San Diego Symphony Music Director Jahja Ling guided his orchestra and the Jacobs Music Center audience through Shostakovich’s puzzling, kaleidoscopic Symphony No. 15 Saturday (Nov. 23) in a tightly focused account that made a compelling case for the composer’s valedictory symphony. Pianist Jon Kimura Parker was on hand to slay the technical dragons in the Mendelssohn First Piano Concerto in G Minor.

The prodigious trove of Benjamin Britten’s music needs no special occasion to warrant its performance, but San Diego State University’s Patrick Walders put together a worthy and occasionally inspired tribute to Britten at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Friday, Nov. 22, 2013, the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Notable were tenor John Russell’s solo in “Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings” and the vibrant “A Ceremony of Carols” sung by Russell’s Chamber Choir from Cal State San Bernadino.