Friday, Dec. 20: The Marotta of course is the legendary drummer Jerry, who has played with pretty much everybody, but most pertinent to this discussion is his radical work as the featured percussionist on the first four Peter Gabriel solo albums – albums that defined a new way of arty ensemble playing (the third record in particular) and that established a musical dialect from which Sarah Perrotta has drawn across her entire career.

Saturday, Dec. 21: A total of 140 instrumentalists and singers on the Bardavon stage will join the Philharmonic to perform George Frideric Handel’s most popular choral work. Audience members will be invited to sing along.

Sunday, Dec. 8: On her indie-folk debut I Need to Start a Garden, the startlingly mature Portland-based songwriter Haley Heynderickx positions herself squarely in the freak-folk tradition: able fingerpicking on nylon-string and gritty electric guitars; lyrical concerns that straddle bucolic imagism and deep symbolism; and rustic production values that occasionally sprout surprising and strange sonic developments.

Friday, Dec. 6: Do you prefer art when it knows it is art, or when it thinks it might still just be rock ‘n’ roll? Of course, there is a third road: Abbey Road, the Beatles’ second swing at a conceptual masterwork, and arguably the more successful one, even if they could never hope to duplicate the world-changing novelty of the first one. Abbey Road in fact sounds nothing like Sergeant Pepper’s. It is deeper, darker, more assured, more beautiful and more broken, showing all the wear and tear of the interceding years and all that they had learned. Consider: They are only separated by two years. Two years. “Year” must have meant something different back then.

Saturday, Dec. 7: The jazz pianist’s inventive solo interpretations of Jobim (2009’s Fred Hersch Plays Jobim) reimagine the music of Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim as introspective and almost classical in its internal, contrapuntal complexity. Even by Jazzstock’s consistently lofty standards, this is a big get.

Sunday, December 15: The isolation and examination of Robert Hunter’s contribution to the Grateful Dead is long overdue, as is his appreciation as a prolific and seminal rock poet.