SongFest brings out rare talents for composer tour de force.

For the past week, Hidden Valley has been partnered with Rosemary Ritter’s long-standing Los Angeles summer music education program SongFest to produce SongFest Intensive, a select educational sojourn which offers master classes and performance opportunities. It plunges students into the works and methods of the so-called First Viennese School, which existed from 1740-1780 and focused on composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Hidden Valley General Director Peter Meckel fielded more than 300 applicants for 18 openings.

“This group is truly the best of the best,” he says, “in terms of both the teachers and the students.”

A long-standing music educational center, it was in Vienna circa 1759 that the world first heard the classical symphony form, with the emergence of Haydn’s first of an amazing 104 symphonies. Add to that another 57 inked by the other three composers and the result was the cementing of the symphony as the definitive long form for large orchestras.

Led by several of the world’s most distinguished artists of the concert and operatic stages, including Sir Thomas Allen (baritone), Graham Johnson (pianist) Susanne Mentzer (mezzo soprano), Craig Rutenberg (pianist) and conductor Stewart Robertson, the week-long event celebrates its conclusion this weekend with two concerts for which the faculty members and their students will collaborate.

A Sunday matinee features a program called The Songs of Schubert, with selections from Schubert’s Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin among the highlights. Sunday evening, a program entitled Die Gemütliche Stadt Wien will feature waltzes, arias and duets from Vienna with works by Strauss, Mozart, Mahler,\ and Brahms, staged and narrated by Edwin Cahill – plus a post-concert spread of Viennese pastries.

THE SONGFEST INTENSIVE CONCERTS 3:30pm and 7:30pm Sunday, Jan. 8. Hidden Valley Music Theater, 104 West Carmel Valley Road, Carmel Valley. $15-$25. 659-3115, www.hiddenvalleymusic.org.