Guild Hall will present a recorded concert from the Lucerne Festival, featuring Claudio Abbado conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) in C minor, on Saturday night. Mr. Abbado, who died this year, was one of the foremost conductors of Mahler.

    This composition is considered one of Mahler’s most emotionally powerful works. It will be preceded by a lecture by Gilbert Kaplan, given in the John Drew theater at 6:45, with the screening at 8.

    Mr. Kaplan, who has a house in East Hampton, is a Mahler expert and a conductor himself; he has been invited to lead performances of the symphony by more than 50 orchestras around the world. As a faculty member of Juilliard, he has also lectured widely on the composer. His illustrated lecture will be accompanied by 30 recorded examples of performances of the piece.

    The concert also features Eteri Gvazava, Anna Larsson, and Orfeón Donostiarra. The cost for the evening is $18, $16 for Guild Hall members.

    On Wednesday, the jazz musicians Gil Gutierrez, a guitarist, Bob Stern, a violinist, and Peter Martin Weiss, a bassist, will hold an “open rehearsal” or casual performance of jazz in the Montauk Library.

    The free concert, presented at 7:30 p.m., will include pieces by Piazzolla, Villa Lobos, Vincente Amigo, Jobim, Reinhardt & Grappelli, and original compositions by Mr. Gutierrez, who is a Oaxaca-born guitarist and composer now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, an expat retiree haven for many American artists and artistic types.

    The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon series will continue tomorrow at 6 p.m. with the pianist Tanya Gabrielian, a veteran of New York’s Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, London’s Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore Halls, the Sydney Opera House, and the Salle Cortot in Paris. Her program is called “Dedications.” 

    According to the pianist, “each of the four pieces is dedicated to different sources of inspiration—legacy, location, love, and admiration.” 

    On Friday, April 25, Ching-Yun Hu, who is from Taiwan, will play an all-Chopin program. Tickets for all concerts in the series are $20, $10 for members of the museum.

    Just as spring buds bloom into summer flowers, Scott Schwartz, Bay Street Theatre’s artistic director, intends to nurture fledgling plays into potential main-stage productions. In the works is a series of staged readings of new plays, to be held at the Sag Harbor theater every spring, with the first three kicking off the series next weekend.

    On Saturday, his day off from the theater, he was going to the theater — the Broadway theater — to see a matinee performance of the musical “If/Then,” followed by an evening performance of the revival of John Steinbeck’s classic “Of Mice and Men.”

     The Bay Street readings begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 25, with “Fight Call,” a comedy by Jess Brickman that follows two feuding actors who are playing father and son in a production of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” — which itself is about a father-son conflict. Daniel Goldstein will direct.

    Mr. Schwartz’s directorial choices lean toward the play within the play, a theatrical device honed by Shakespeare, who used it repeatedly both in comedies (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in his darkest tragedies (“Hamlet”). Another example will turn up in June in Bay Street’s main-stage revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” which will star Richard Kind.

    “The Orchard Play” by P. Seth Bauer, directed by Will Pomerantz, is the second reading in next week’s “New Works” series, on April 26 at 8. A retelling of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” it is now set on a Pennsylvania farm. “Even though this is a modern play,” Mr. Schwartz said, “it harkens to Bay Street’s commitment to the classics.”

    At 2 p.m. on April 27, the reading will be of Molly Smith Metzler’s “The May Queen,” directed by Vivienne Benesch. Mr. Schwartz called the play a “dramedy,” with  “a very serious heart.” It centers on the return home of a former high school prom queen, examining youthful relationships and suggesting that idols may have feet of clay.

    One important aspect of both the readings and the stage season ahead, said Mr. Schwartz, is the number of women playwrights and directors. His goal, he said, is to create a more inclusive theater environment on the East End. Besides the two women whose works will be read next weekend, and Ms. Benesch, the director, the summer will bring the premiere of Carey Crim’s “Conviction,” which opens the season on May 27, and also the premiere of “My Life Is a Musical,” to be directed by Marlo Hunter. “We want to make Bay Street reflective of all the voices in our community,” Mr. Schwartz said.

    Before each of next weekend’s readings there will be a 4 p.m. panel discussion, during which the audience and the three authors can explore the world of the contemporary playwright. John Weid­man, a former president of the Dramatists Guild whose credits include the book for Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” “Assassins,” and “Road Show,”will be the moderator. Also on the panel is the co-producer, with Mr. Schwartz, of the readings, Emily Simoness, the executive director of SPACE on Ryder Farm in Brewster, N.Y., a writers-in-residence working farm.

    Admission to the readings is free, but Mr. Schwartz has strongly suggested advance reservations. It is hoped that those attending the panel discussions and a cocktail reception to be held on April 26 will make a $20 donation.

    The paintings of Matt Vega, on view at Ille Arts in Amagansett, mark a bit of a homecoming for the artist, who received an M.F.A. from Yale in photography, but began his studies in painting at Boston University.

    Living in Amagansett since 2002, his incorporation of words into his images speaks to a childhood spent in New York City in an era when graffiti still clung to the outside of subway cars. That free-form lettering of the artist’s tags, or obscure street poetry, has been transposed by Mr. Vega into expressive and painterly canvases where the mark becomes text and the words, while meaningful, are given an expressionistic treatment.

    They might be full stanza from Wordsworth or fragments of other pieces of poetry. Letters may impart meaning or stand alone as signifiers of themselves. It can be up to the viewer as to how to perceive them. There is enough visual interest in the composition itself to keep from seeking further meaning, but at some point the temptation to read the painting takes hold.

    It is not always easy. Individual letters are often obscured by background colors in the same family. The overall rhythm and the sheer scale of the paintings can in some cases cause the viewer to look past the familiar marks and instead appreciate them solely for their composition.

    If one is able to read the lines, or between them as it were, there is a trove of material to appreciate. Robert Frost is represented by a sizable poem, “Neither Out Far Nor Deep.” William Wordsworth is there in “Resolution and Independence,” in a painting that loudly and impressionistically proclaims its title.

    Other works also touch on the Wordsworth poem, including parts of individual stanzas and, in the case of one painting, “Twenty Stanzas‚” the poem in its entirety. The assumption might be that paintings about language cannot really be about paint, but even in this work the language has a visual quality that the artist quite deliberately evokes. Black and white smear into different registers of gray and the dark letters appear submerged in the drippy white of the surface even as they remain legible. The handwriting of the brush is muscular, capital letters, clear and graphic, while everything around tries to usurp its import but does not succeed.

    “My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, As if life’s business are a summer mood; As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith, still rich in genial good.” The choice of such elegant words and poetry compels the viewer to read on.

    Many paintings are in black and white but Mr. Vega does use color in some of them. The acrylic he places on drop cloths, simply pinned to the walls of the gallery, takes on the quality of oil paint in his tonal blends of color with white and black as foils. The paintings, which are all dated from this year, seem to come from different seasons, but perhaps it is merely the mental state of the artist.

    Mr. Vega has an equivalent stake in how viewers read his paintings in comparison to what they see when looking at them. One’s cognitive functions matter just as much in the mix as the aesthetic concerns. Both should be satisfied with this enthralling show, on view through Monday.

    With “Suffering Fools,” his second CD, the singer-songwriter Michael Weiskopf returns with a nine-song collection liberally sprinkled with meditations on topical issues, including mass shootings and a hero of the Tea Party movement.

    As with his first release, 2012’s “Insomnia,” Mr. Weiskopf turned to Cynthia Daniels and her MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton for recording and mixing. “She’s great to work with,” he said of Ms. Daniels, who co-produced both releases. “She gives you the right environment, encourages you to take the risks.”

    Mr. Weiskopf is backed by several South Fork musicians on “Suffering Fools,” as he was on “Insomnia,” including Randolph Hudson III, Klyph Black, Jim Lawler, Joe Delia, Jewlee Trudden, Sarah Greene, and Ms. Daniels. A resident of East Hampton, he also fronts the Complete Unknowns, a band that celebrates the music of Bob Dylan.

     Like Mr. Dylan, Mr. Weiskopf is not shy about addressing controversial topics in his music. In the nearly 10-minute “No Reason,” the words tumble out over a sparse acoustic guitar accompaniment. “My heart turns dark as the ages unfold,” he sings, “the tales of our heritage as it’s been sold by the tyrants of history, bloodthirsty and cold, from Caesar to Pol Pot the genocide road, and the new ones I’ve witnessed as I grow old, competing with their actions. . . . I’m not buying some false distraction.”

    On “Suffering Fools,” the artist said, “I tried to string together a consistent theme throughout the work,” as he did on his previous album. “I think my attempt is to paint a picture. It’s deliberate that there are no obvious songs about the routine heartbreak we all go through.” Such territory, he observed, has been thoroughly mined elsewhere. “I wanted to comment on what I consider to be larger issues. This kind of category doesn’t get covered as routinely as it once did.”

    On “Guns Don’t Kill,” Mr. Weiskopf seethes at the mass shootings that all too often occur in the United States. He said the song was written a few days after the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. “The unfortunate thing about the song is it’s always timely,” he said, mentioning last week’s mass shooting at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. Thirteen people were killed and 30 wounded at the same base in 2009. Lamenting “the madness in which the gun lobby intimidates politicians” and “how easily people have access to weapons,” Mr. Weiskopf said, “I tried to write from inside the mind of someone who would commit something like that.” And yet, he said, “Ranting about gun control doesn’t seem to do anything at all.”

    “Thank You, Canada (the Ted Cruz song)” is a playful look at the senator from Texas and Tea Party hero. While many of Mr. Cruz’s supporters continue to question President Obama’s citizenship, the senator is himself foreign-born. “I thought about Canada, what an interesting place it is, all these great people,” Mr. Weiskopf said. “And then there’s Ted Cruz and Justin Bieber. I was trying to laugh at it: Okay, we see this guy for what he is. I needed to express it the way I can express it without getting too emotional about it.”

    “The work has to speak for itself,” he continued. “You make these songs, you put them out, you think you have something to say, and if it resonates with a handful of people, that’s a good thing.”

    “Suffering Fools” is available at Innersleeve Records and Crossroads Music in Amagansett, and online at the iTunes store, Amazon, and CD Baby. The Complete Unknowns will play at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Friday, April 18, at 8 p.m., and at the Bob Dylan 73rd Birthday Bash at the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in New York on May 26.

    Cynthia Carr, a New York City-based writer and cultural critic, will deliver a lecture at the Watermill Center today at 6:30 p.m. Titled “My Golden Age in Hell: Covering the ’80s East Village,” the talk will examine the performance art scene at artist-run clubs such as 8BC, WOW, and the Pyramid.

    Ms. Carr will also discuss two pieces of “ordeal art” from the ’80s, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s year spent tied together by an eight-foot rope, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s walk across the Great Wall of China.

    The author of three books, Ms. Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists for The Village Voice during the 1980s and 1990s and has written for Artforum, The New York Times, Modern Painters, and other publications. Her talk is free, but reservations are required and may be made at watermillcenter. org.

    The center is now accepting applications for its 2015 residency program, which invites artists of all disciplines to create collaborative works that investigate, challenge, and extend the parameters of performance practice. The deadline for applications, which may be submitted to watermillcenter.slideroom.com, is June 11 at 5 p.m.

    Soyeon Kate Lee and Ran Dank will perform as a piano duo at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday at 7 p.m., as part of the Rising Stars piano series. Ms. Lee, a Korean-American pianist, won first prize in the 2010 Naumburg International piano competition. A Pianofest distinguished artist, she has performed internationally as a guest soloist.

    Mr. Dank has performed as a soloist at numerous venues in the United States and abroad. He won the Sander Buchman Memorial First Prize of the 2009 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, among other awards.

    Ms. Lee and Mr. Dank will perform two-piano works: “Scaramouche” by Milhaud, “La Valse” by Ravel, and the four-hand arrangement of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” They are not only a duo on piano; they are also husband and wife.

    Patricia C. Wright, professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University and one of the world’s foremost experts on lemurs, will be honored at the university’s Stars of Stony Brook benefit on Wednesday at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. She is being recognized for her important contributions to the biology, ecology, conservation, and behavior of living primates.

    “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” an Imax film narrated by Morgan Freeman that highlights Ms. Wright’s lifelong mission to help these strange and adorable creatures survive in the modern world, had its world premiere on Friday and is currently playing at Imax theaters throughout the world.

    Previous Stony Brook honorees include Alan Alda, Ed Harris, and Julie Andrews. Money raised by Wednesday’s event will support student scholarships and a variety of educational programs at the university and around the world.

    The Parrish Art Museum’s third installment of Architectural Sessions, an ongoing series co-presented with A.I.A. Peconic and moderated by the architect Maziar Behrooz, will take place in Water Mill Saturday at noon.

    The program, “Five Minutes Max,” loosely borrows its format from the museum’s popular PechaKucha Night series. Each of 12 East End architects will give a five-minute presentation of 15 images, each of which will remain on the screen for 20 seconds.

    Each architect will consider one topic or theme that was important to a project designed and built on the East End. The presenters will be Hideaki Ariizumi and Glynis Berry, John Berg, Bill Chaleff, Jonathan Foster, Maxine Nachtigal Liao, Nick Martin, Michael McCrum, James Merrell, John Rose, Steve Schappacher, Ric Stott, and Fred H. Throo.

    Tickets are $10, free for members, children, and students, and include museum admission.