With five months to go until her 20th birthday, the British composer-pianist-violinist-conductor Alma Deutscher has the classical-music world on its ear. Born in Basingstoke but resident in more-congenial Vienna since 2018, Deutscher is said to have sung in perfect tune before she could speak and to have been reading music fluently before she learned to read words. Her opera Cinderella, which premiered in 2015, has been seen on three continents. In 2022 a revised version came to Opera San José, which seems somehow providential; the company was founded as a finishing school for emerging talent by Irene Dalis, a self-styled local “prune-picker” who went on to dazzle Berlin, Bayreuth, and the Met as a mezzo-soprano of the first rank. The San Jo Cinderella marked Deutscher’s debut as an opera conductor, and now she’s back, helming Mozart’s The Magic Flute, that fairy tale supreme by the predecessor she counts as an idol. And keep your eyes open for choreography by Antara Bhardwaj, an Indian-American master of the diabolically intricate rhythms, sensual narrative subtleties, and flyaway dynamic flourish of the ancient Kathak dance style. Though a recent convert to opera, Bhardwaj has already made diamantine contributions to Opera San José’s productions of The Marriage of Figaro and Roméo et Juliette. —Matthew Gurewitsch