Freebie(s) of the week: San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offers an interesting mix of free shows Thursday and Friday. Kicking things off at 12:30 p.m. Thursday is San Francisco multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Camellia Boutros, a first-generation Lebanese Palestinian who’s the very definition of a self-made musician. She honed her style for years playing the trumpet, oud and bass for bands performing Arab, Mexican and Balkan music. Then she designed and constructed her own fretless 12-string guitar to develop her unique blend of Arab rock and psychedelia. These days, Boutros performs with groups touching on everything from Middle Eastern folkloric music to Balkan jazz to Mexican Son jarocho (Veracruz style) to Latin hip-hop. Boutros brings a quartet to the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival at 12:30 p.m. Thursday. On Friday, the kid-friendly harmonica-and-juggling duo Coventry & Kaluza play half-hour sets at 11 a.m. and noon. And at 6:30 p.m. Friday, there’s “Good Medicine,” a comedy show featuring a cast of Native performers. The group was formed by Oakland comedian and author Jackie Keliiaa, a mainstay of the Bay Area stand-up scene. Performances are at the Yerba Buena Gardens Great Lawn, on Mission Street, between Third and Fourth streets. More information is at ybgfestival.org/.
Another freebie: Even the March release of “Hoppers,” a film by Emeryville-based Pixar about a feisty group of beavers (now streaming!), cannot change the fact that the beaver capital of the world in the East Bay is not in Emeryville, but in Martinez. The beloved Martinez beavers of Alhambra Creek moved into the creek in 2006 and despite plans by some concerned officials to evict them, some remain there today, adored and revered by Martinez residents and many others. The popular whiskered ones even have their own festival. On Saturday, the 17th Beaver Festival runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Susana Park, at Susana and Estudillo streets in Martinez. The event features a parade, an 18-piece jazz band, a huge, stocked aquarium, displays of wildlife, and assorted presentations devoted to science, nature and more. Organizers are promising—wait for it—a dam good time. No word on whether they will offer chunks of wood to nibble on. Admission is free. More information is at martinezbeavers.org.
Fiesta time at Lesher: Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center this weekend is hosting its fourth annual Fiesta Cultural featuring two days of Latin American art, music, dance and more. The celebration takes place on Friday and Saturday with two different events. It kicks off Friday night with a concert by the Grammy Award-winning Pacific Mambo Orchestra. The San Francisco-based outfit is widely recognized as one of the premiere mambo/Latin jazz bands in the world, known for merging the traditional sounds of Tito Puente and other mambo kings with its own contemporary influences. The 20-member band won its Grammy in 2014 in the Best Tropical Latin Album category for its debut recording. So versatile is this group, its setlist features mambo-flavored covers of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia” and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. The concert is at 7:30 p.m.; tickets are $50-$83 at www.lesherartscenter.org. On Saturday, the festival takes it outside with the Fiesta Cultural Street Fair, featuring music and dance performances, films, workshops and more taking place around the Lesher Center from noon to 5 p.m. Find the full schedule at lesherartscenter.org/events/fiesta-cultural.
A double dose of Handel: Of the 42 operas that prolific German composer George Friedrich Handel produced over his long career, one of the most frequently performed today is his 1735 masterwork “Alcina,” written toward the end of his sojourn in London. And what a complex, convoluted plot it boasts, full of disguised characters, mistaken identities and transgender romantic entanglements. Thank goodness, the music is simply magnificent. The titular character is an enchantress who lives on a magic island with her sister Morgana and who is inclined to dispose of suitors she has tired of by transforming them into wild beasts, rocks, trees or streams. Her current flame Ruggiero is still a guy, but to pursue her, he has abandoned his fiancé Bradamante, who disguises herself as her own brother to seek justice and thereby attracts the unwitting amorous attentions of Morgana. Further complications ensue. To revel in the glorious music, check out concert versions presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society and Festival Opera at the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition in Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. The following weekend, the same conductor and roster of artists will reconvene at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek to mount two fully staged and costumed productions with all the dramatic flourishes at 7:30 p.m. June 19 and 2 p.m. June 21. Derek Tam leads the Festival Opera Orchestra in all four performances, with soprano Nikola Printz in the title role, Courtney Miller as Ruggiero, Shawnette Sulker as the misinformed Morgana and Sara Couden as the aggrieved Bradamante. Find tickets for all the productions, from pay what-you-can for Berkeley at berkeleyfestival.org to $20-$95 in Walnut Creek, at festivalopera.org.
A triple treat: The probable main draw for this weekend’s San Francisco Symphony concerts, with Chinese-born New Zealander Tianyi Lu at the podium as guest conductor, is “Scheherazade,” the shimmering symphonic suite from Rimsky-Korsakov that’s a dazzling display of orchestral colors and textures. But concertgoers should also sit up and take note of the Violin Concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who fled Nazi Germany and gained fame here as a Hollywood composer, winning the Oscar for his 1938 original score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” marking the first time the award went to the composer rather than to the studio. The concerto, first dismissed by critics as overly romantic in the era of sharp-edged atonalism (one caustic remark labeled it “more corn than gold”), and dedicated to Korngold’s neighbor, the great violinist Jascha Heifetz, is now widely praised for its technical virtuosity and rich emotional impact. The soloist for this performance is the young Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas, first prize winner of the Yehudi Menuhin Competition’s senior division in 2021 as a teenager. The third work on the program is the San Francisco Symphony’s first performance of Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi’s “Zhiân,” written in 2023 in support of Iranian people who are struggling for freedom. Performance times are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in Davies Hall. Find tickets, $30-$155, at sfsymphony.org.