Best in classical this week: Argento celebration, 'Midsummer's Night' opera

The Source Song Festival is a young organization, but already relishes pushing the envelope. Centerpiece of its third season is a pair of concerts bookending a week of art-song activity, in which the music of Twin Cities composer Dominick Argento will be celebrated. Three sets of his songs figure in the opening evening, interspersed by interviews with the composer and performers. In the closing concert, Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard boldly re-imagines two Argento song cycles — the Pulitzer Prize-winning "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf" and "The Andrée Expedition" — as multi-singer, staged pieces. (8 p.m. Mon., Ted Mann Concert Hall, University of Minnesota, Mpls.; 8 p.m. Sat., Ordway Center, St. Paul; $15-$33, sourcesongfestival.org)

Benjamin Britten was a remarkably gifted orchestrator, but even by his own high standards the score for his opera "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of his most brilliantly imaginative, evoking the nocturnal maneuverings and double dealings of Shakespeare's Athenian forest in music of crepuscular strangeness and subtlety. It all springs to life in two fully staged performances at the Lakes Area Music Festival, fronted by the rising American countertenor Daniel Moody as the scheming Oberon, King of the Fairies. With free entry, this is the operatic must-see of the summer season. (7 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.; Tornstrom Auditorium, Brainerd, Minn. Free, lakesareamusic.org)

The lirone, vihuela and arpa doppia are not instruments you see every day. All the more reason to check out Ensemble Sprezzatura's recital at the Twin Cities Early Music Festival, where they'll join with a violin, cembalo and gambas to explore music of the Spanish renaissance. (8 p.m. Sat., Ultan Hall, University of Minnesota, Mpls. $5-$15, tcearlymusic.org)

Festivals should do more than peddle the familiar to their audiences, and no fewer than three festival premieres — by Richard Strauss, Milhaud and Janacek — pack the final concert of this year's Alexandria Festival of the Lakes. Add Beethoven's relatively unfamiliar Septet, and you have a chamber music no-brainer. (7 p.m. Sat., Alexandria United Methodist Church, Alexandria, Minn. $15, alexfest.org)

Italian baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti famously wrote 555 keyboard sonatas, all short, sweet and in a single movement. Their high spirits and technical chicanery are showcased in a recital by harpsichordist Joe Gascho, who performs a Scarlatti set, then adds a selection of transcribed guitar pieces by Santiago de Murcia. (7 p.m. Thu., Ultan Hall, University of Minnesota, Mpls. $5-$15, tcearlymusic.org)

Terry Blain