Tomorrow, the Brava Theater will host the fourth Switchboard music festival, an eight hour marathon of modern and eclectic music. Eight hour seems crazy long, or even masochistic, but you can actually go in and out, stretch your leg for a set that you don't care for, fetch a cone of ice cream at Humphry Slocombe, and come back for the next one. Actually, if you enjoy flavors like foie gras, strawberry candied jalapeno or Texas teabag, you're the sort that would love the musical line up at the Switchboard. It covers a bunch of genres, with Carla Kihlstedt (with a band described in a press release as "very awkward, like a tourettic guest," but meant in a good way; you can check her out here), Birds and batteries, an SF-based indie-pop band, Gojogo, a quartet which combines the Western sounds of classical and jazz with the rhythmic traditions of India, or Erik Jekabson, a jazz trumpeter who graduated in composition from the SF conservatory. They'll all blur boundaries and stretch styles and it's just a fun way to feed your ears some new flavors.

Britten Festival with Lorin Maazel: Lorin Maazel retired from conducting the NY Phil not so long ago, which, with all due respect to our local band, is the best orchestra in the country. He's over eighty, he has garnered enough laurels to rest upon with plenty extra to flavor a few boar stews. He has earned the right to retire in Florida and play golf and collect social security and not work another day in his life. Yet, here he was last week, holding the baton at Zellerbach Hall for a Britten chamber opera mini-festival hosted by Cal Performances.