The UC Davis Gospel Choir and Symphony Orchestra are set to perform evening concerts this weekend, and two other music department groups are planning free noontime concerts next week. Then, from May 28 through June 4, you can hear even more music department groups in concert.

First up is the Gospel Choir at 7 p.m. May 17 in Freeborn Hall, with guest artists Holy Cry in a concert of African and African American choral music, including contemporary and traditional gospel, spirituals, hymns and anthems.

The program features UC Davis undergraduate Ashley Barmore's arrangement of Melissa Etheridge's I Need to Wake Up. The Small Difference Women's Choral Ensemble commissioned the arrangement for the ensemble's performance at the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses concert in Miami in July.

The Symphony Orchestra, in a concert at 8 p.m. May 18 in Jackson Hall at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, plans a program crafted after the fashion of Alsatian conductor Charles Munch, who fostered the Berlioz renaissance in both Paris and Boston. Orchestra conductor D. Kern Holoman is completing a book on Munch, the first full-length Munch biography.

The program, opening with A Night on Bald Mountain and concluding with Dream of a Witches' Sabbath from the Symphonie fantastique, affords an excellent opportunity to consider Romantic music's supernatural, merrily satanic modes, according to a news release from the Department of Music. "Fantastic imagery abounds: Berlioz's Symphonie tells the story of love and decapitation, ending in the famous Dies irae. Mussorgsky's A Night on Bald Mountain is instantly recognizable from the harrowing sequence in Walt Disney's 1940 animated feature film Fantasia."

UC Davis graduate student Jessica Bejarano will conduct the Mussorgsky piece, the first of two public concerts connected with her master's thesis in conducting and centering on Russian secular art music. The second concert will be Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy at 7 p.m. June 5, also with the Symphony Orchestra, in a free performance in Jackson Hall.

MORE MUSIC

University Concert Band -- Quad Concert. Free. 12:05 p.m. May 21.

Hindustani Vocal Ensemble -- Free Noon Concert, 12:05 p.m. May 22, 115 Music Building.

Jazz Band -- 8 p.m. May 28, Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center.

University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra -- 8 p.m. June 1, Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center.

University Concert Band and Wind Ensemble -- 7 p.m. June 4, Jackson Hall.

TICKETS

The Quad Concert and the Hindustani Vocal Ensemble concert are free. Tickets for all other events are available through the Mondavi Center box office, (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org.