Gold rush: Santa Fe Community Orchestra

The Santa Fe Community Orchestra closes its season with a free concert (donations accepted) at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 4, at St. Francis Auditorium (New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.). Every year this nonprofessional but enthusiastic orchestra holds a competition for new symphonic compositions, and it will premiere the latest winner in this concert: The Ruins of Quivira by Santa Fe pianist-and-composer Charles Blanchard. (Quivira was one of the mythical Seven Cities of Gold that Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and several ensuing conquistadores never managed to find.) Also on the program, conducted by Oliver Prezant, are Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and the “Symphonic Nocturne” from Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark (a concert suite arranged by Robert Russell Bennett from the score to this 1941 Broadway musical about psychoanalysis). For further information, call at 505-466-4879 or visit www.sfco.org. — J.M.K.