Central City’s 2012 season offers an emotionally varied program. With the final opening night of the season Saturday, the ghosts of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw joined the starving artists of Puccini’s La Bohème and the homespun Americans of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! on the bill.

The word ‘planet’ means wanderer,” the narrator says, explaining the captivating, wandering harmonies of Gustav Holst’s popular orchestral piece The Planets. “To the ancient world, the planets were the stars that changed position, that wandered from one place to another. In The Planets, the music wanders from harmony to harmony.”

You would not expect to meet Aunt Eller and Curly, two of the homespun characters of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic American musical Oklahoma!, at the opera house. But up in Central City this summer, that’s exactly where they are.

Boulder’s Chautauqua this summer will be home to several music festivals. Principally there is the annual Colorado Music Festival (CMF), an attractively eclectic festival that has become one of Boulder’s premiere cultural events. Running June 24 through Aug. 3, CMF offers four concerts every week, almost all of them in the Chautauqua Auditorium.

Ever mutable, the festival is both the same as ever and completely remade. It has all the same ingredients as the past three years: the combination and juxtaposition of musical styles, serious chamber music and folk styles, storytelling with music, and improvisation alongside music that is thoroughly composed.

Robert Olson remembers the first time he conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony. “When you get to conduct your first Second, it’s like your first love,” he says. “You never forget it.” Olson, artistic director and conductor of the Colorado MahlerFest, will be reunited with the Second Symphony on Saturday, May 19, and Sunday, May 20, in Macky Auditorium, conducting the unforgettable score as part of this year’s festival.

Cynthia Katsarelis, director of Pro Music Colorado Chamber Orchestra, is a storyteller. “I kind of believe that music is always telling some kind of story, even if it’s an abstract story,” she says.

The Boulder Philharmonic’s season finale concert has more unusual angles than a geometry textbook. And fortunately for Boulder’s classical music audiences, they are all positive.

The Boulder Philharmonic will welcome back violinist Sarah Chang and the acrobatic Cirque de la Symphonie, present a tribute to Louis Armstrong, and feature Boulder composer Jeffrey Nytch as part of t

Having travelled through several other communities, the county’s community orchestra is back in Boulder with music director Devin Patrick Hughes. They will play “Transcendental Metamorphosis,” a concert featuring music of Charles Ives, Arvo Pärt, Brahms and Denver’s Conrad Kehn, at 7 p.m. Saturday in the First Presbyterian Church in Boulder.