Silent-film music

Some splendid musicians will be at the Castro Theatre July 12-15, accompanying the movies in the 17th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival. One is Donald Sosin, a noted composer and keyboard improviser who’s served as the resident pianist at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image and performs at rep houses and festivals around the world.

Sosin, who has played the San Francisco festival for the past six years, will improvise on themes he composed to Von Sternberg’s noirish 1928 classic, “The Docks of New York,” Herbert Brenon’s 1923 “Spanish Dancer” — he describes the music as a mix of Spanish Renaissance and Gypsy music — Chinese director Sun Yu’s “Little Toys” (the music will include the synthesized sounds of Chinese instruments) and Felix the Cat cartoons.

“I grew up watching those cartoons in the later TV versions,” says Sosin, 61, on the horn from his Connecticut home. He swings them with the sound of 1920s jazz, “ragtime, stride and endless Mickey Mousing of crashes and sound effects.” He plans to improvise the music with Stockholm drummer Mattias Olsson, who plays with the Swedish Matti Bye Ensemble, which will accompany Swedish director Mauritz Stiller’s 1920 film “Erotikon.”

“Mattias and I had great fun last year playing on Disney cartoons,” says Sosin, who will join Toychestra, the inventive all-female Oakland ensemble that plays toy instruments, for the Felix finale.

Find out more at www. silentfilm.org.

The Berkeley Symphony, flying high under the leadership of Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro, has commissioned four new works for its 2012-2013 season, which opens Oct. 4 at Zellerbach Hall with a new work by San Francisco composer Paul Dresher that uses two of his original instruments: the Quadrachord, a guitar-like instrument that can be plucked or bowed, and the Hurdy Grande, a big brother to the traditional crank-turned hurdy gurdy. It shares the opening-night bill with Ives’ “The Unanswered Question” and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

The symphony, which has extended Carneiro’s contract through 2017, will also premiere pieces commissioned from Steven Stucky, Andreia Pinto-Correia and 21year Berkeley native Dylan Mattingly, a John Adams protege whom Adams called “a hugely talented young composer who writes music of wild imagination and vigorous energy.” The symphony will also bring forth Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” Ligeti’s Piano Concerto played by Shai Wosner, and Lynn Harrell performing Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto.

Get more information at www.berkeley symphony.org.