Your weekend arts forecast: ‘Serenity,’ Mozart and a big ol’ basset horn

Our featured photo today (look up) is of Joseph Beverly, who plays clarinet and bass clarinet with The Florida Orchestra. In the picture, taken in the empty Mahaffey Theater, he is going to town on a rarely-used instrument called a basset horn.

He’ll be playing this strange-looking contraption Saturday and Sunday (5 p.m. both days), as TFO performs Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for Winds, a.k.a. Gran Partita.

In this handy, oddly entertaining video, Beverly demonstrates the instrument and talks about why Mozart wrote for it specifically in this piece.

Gran Partita alternates this weekend, at the Mahaffey, with a Masterworks concert titled Serenity; music director Michael Francis wanted to program something sweet and calming to mark the one-year anniversary of the Covid-caused closures in the arts world.

And so this concert (2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and 8 p.m. Saturday) includes Barber’s beloved Adagio For Strings, Across the Calm Waters of Heaven – A Piece for Peace by Ahmed Alabaca, Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight and several other calming classics.

Read about both shows (performed for limited-capacity audiences) and find tickets here.

And now, this

Things are easing up, for sure, but continuing Covid guidelines make it necessary to once again have the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance’s Second Saturday ArtWalk without hop-on-hop-off trolley service this weekend. Bear in mind that each participating venue has different Saturday hours.

“Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles” is on view through Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.

A reminder that Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles ends Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. It’s a bold, vibrant collection of Native American weavings from the mid-1860s to today. Details are here.

The amazing Dan Orlando (check him out here) is back at the Hideaway Cafe Saturday, with Jenn Bostic.

All the theater stuff’s in Tampa this weekend, as Stageworks opens the contemporary drama American Son (read all about it here) and Jobsite’s Satanic puppet comedy Hand to God ends Sunday (ditto). Audiences are limited and spaced.

Last, but by no means least, The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art is opening Artists for Conservation: International Exhibit of Nature in Art Sunday. Here’s our story from earlier this week.