They’re watching you

While the rest of the world was listening to new wave, some of us were listening to Hall and Oates’s blue-eyed soul masterpiece album Private Eyes, though not necessarily by choice. Released in the summer of 1981, the album was such a certified classic by fall that it was being taught to students in music classes in at least one Philadelphia public elementary school. Daryl Hall and John Oates, a pair of Temple University white dudes who’d spent the ’60s playing on sessions by the esteemed Philly soul architects Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, became for a time the best-selling duo in rock history. The song "Private Eyes," released prior to that Orwellian-benchmark year 1984, seems to get only more poignant every year; on the other hand, we’re still waiting for a new-metal band to cover (or perhaps call themselves) "Maneater." After a decade of inactivity, a slew of ridiculously titled solo albums (Hall recently put out one called Phunk Shui), and the requisite Behind the Music episode, the Hall and the Oates have mended fences, are threatening to release a new album, and are on a tour that brings them to the Orpheum, One Hamilton Place, in Boston, on March 3. Tickets go on sale this Saturday at 10 a.m.; call (617) 931-2000.

Vince’s next small thing

He doesn’t need to, but country superstar Vince Gill scales down — way down — for a quickie small-club tour to promote his ironically titled new album, Next Big Thing (MCA Nashville). The former Emmylou Harris guitarist has rounded up pretty much every award in the book — more than a dozen Grammys, more Country Music Association awards than anyone else, dead or alive. But as a teaser for the new disc, which hits shelves on February 11, he’ll make the rounds of honky-tonk-size stages, including the Paradise in Boston on February 14. Which just happens to be Valentine’s Day — and one wonders, rhetorically, whether his main squeeze, Amy Grant, can bear to be without her man on such an occasion. Tickets go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m. and will likely be gone by 10:05. There’s a two-ticket limit, it’s an 18-plus show, and the tickets go for $40 a pop. Call (617) 423-NEXT.

Byatt in Boston

The works of supremely cool woman of English letters A.S. Byatt (whose little sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble, is another) have been subjected to the silver screen in recent years — in Philip Haas’s 1995 Angels and Insects (from her novella Morpho Eugenia), and most recently, last year in Neil LaBute’s Possession, from her Booker Prize–winning novel of the same name. But her grandest project has been her series of novels, beginning with 1978’s The Virgin in the Garden, depicting the tides of English culture and ideas from the 1950s through the 1970s through the lens of one Frederica Potter. The culminating volume in the tetralogy, A Whistling Woman, was released last month and finds Byatt’s proto-feminist heroine in the vortex of late-’60s English counterculture. Byatt will be in town to read from the novel on February 8 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 279 Harvard Street, in Brookline. Tickets are $2 and are available through Brookline Booksmith at (617) 566-6660.

Classic beauty

You might think the classical realm would be immune to the charms of the flesh, but you’d be wrong: give an audience a former Ford Agency model sawing at a good piece of wood between her legs, and they’ll come in droves. Which isn’t being quite fair to the Russian-born cellist Nina Kotova, who used the money from her Fendi, Armani, and Karl Lagerfeld runway gigs to put herself through music school, and who has subsequently traded the pages of the French editions of Glamour and Cosmo for the international concert stage. She’s played for audiences ranging from the attendees of the MTV Music Awards to the royal family of Japan, and she’ll make her Boston debut with conductor Steven Lipsitt and the Boston Classical Orchestra — Faneuil Hall’s chamber-orchestra house band, once upon a time helmed by Harry Ellis Dickson — on January 24 and 26 at 3 p.m. at Faneuil Hall, in a program including Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, as well as works by Haydn and Mozart. Tickets are $23 to $45; call (617) 423-3883.