Perpetual Motion Roadshow #40

WITH A PLEDGE for "No boring readings or your money back!," the Perpetual Motion Roadshow puts its money where its mouth is, but it's hard to say exactly where that mouth has been. The roadshow, conceived by Canadian novelist Jim Munroe, has been making the rounds up and down the West Coast since 2003, inflicting a new trio of theretofore unassociated "indie performers" of both healthy and ill repute, and varying widely in their chosen media, from writing and cartooning to ranting and singing. This particular incarnation will feature a musician, a poet and a minister of the Church of the Subgenius—kind of a vaudeville show for the punk rock set. San Jose needs no introduction to Lisa Dewey, an ethereal songwriter, musician and singer who was also voted "sexiest artist in Silicon Valley" by readers of this newspaper. Jane Ormerod, born in England but living in NYC, is a gritty and gutsy postmodern poet. Janor Hypercleats is the aforementioned minister and street performer who's written numerous books about or related to the Church of the Subgenius, a decades-old cult of divine slacking or satirical nonsense, and also performs as Mr. TV. (Mike Connor)

Catch the Perpetual Motion Roadshow on Thursday (Jan. 18) at 8pm at Anno Domini, 366 S. First St, San Jose. Tickets on a 'Pay what you can' sliding scale.

Acrophobes beware: Listening to the score of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' is almost as affecting as the real thing.

Peninsula Symphony

SOMETIMES THE BRILLIANCE of movie scores can be overlooked in the dark surrounded by the images the music serves. That's surely the case with Bernard Herrmann's extraordinary, near-Wagnerian score for Hitchcock's Vertigo, the centerpiece of the Peninsula Symphony's "Music From the Big Screen" program. The other selections—Elmer Bernstein's suite from The Magnificent Seven, Maurice Jarre's desert soundscape for Lawrence of Arabia and Max Steiner's somewhat bombastic (how could it be otherwise, with all those damn memos from Selznick) Gone With the Wind—are perhaps more important for the memories they evoke than their intrinsic virtues. As for Howard Shore's music from The Lord of the Rings, it is simply too soon to tell. Mitchell Sardou Klein conducts; Jan Wahl, the flamboyant, hat-wearing film critic from San Francisco, hosts (don't say you weren't warned). The program repeats Saturday at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. (Michael S. Gant)

The Peninsula Symphony performs on Friday (Jan. 19) at 8pm at San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo. Tickets are $28-$33. (650.941.5291)

Symphony Silicon Valley

FIDDLE MASTER Mark O'Connor bridges the gap between mountain roots music and high-brow classical with compositions for violin and orchestra that neatly meld his virtuosity with Coplandesque Americana. O'Connor himself will perform his lush three-movement Old Brass Concerto no. 6 with Symphony Silicon Valley. The program, led by maestro Joseph Silverstein, also goes long with Beethoven's Leonore Overture no. 3 (one of four that the composer wrote for his opera Fidelio) and Dvorák's Symphony no. 7. (Michael S. Gant)

Symphony Silicon Valley performs on Thursday (Jan. 18) at 7:30pm, Saturday (Jan. 20) at 8pm and Sunday (Jan. 21) at 2:30pm at the California Theatre, 345 S. First St, San Jose. Tickets are $34-$36. (408.286.2600)

Send a letter to the editor about this story.