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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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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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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Violinist Pinchas Zukerman is joined by Royal Philharmonic for two shows this week.

WEST PALM BEACH
A CLASSICAL LEGEND

Pinchas Zukerman leads the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Great Britain in two concerts at the Kravis, one Wednesday night, and the other Thursday afternoon. The Wednesday concert starts at 8 p.m., and Thursday’s begins at 2 p.m. Tickets start at $25. Information: (561) 832-7469 | Directions, invite a friend

WEST PALM BEACH
DRAMAWORKS’ LATEST
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play depicting a mentally unbalanced woman’s far-reaching effects on the lives of her two daughters, and a young girl’s struggle to keep her focus and dreams alive. It opens Jan. 6 and runs through Jan. 29, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Tickets: $55. (561) 514-4042 | Directions, invite a friend
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This weekend, as well as the week to come, offers a large variety of classical music events, so much so that the original version of this column was twice as long.

Here’s a look at only a portion of the seasonal bounty:

Boca Symphonia: American violinist Tim Fain opens the Boca Raton orchestra’s new season Sunday afternoon with the Violin Concerto No. 2 (in G minor, Op. 63) of Sergei Prokofiev.

Fain, 35, a Southern Californian who studied at Curtis and Juilliard, is the winner of a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was most recently heard on the soundtrack of the ballet movie Black Swan. He’s especially noted these days for his work with the composer Philip Glass, and his current project, Portals, features a new work by Glass (Partita for Solo Violin) at the center of a multimedia evening exploring the need for human connection in a culture now dominated by digital technology.

"I’ve put together so many different means of expression for the concert, while at the same time trying to bring it all into the age we live in," Fain said. "You see other musicians signing on, and then your hear their sound and see them playing on screen, and I’m performing live, along with them. It’s my hope that it brings the recital into a much more current place: the age we live in."

Fain is one of the current breed of classical musicians for whom genre barriers, and even traditional concert venues, no longer represent the only way to musical fulfillment. "I’ve always been drawn to music of all different types," he said, and in the near future he’ll be presenting Portals again (May 20 in Peekskill, N.Y.) and doing duo recitals with Glass this coming summer at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival.

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Before they start their residency at the Colony again, the Delray String Quartet plays a pre-season show at the Arts Garage.

It’s been eight years since former Fantasticks producer Don Thompson got the idea for the Delray String Quartet after hiring two musicians for a party he was throwing.

And since its debut in late 2004 at the Colony Hotel and Cabana Club on East Atlantic Avenue, the quartet has made an all-Dvorak disc, commissioned new quartets from composers Thomas Sleeper and Kenneth Fuchs, expanded its operations into Fort Lauderdale and Coconut Grove, and performed other concerts in West Palm Beach, Wellington and Naples.

This year, it has added an appearance at the Arts at St. Johns series in Miami Beach to its list of regular venues, and in late January will record the Fuchs work – his String Quartet No. 5 – for a Naxos disc featuring other works by the composer, including a piano piece performed by pianist Christopher O’Reilly, said the quartet’s violist, Richard Fleischman.

The quartet performs an informal pre-season concert Friday at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage, then returns to Delray’s Colony Hotel on Dec. 11.

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Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine has canceled his fall conducting engagements after reinjuring his back.

The Met announced Tuesday that Italian conductor Fabio Luisi has been named the Met’s principal conductor. He’s filling in for Levine, who has led performances at the nation’s premier opera house for four decades.

Levine was to start rehearsals Tuesday for the new season.

He was in Vermont recuperating from previous back surgery when he fell last week and damaged one of his vertebrae. The 68-year-old musician underwent surgery in New York on Thursday.

Luisi was appointed the Met’s principal guest conductor last year. He will conduct “Don Giovanni” and “Siegfried.”

Levine’s remaining shows will be led by Louis Langree and Derrick Inouye.

Betsy Diaz, a 22-year-old singer from Miami, prepares herself for the Grand Finals of the Palm Beach Opera’s 42nd annual competition. She finished fourth overall:

All of 11 years old, Jackie Evancho has already released an album that's gone platinum. (Mike Stobe / Getty Images)

We know her as a tiny, honey-haired girl with blue eyes and a mature-sounding soprano voice, carefully making her way through Puccini’s O mio babbino caro while dressed in her Sunday best, smiling sweetly to enthusiastic audience applause, and speaking intelligently and untiringly to various prying adults.

But sometimes, Jackie Evancho just wants to scream.

To music, that is: Rihanna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and even Taylor Swift.

"Sometimes I think it would be fun to scream, at the top of my lungs, some of their pop songs, but I know that would be just terrible for my voice," Jackie wrote in an e-mail message. "My voice just happens to be inclined toward the classical crossover genre, which kinda lets me get a little of both worlds, with it being more often than not pop sung in a classical way."

Jackie Evancho (e-VANK-oh), who turns 11 in April, made a name for herself in August when she appeared on America’s Got Talent. She came in second in that competition, but it scarcely mattered. In mid-November, she released a Christmas album (O Holy Night) that became a platinum-seller less than a month later.

Jackie will be the headliner Saturday night for this year’s Festival of the Arts Boca, appearing with four young adult singers on a program called Young Stars of the Metropolitan Opera. Although it’s unusual to see someone so young doing this kind of singing, she does have some parallels in New Zealand’s Hayley Westenra and Britain’s Charlotte Church, both of whom began their careers as girls in popera and branched out into other kinds of music as they entered adulthood.

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