Two favorite Miami classical events that usually take place around this time of year have just begun or will get under way today: The Mainly Mozart Festival and the Miami International Piano Festival. The Mainly Mozart Festival (this is the 18th edition) got under way May 15 at the Westin Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables, and it continues each Sunday through June 26. Among the featured performers in this chamber music series are the Amernet and Bergonzi String Quartets, pianists Jose Lopez, Tao Lin, Piotr Kosinski and Geoffrey Loff, as well as violinists Ania and Piotr Filochowski.

Also on the program is the Miami Music Project String Quartet, an ensemble under James Judd’s Miami Music Project initiative. This group — violinists Aleksandr Zhuk and Karen Lord-Powell, violist Yael Kleinman and cellist Aaron Merritt — will appear June 12 with Lin in music by Schumann (the Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op. 44), Mozart (the Quartet in G minor, K. 478), and a string quartet by Erwin Schulhoff.

All concerts begin at 4:30 p.m. and cost $20, or $100 for the entire series. Call 786-468-2251 or visit www.miamimusicproject.org.

Meanwhile, the Miami International Piano Festival begins tonight (Thursday) at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach and runs through Sunday.

Swiss pianist Cedric Pescia begins the series tonight at 8 with the 13th Order (“Les Folies Françaises, ou Les Dominos”) from Francois Couperin’s great collection of piano suites, beloved everywhere by pianists interested in Baroque music. It’s a lovely collection of short pieces, and it shares the program with music by another French cataloguer, Olivier Messiaen: His “Le Courlis Cendre” (“The Curlew”), from his “Catalogue d’oiseaux.”

Pescia also will play the Beethoven Sonata No. 31 (in A-flat, op. 110), Schumann’s”Davidsbundslertanze” (Op. 6), and selections from the “Jatekok” (“Games”) of the Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Kurtag.

The Bolivian pianist Walter Ponce plays a program of Schubert and Liszt on Friday night, including Liszt’s big B minor Sonata and the “Hymne de l’Enfant a son Reveil,” and Schubert’s equally big B-flat major Sonata (D. 960) and the lesser-known Scherzo in B-flat (D. 593). This, of course, is a Liszt anniversary year, and pianists everywhere are marking the 200th anniversary of the great Hungarian who invented the piano recital in the form we know it today, and whose huge compositional output, as flawed as much of it is, deserves to be better-known.

Saturday afternoon’s concert (at 2 p.m.) features three teenagers, starting with the 15-year-old American pianist George Li, who will play Haydn (Sonata in C, Hob. XVI: 50), Ravel (“Oiseaux Tristes” and the “Alborada del Gracioso”) and Liszt (Consolation No. 3 in D-flat and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, perhaps Liszt’s best-known piece).

The second half features the 17-year-old American cellist Oliver Aldort, who will play the beautiful Chopin Cello Sonata (in G minor, Op. 65), the same composer’s early “Introduction and Polonaise Brillante” (Op. 3) and the Schumann “Fantasy Pieces” (Op. 73). He’ll be accompanied by the 19-year-old Venezuelan-born pianist Luis Urbina.

Later that night, the Israel pianist Amir Katz honors Chopin with a concert devoted to all 21 of the composer’s nocturnes, including the posthumous and uncollected pieces. This was a genre that Chopin, borrowing from the Irish pianist John Field, made entirely his own, with a unique style of harmony and melody that has made these works staples of the repertoire since they were fresh off the stocks. Katz played this cycle many times in concert and recorded it for the OehmsClassics label of Munich.

The series closes with an unusual concert Sunday night, featuring the fine Franco-Algerian violinist Gilles Apap, who will head a group called the Transylvania Boys, with guitarist Chris Judge and bassist Brendan Statom. The program will include everything from Prokofiev’s familiar March from his opera “The Love for Three Oranges” and Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” to traditional Roma and jazz tunes. It sounds very Stephane Grappelli-meets-Django Reinhardt to me, and it should be a diverting way to end the series.

All concerts are held at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach, with tickets ranging from $15 to $40. Call Ticketmaster at 800-745-3000, or call the Colony at 305-674-1040, ext. 1.