Sunday, October 6, 2024

Old First Concerts: November, 2024

After the relatively quiet months of September and October, Old First Concerts (O1C) programs will pick up a bit with four performances in the month of November. These will take place during the first half of the month before the onset of seasonal programming at the end of the year. For those that do not already know, these performances take place at Old First Presbyterian Church, which is located at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southeast corner of Van Ness Avenue.

All of the offerings will continue to be “hybrid,” meaning that live streaming will also be available. General admission tickets will be sold for $30, with reduced rates for seniors, students, and children age twelve and under. Hyperlinks to the event pages, which include information about all ticket prices and hyperlinks for purchases, including live stream viewing, continue to be attached to the date and time of the performances in the following specifics:

Sunday, November 3, 4 p.m.: Orphic Percussion is a quartet of percussionists all based in the Bay Area: Sean Clark, Michael Downing, Divesh Karamchandani, and Stuart Langsam. They have commissioned over 30 pieces to build up their repertoire. Five of those pieces will be included in this program:

  1. “Muse of Fire” by Alexis Alrich
  2. “Rendezvous I” by Gary Heaton-Smith
  3. “Stress and Flow” by Alejandro Vinao
  4. “Series of Accidents” by Shaun Tilburg
  5. “Stuck in Loops” byu Kenneth Froelich

The program will also include Marc Mellits’ “Gravity” and “Donner” by David Skidmore.

Friday, November 8, 8 p.m.: Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) last visited Old First in September of last year. For this year’s visit, the only founding member to perform will be pianist Margaret Halbig. However, she will be joined by three diverse instrumentalists, Laura Reynolds alternating between cor anglais and oboe, violinist Lylia Guion, and Megan Chartier on cello. The program will include three world premiere performances; and three of the contributing composers, Mary Bianco, Vivian Fung, and Ursula Kwong-Brown will participate in a pre-concert talk moderated by Brennan Stokes.

Sunday, November 10, 4 p.m.: Pianist Lynn Schugren will present a solo recital entitled The Voice of the Piano. Her program will survey works from the previous and present centuries, beginning with one of Amy Beach’s last compositions, her Opus 148 Five Improvisations. The other two twentieth-century works will be sonatas by, respectively, Louse Talma (1943) and Miriam Gideon (1983). The earliest work from the current century will be Joan Tower’s “Ivory and Ebony,” completed in 2009. There will be two pieces by Frances Brouwer completed last year: “Flight” and “Fear of the Deep.” The program will conclude with a world premiere performance of “The Caryatids” by Alexis Alrich.

Kurt Erickson, Heidi Moss Erickson, and John Parr in the banner for this month’s LIEDER ALIVE! performance (from the O1C event page)

Sunday, November 17, 4 p.m.: As readers probably know by now, O1C is hosting all of the recitals in the thirteenth annual Liederabend Series presented by LIEDER ALIVE!  Soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, accompanied at the piano by John Parr, will give the West Coast Premiere of excerpts from Kurt Erickson’s Each Moment Radiant. This will celebrate Erickson’s ten years of service as Composer-in-Residence for LIEDER ALIVE! The program will also include selected works by Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, and Richard Strauss.

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