During late-July, the classical music festival “high season,” anchored by concerts at Tanglewood and at other regional venues, approaches its zenith, with sure-fire programming. Offerings this week include a celebration of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” by the phenomenal "The Knights" chamber orchestra, great symphonies by Mozart and Mahler and, for daring listeners, the Festival of Contemporary Music.

Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in North Adams is continuing its ongoing three-week Summer Music Festival of new music, curated by renowned Bang on a Can (BOAC) composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe.

As always, the place to be for great classical and stimulating new music is right here in our own intimate corner of the world - the Berkshires - a so-designated “cultural capital,” where artistic boundaries are nonexistent.

At Tanglewood this week

• Friday, July 24, 8:30 p.m. in the Shed: Maestro Christoph von Dohnanyi leads the Boston Symphony in an all-Beethoven program, featuring supremely gifted Vadim Gluzman the soloist in the transcendent Violin Concerto. The wondrously magical Fourth Symphony rounds out the program.

• Saturday, July 25, 8:30 p.m. in the Shed: The thrilling conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, too long absent from Tanglewood, leads the BSO in a program of Mozart and Mahler that promises to be a season highlight. The venerated pianist Emanuel Ax is the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 15 in E flat, K. 449. After the interval, the deluge will follow: Mahler’s stupendous, heaven-storming Symphony No. 5. Don’t miss this one.

• Sunday, July 26, 2:30 p.m. in the Shed: Maestro von Dohnanyi returns to the podium to direct the BSO in a very special all-Mozart program featuring the composer’s final three symphonies: Nos. 39, 40 and 41 (‘Jupiter’). Mozart composed these three great masterpieces during a six-week period during the summer of 1788; he never heard them performed, as they were written “on spec,” apparently for himself…very unusual for a composer who earned his living by composing on commission. Whatever Mozart’s motivation, we have these glorious works to savor, which have been cherished since the time they were first heard as the ne plus ultra of Classical symphonic composition. This concert will surely be another not-to-be-missed Tanglewood/BSO high point.

Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood

Celebrating the Tanglewood Music Center’s 75th anniversary year, the Festival has commissioned a landmark 34 new works – most of these to receive their premiere performances during this year’s festival season. Fifteen of these will have their premieres the week of July 20-27. Composers John Harbison, Michael Gandolfi, and Oliver Knussen are the Festival curators. For a complete listing of Festival of Contemporary Music programs and events, as well as program notes for all the works performed, go online.

Tickets for all Tanglewood events can be purchased online at tanglewood.org, via SymphonyCharge, 888-266-1200 or 888-266-1200, and at the Tanglewood box office located at the main gate, on West Street in Lenox. For further information call 413-637-1600.

Mass MoCA Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival

If you think that this three-week music festival is your typical “high modern” cerebral celebration of head-in-your-hand, academic musical experimentation divorced from our daily lives and popular culture, think again: This is not your father’s (or grandfather’s) festival of modern music.

Instead, it’s a joyous, pop-inflected, “what if” carnival of musical merriment and yes, passion, where caution is thrown to the winds. Think music on the cutting edge and beyond. As the BOAC Festival organizers themselves describe it: “Brilliant musicians and composers inhabit the Mass  MoCA campus for three rollicking weeks of innovative, unexpected, and ear-expanding music.”

Recitals are held throughout specific MoCA galleries most days until July 31 at 1:30 p.m. (BOAC composer/performer Fellows) and at 4:30 p.m. (BOAC music faculty). All daily gallery concerts are free with paid MoCA admission.

As it progresses, the Festival heats up, with evening performances every night from Saturday, July 25, until the concluding BOAC Marathon blowout on Saturday, Aug. 1, which runs continuously from 4 to 10 p.m. in MoCA’s Hunter Center auditorium. Patrons can freely enter or leave as they please. This six-hour Festival finale features excerpts from Philip Glass' celebrated minimalist opera “Einstein on the Beach,” music/video by Christian Marclay, songs by Meredith Monk, Julia Wolfe’s forceful “Singing in the Dead of Night,” and much more. Tickets for this event are $5 for members / $15 for students / $24 for non-members for the concert, or $35 concert + gallery admission.

For complete BOAC Summer Music Festival information and related events, including performers, composers and joint art/music presentations at MoCA and in venues within the city of North Adams, go online.

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