Palestrina presents a missal to Pope Julius III.

I’ve been spending some time looking at the upcoming classical music season for 2009-10, and despite the loss in February of the Concert Association of Florida, it’s looking rather good.

Some of that is because the organizations that are fiscally the strongest — the New World Symphony and Seraphic Fire, chiefly — have excellent seasons planned. Seraphic Fire is doing everything from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, one of the greatest works of the Renaissance, to Handel’s Israel in Egypt and the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, a work whose 400th anniversary it will celebrate with a gala performance in May joined by the Western Michigan University Chorale, with whom they have just recorded the piece.

The New World has Michael Tilson Thomas as pianist in the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 (in A, K, 488), and as conductor of the Beethoven Ninth and Mahler Fifth symphonies, plus Nicholas McGegan in an all-Baroque program, contemporary music from Finland (pieces by Kaija Sariaaho and Magnus Lindberg), and works by three members of New York’s Bang on a Can collective (Michael Gordon, David Lang and Evan Ziporyn).

But the Arsht and Broward centers are each offering their own classical-concert series. The Arsht’s four-concert Knight Masterworks Season — funded by a $200,000 Knight Foundation challenge grant, a five-year, $500,00 grant from Sanford and Dolores Ziff, and $80,000 from other private supporters of classical music — offers two major soloists (violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Lang Lang) and two big orchestras (the Israel Philharmonic, led by Pinchas Zukerman, and the Detroit Symphony, led by Leonard Slatkin).

The Broward Center series, which was announced along with formation of a philanthropic arm called Classical Entourage, features in its seven classical concerts the return of the Florida Philharmonic’s James Judd, leading his former orchestra’s chorus, now known as the Master Chorale of South Florida, in Handel’s Messiah. It’s also got frequent South Florida visitor Joshua Bell in recital, and an evening of art song by the great soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, who’s on something of a comeback tour (she’ll return to the operatic stage in Cologne next year as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier).

All in all, not bad considering the gloom with which concertgoers had first greeted the news of the CAF’s demise. It’s not as full or rich a season as we’ve all had the privilege to enjoy over the past few years, but it’s encouraging to know that despite the bad times, affection and support for this art form continues.