Grant Llewellyn

It’s easy enough to forget why living in Boston is a good thing. Rents and housing prices, public transportation, and the weather are only three items on a long list of dissatisfactions. But if you’re inclined toward the arts, you have to stop and marvel at the sheer richness of this city’s cultural life. Next weekend is such a time for classical music. His cup running over, this writer is pleased to draw attention to the following, with apologies to those left out.

Boston’s lack of a first-rate opera company has often been noted, not least by me. But things seem to be getting better all the time. Last week my Phoenix colleague Lloyd Schwartz heaped well-deserved praise on Opera Boston’s new production of John Adams’s Nixon in China. Now the city’s older sister company, Boston Lyric Opera, presents more-conventional but no less affecting fare in the form of Puccini’s Tosca. Not only is it one of the most popular operas around, but it mixes the personal and the political as effectively as anything written over the last hundred years or so. And the production marks an important BLO debut: Keith Lockhart, better known as the public face of the Boston Pops, conducts. The opera’s two principals are also making their first BLO appearances: soprano Lisa Daltrius as Tosca and tenor Jorge Antonio Pita as her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi. There are seven performances at the Shubert Theatre (265 Tremont Street in the Theater District) from March 31 through April 13, including two Sunday matinees. Tickets are $33 to $152; call (800) 447-7400.

Also on the operatic tip are four performances of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte by New England Conservatory’s Opera Theater. Cast and orchestra will be drawn from NEC’s student ranks, and another conductor will make his first appearance: John Greer, the new head of the school’s Opera Studies program. (Marc Astafan directs.) About the work itself there seems little to add after more than 200 years of happy acquaintance except to say that it remains for many of us the operatic companion we’d take to the proverbial desert island. Performances are April 2 at 8 p.m., April 3 at 2 and 8 p.m., and April 4 at 2 p.m. at the Cutler Majestic Theatre (219 Tremont Street in the Theater District). Tickets are $15; call (617) 585-1260.

Lockhart isn’t the only fixture to be switching teams next weekend. Grant Llewellyn, music director of the Handel and Haydn Society, will shelve his period-instrument hat for a week to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performances of Thea Musgrave’s BSO commission Turbulent Landscapes. Musgrave was last heard from around here when Boston Musica Viva premiered her impressive chamber opera The Mocking-Bird a few years back. Llewellyn surrounds the new work with English music both familiar — Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis — and rare — William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, the latter featuring the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and baritone John Relyea. Performances at Symphony Hall (301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston) are April 1, 2, 3, and 6 at 8 p.m., and tickets are $26 to $95; call (617) 266-1200.

You probably can’t call composer Osvaldo Golijov a local hero any more. The MacArthur recipient is now in demand everywhere, and his intensely melodic genre-mixing music has taken on a life of its own. This season, the FleetBoston Celebrity Series has been offering a tribute to this remarkable artist, and its final installment is a recital by Golijov’s pal Dawn Upshaw, who’ll give the Boston premiere of Ayre, a new song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble. It incorporates accordion, guitar, and electronic sounds, so expect the eclectic. And eclectic is what you’d have to call Luciano Berio’s wonderful folk-song arrangements, which fill out Upshaw’s program. The April 2 concert is at Jordan Hall (30 Gainsborough Street in Boston) at 8 p.m., and tickets are $41 to $61; call (617) 482-6661.

One last local figure who’s beginning to get the attention he deserves is Andrew Rangell, a dynamic pianist known mostly for his recordings of Bach and Beethoven for the Dorian label. On April 3, he brings one of the most substantial and imaginative programs of the season to Jordan Hall. The first half ranges from Sweelinck variations to Takemitsu to a new work by Tufts’s John McDonald; the second is given over to Charles Ives’s enduringly strange Concord Sonata, probably the greatest piano work written by an American. Rangell spent much of the 1990s away from the concert stage, recovering from a hand injury, so it’s good to have his probing musicianship before the public again. A FleetBoston Celebrity Series Marquee event, his recital starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are a steal at $15 to $20.