One word describes the 2008-09 season at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts: masterful.

As in music masters of yesterday, like Bach (listen for his Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations); and Beethoven (his entire Opus 18 for string quartet, plus the Prometheus Overture, a piano concerto and a symphony).

As in the literary master Shakespeare, represented onstage (Hamlet); in music (Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder); in a film series (three movies based on the Bard's plays, including Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet); in the arboretum (on a Valentine's Day Sonnet Walk with Professor Peter Lichtenfels; and in partnership with Homer Simpson (yes, TV's Homer Simpson).

As in masters of today, like cellist Yo-Yo Ma (more Bach); singer Mavis Staples (performing off her latest work, We'll Never Go Back, music from the Civil Rights era; violinist Itzhak Perlman (performing for a second consecutive year at the Mondavi Center); sitar-playing father and daughter Ravi and Anoushka Shankar; New York City's Vanguard Jazz Orchestra; and performance artist Laurie Anderson.

And as in masterful works like Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'enfant-Jesus, "one of the great Herculean challenges of the piano repertory"; Anderson's new Homeland, part epic poem and part music concert.

"We've been lining up this season for almost two years in order to provide the largest, most diverse and most outstanding mix of artists and speakers anywhere in our region, presented in a venue that is acoustically and aesthetically without peer," said Don Roth, executive director.

For his third season at the helm, and the Mondavi Center's seventh overall, Roth makes a mark with two new series: Masters of Our Time and Tour de Force.

The "force" for 2008-09 is the piano, exemplified by players and compositions in "electrifying" performances that transcend the ordinary, Roth said.

The Tour de Force series comprises three concerts: Christopher Taylor, playing the two-hour-plus Vingt Regards, 20 contemplations of the baby Jesus; Angela Hewitt, playing Bach's Goldberg Variations; and Frederic Rzewski, playing his own The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a set of 36 variations based on a song closely associated with opposition to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Masters of Our Time also comprises three concerts: Anderson's Homeland, exploring 21st-century American fear and freedom, the increasing acceptance of violence and the persistent new language of war; pianist-composer Philip Glass, presenting an evening of chamber music; and the Shankars.

These Masters of Our Time share "an ability to draw us out of the commonplace and the everyday, which is one of the most powerful qualities which all great art shares," Roth said.

The American Heritage Series continues with Staples; singer Linda Ronstadt and Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano; the Punch Brothers, featuring mandolinist Chris Thile of Nickel Creek; Guitar Blues, with Jorma Kaukonen, a founding member of the rock band Jefferson Airplane; and Bill Frisell's Disfarmer Project, imagining an Arkansas mountain town in the 1940s, with music presented against a backdrop of Mike Disfarmer's black-and-white period photographs.

New for 2008-09 is a Beethoven series by the Alexander String Quartet, performing all of Opus 18 over three Sundays, two segments at a time. Each concert will be performed twice, with music educator Robert Greenberg delivering introductory remarks prior to the 2 p.m. performances. The 7 p.m. shows will be followed by question-and-answer session with the quartet.

Dance offerings in 2008-09 include Israel's Inbal Pinto company, performing Shaker; and France's Ballet Preljocaj, presenting Les 4 Saisons, breathing new life into the Vivaldi concerto of the same name.

Another dance program, Cinderella, presented by the State Ballet Theatre of Russia with live orchestra, is billed as a special event.

The Classical Favorites Series comprises the Vienna Boys Choir and Opera a la Carte's production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers, plus the American Bach Soloists' Messiah.

Instead of a Theater Series this year, the Mondavi Center is presenting a Season of Shakespeare, with Shakespeare and Company's Hamlet and Rick Miller's MacHomer. Miller describes his one-man show as a "vocal spectacular," a hilarious presentation of Macbeth -- following a script that is 85 percent Shakespeare and all in the voices of more than 50 characters from The Simpsons cartoon show.

The Distinguished Speakers Series brings in U.S. Supreme Court scholar Jeffrey Toobin, with a talk tailored for the UC Davis Centennial during the Fall Festival; statesman and former Sen. George Mitchell; feminist leader and political activist Gloria Steinem; former "child soldier" Ishmael Beah from Sierra Leone; and Academy Award-winning writer Paul Haggis.