Cantata Singers to offer a season of Kurt Weill

The Cantata Singers' 2007-08 season will be centered on Kurt Weill, the émigré composer whose music uniquely connected the European concert hall, Weimar cabaret, and Broadway theater.

The ensemble will aim to shed light on Weill's complex web of influences by interweaving his music with that of composers such as Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Orff, and Brahms. Among the premieres is the season opener on Sept. 23, the first local performance of one of Weill's lesser-known collaborations with Bertolt Brecht: "The Flight of Lindbergh," a cantata that retells the aviator's famous transatlantic journey. Soloists are William Hite, David Kravitz, and Mark Andrew Cleveland. Fittingly, the piece will be heard not in a concert hall but at the Collings Foundation Aircraft Museum in Stow. Call it the Lindy-era version of "Music for Airports."

Other performances include the Boston premiere of Weill's "Legend of the Dead Soldiers," with soloists Janet Brown, Rockland Osgood, and Kravitz, programmed with Dallapiccola and Orff on Nov. 9; and Weill's Second Symphony, which will be paired with the Boston premiere of Charles Fussell's "High Bridge -- A Choral Symphony After Poems of Hart Crane" (May 9). Soloists for the Fussell include Karyl Ryczek, Janna Baty, Hite, and Kravitz.

One especially intriguing concert features the world premiere of the third in the Cantata Singers' stream of "Slavery Documents" commissions (Jan. 18 and 20). The first two works were based on Civil War texts. "Slavery Documents 3: And the Trains Kept Coming," by the Israeli composer Lior Navok, sets to music communications from World War II in which Jewish leaders implored the Allies to bomb railroad tracks leading to concentration camps. Navok's piece will be paired with Weill's "Die Propheten," the fourth and final act of his musical pageant of Jewish history. That should make for an engrossing, if not particularly euphoric, event.

The season is rounded out by a program featuring the excellent violinist Jennifer Koh playing Weill's Concerto for Violin and Winds. It will stand alongside Brahms's gently consoling "German Requiem" (March 14 and 16). Two concerts in the Chamber Series (Feb. 17 and April 6) focus on Weill's songs and theater pieces.

617-868-5885, cantatasingers .org

Emmanuel Music was founded in 1970 to perform the sacred cantatas of Bach in their liturgical setting of Sunday services. The cantata performances remain a fixture, but since then the ensemble has broadened its mission to include extensive explorations of other composers, from Handel to John Harbison. Next season, though, Emmanuel re-embraces Bach in a big way, focusing its collective musical wisdom almost solely on the Baroque master. The season includes performances of his choral, chamber, and solo music in a plethora of series and settings.

Anchoring the offerings will be two large choral works: the angular, expressionistic St. John Passion (March 8) and the sublime Mass in B Minor (April 12). The Passion will feature tenor Charles Blandy in the Evangelist's role and bass-baritone Paul Guttry as Jesus. Music director Craig Smith conducts.

The gala opening concert on Oct. 10 is centered on "The Art of Fugue," Bach's great unfinished treatise on the contrapuntal form to which he devoted so much of his life's work. Each of its 14 fugues will be played by a different pianist; participants include Smith, Harbison, and Randall Hodgkinson.

One of Emmanuel's most frequent collaborators, Russell Sherman, will devote three successive Saturday afternoons to the six English Suites (Jan. 26-Feb. 9). Each concert will feature one of Bach's three sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard; performers will be drawn from Sherman's students and the string players of Emmanuel's orchestra. There will also be six Thursday noon concerts in the Lindsey Chapel of Emmanuel Church: Each will feature one of Bach's six sonatas and partitas for solo violin. These performances, in February and March, are free.

Among the non-Bach repertoire will be the Emmanuel Chamber Series, currently in its fourth year of exploring the chamber, piano, and vocal works of Robert Schumann. One surprise will be a stretch of Sundays in which no Bach will be heard. For the first time, Emmanuel will follow Bach's practice of suspending cantata performances during the Lent season. At those six services, the Emmanuel chorus will sing a capella masses by Palestrina.

Tickets go on sale next month. 617-536-3356, emmanuelmusic .org

Chorus pro Musica ends its season on Sunday, June 3, as it has many recent ones: with opera presented in concert. This year it's the popular double bill of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" and Leoncavallo's "I Pagliacci."

The performance will be a milestone of sorts for the chorus: It will mark the last full season under the baton of its current artistic director, Jeffrey Rink. In July, Rink will become music director of the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, based at Okaloosa-Walton College in Niceville, Fla.

Rink, a longtime musical presence in Boston -- he's also music director of the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the Longy Chamber Orchestra -- will continue as the chorus's artistic director next season and conduct two concerts, including next year's opera performance. Guest conductors will step in for the remaining two concerts. choruspromusica.org; concert operaboston.org