the Greek city of Thessaloniki, where her father is a violin-maker, came to the United States at 13 to study for two years with Pinchas Zukerman. She then began working with Itzhak Perlman as part of his Perlman Music Program and then transferred to his studio at Juilliard, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 2010, she married bassoonist Oleksiy Zakharov, who now plays in the Indianapolis Symphony.

Her performance with the Symphonia comes at Perlman’s recommendation, and she can’t say enough good things about the legendary Israeli-American fiddle master.

"I always said when I was going to my lessons, ‘I’m going to church now.’ Because every time I came out of there, it’s like ‘,’" she said, singing that last syllable, choir-style.

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Joshua Bell performs at the Kravis Center on Tuesday. (Photo by Chris Lee)

He’s in a cab on the way to the airport in New York, heading out to Vegas for a few days of much-needed R&R.

But Joshua Bell manages to juggle a round-robin call with eight reporters even as his voice cuts in and out while traveling through a tunnel or paying the fare.

It’s a peripatetic life, but someone’s got to do it, and Bell has been doing it as well or better than any other classical violinist of his generation, ever since his first appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra as a 14-year-old prodigy soloist.

Now 44 and a father of three boys, the Indiana native has just released an album of French sonatas, played on the soundtrack of Zhang Yimou’s movie Flowers of War, and is preparing this year for a tour in his new role as music director of London’s celebrated Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

But first, West Palm Beach will hear him Tuesday afternoon in a recital program with British pianist Sam Haywood at the Kravis Center. He’ll play sonatas by Brahms (No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108), Ravel and Mendelssohn (Sonata in F), plus the solo Sonata No. 3 (Op. 27, No. 3) of Eugene Ysaye and an arrangement of George Gershwin’s Three Preludes.

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Among highlights coming are the Lynn Conservatory's performance of Symphony No. 1 by John Corigliano (left); and the arrival of Trio Solisti at the Society for the Four Arts.

During the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, the American composer John Corigliano responded by writing his Symphony No. 1 as a memorial to those he had lost to the disease.

The work, first championed by the Chicago Symphony in 1990, became a touchstone not only of the emotional and political furor surrounding AIDS, but of contemporary classical music. A three-movement symphony with an often-brutal, lacerating musical language, it makes a powerful statement with or without its program.

This weekend, the music students at the Lynn University conservatory will perform the symphony twice, in what may be the first local performances of the piece since the Florida Philharmonic programmed it in 1995. Conductor Albert-George Schram said it’s important that the Lynn Philharmonia play works that belong to a newer tradition.

"(The Corigliano symphony) is not part of our vernacular the way the great classics are. (But) I believe it’s like Mahler’s 11th Symphony or Shostakovich 16, something like that," Schram said, referring to what would have been the next work in each composer’s list. "Somebody somewhere said that this will be a symphony long after a cure for AIDS will have been found. This will still be a real Symphony No. 1."

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Sherrill Milnes retired from the operatic stage 10 years ago, after a stellar career that saw the Chicago-born singer acclaimed as one of the finest baritones of his time.

"I decided in ’02 that I had 42 years of earning a living from singing, and 42 was a good number. And so I stopped," said Milnes, who was renowned for his work in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

Milnes, who just turned 77, will be the special guest host Friday, Jan. 20, and Sunday, Jan. 22, of two gala concerts celebrating the 50th anniversary of Palm Beach Opera at the Karvis Center. Some of today’s best-known opera singers will share the stage with the company’s Young Artists in selections from beloved operas.

But don’t expect Milnes, who sang in two Palm Beach Opera productions during the time of artistic director Anton Guadagno, to sing at the Friday or Sunday concerts.

"I’ll be telling stories. I am now a raconteur," he says, relishing the r’s of that last word and giving it an impeccable French pronunciation.

Joining the celebration are sopranos Denyce Graves-Montgomery, Angela M. Brown, Sarah Joy Miller and Ruth Ann Swenson, mezzo Lauren McNeese, tenors Atalla Ayan and Brandon Jovanovich, and baritone Daniel Sutin. They’ll perform selections from Verdi’s La Traviata and Aida, Puccini’s La Boheme, Bizet’s Carmen, and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus.

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Marshall Turkin wanted to be a composer when he left his hometown of Kansas City, and after writing arrangements for the U.S. Navy in World War II and earning degrees at Northwestern University near Chicago, he finally made it to the big city of New York.

He was scraping together a living as a jazz alto saxophonist in the post-swing era and thinking about becoming a teacher when he was offered his first arts administration job in Indiana. That led ultimately to executive directorships of the Pittsburgh and Detroit symphonies, as well as the Chicago Symphony’s Ravinia Festival and the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Music Festival.

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Violinist Hye-Jin Kim will wrap her program at the Kravis with sunnier pieces.

The Young Artists Series at the Kravis Center continues Monday, Jan. 9, with South Korea -born violinist Hye-Jin Kim, who has a long list of distinguished solo and chamber music performances relatively early in her career.

Kim, 26, a graduate of the Curtis Institute and the New England Conservatory, grew up in Seoul and moved to Philadelphia at 14 for her Curtis studies. The daughter of a pediatrician father and a mother who studied psychology, she began studying the violin at age 8, and is the only musician in her family.

Her program at the Rinker Playhouse ranges widely, with sonatas by Richard Strauss and Leos Janacek, plus a sonatina by Schubert (in A minor, D. 385), and works by Jean Sibelius (from Five Pieces, Op. 81) and Bedrich Smetana (Aus der Heimat).

Kim wrote by email from Seoul this past weekend that she set up the program to contrast the more conflicted music by Schubert, Janacek and Smetana with the sunnier works of Strauss and Sibelius.

"If the first 45 minutes of the program reminds you of the reality of the world we live in, the last 30 minutes will put a hold on that thought for a bit and make you just enjoy a moment in music filled with beauty and exuberance," Kim wrote.

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The pianist Orion Weiss has made much of being named after a bright assemblage of stars.

The 30-year-old native of suburban Cleveland has a website replete with star imagery, and at the Duncan Theatre, he’ll play a new piece inspired by this convergence of moniker and astrological phenomenon. The work is called Constellations and Toccata, and it’s been written for Weiss by the American composer Michael Brown, a close friend.

"Both sections are about the same idea, but different ways of looking at it, and the idea is the night sky," Weiss said from Reno, Nev., where he gave the world premiere of Brown’s composition, and where "it was really well-received."

"In Constellations, he envisions it as being how you perceive the night sky with your own eyes it’s beautiful and lyrical," he said. "The Toccata is more digital, with twisty rhythms, and he envisions that as how we perceive the night sky with our instruments, with telescopes and data-gathering devices.

"It’s a really great piece," Weiss said.

Weiss appears Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 4, as the first performer in the Duncan Theatre’s annual chamber music series. The series, which used to feature internationally known groups such as the Calder and Janacek string quartets, has had to scale back under economic pressure, and has been offering a young artist’s showcase in the Duncan’s Stage West black-box venue for the past couple seasons.

A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, Weiss is an avid chamber music player, appearing with the Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet, and two of his recordings are coming out next year: the complete Gershwin works for piano and orchestra, with JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a solo disc of pieces by Dvorak, Bartok and Prokofiev.

His program at Stage West is organized around toccatas, including the one in C minor of J.S. Bach (BWV 911), the well-known Schumann Toccata (in C, Op. 7), a short one by Liszt (S. 197a), and a piece called Fantaisie et Toccata by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. Weiss leavens the toccata texture with Schumann’s Bunte Blatter (Op. 99) and Brahms’ early Schumann Variations (Op. 9).

The concert begins at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 4, at the Duncan’s Stage West, which is on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth. Tickets are $25. Call (561) 868-3309 or visit www.duncantheatre.org.

• Those of us of a certain age can remember seeing Willi Boskovsky on PBS at this time of year, turning to the audience with champagne glass in hand and saying, "Prosit neujahr!"

Boskovsky, who died in 1991, led the Vienna Philharmonic’s traditional New Year’s Day concerts for decades, following a tradition that began under Clemens Krauss in 1939, which the orchestra says on its website was something of a secret statement of national pride after Austria’s takeover by Nazi Germany the year before.

Today, the concerts remain hugely popular and a fixture of the holidays in Europe. Here in North America, one keeper of the tradition is Attila Glatz Concert Productions of Toronto, which presents the New Year’s concerts in 16 cities in the United States and Canada. The Salute to Vienna concert at the Kravis Center on Sunday, Jan. 1, features the young Hungarian conductor Imre Kollar, soprano Monica Mosser, tenor Joachim Moser, and the Kiev-Aniko Ballet Company of the Ukraine, all accompanied by the Strauss Symphony of America.

The concert begins at 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 1. Tickets are $27 and up; call (561) 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

• The rest of the week sees a visit from violinist Pinchas Zukerman, a frequent South Florida visitor in season, and often in a conducting role. He’ll be leading the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Great Britain in two concerts at the Kravis, one Wednesday night, Jan. 4, and the other Thursday afternoon, Jan. 5.

The RPO, founded by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1946, is currently led by the Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit and is one of the most highly regarded orchestras in the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday night, Jan. 4, Zukerman solos in the Concerto No. 1 (in G minor, Op. 26) of Max Bruch, and on Thursday afternoon, Jan. 5, it’s the Violin Concerto (in D, Op. 61) of Beethoven. Mozart’s overture to his opera The Magic Flute opens Wednesday’s concert, which concludes with the Symphony No. 4 (in E minor, Op. 98) of Brahms.

The Thursday, Jan. 5, program opens with the Egmont Overture of Beethoven and ends with the Enigma Variations of Edward Elgar. The Wednesday, Jan. 4, concert starts at 8 p.m., and Thursday’s begins at 2 p.m. Tickets start at $25.

If you miss Zukerman, you can catch him in recital Feb. 11 at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart. Tickets for that show are $70. Call (772) 286-7827 or visit www.lyrictheatre.com.