As I had observed this past Friday, during the coming season San Francisco Performances (SFP) will not share recitals with the Dynamite Guitars series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. That said, there will be more diversity of instrumentation in the coming SFP Guitar Series, beginning with the very first recital to be presented. One of the five recitals will be performed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church (1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street); and the other performances will take place in Herbst Theatre (on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue). All of the events will begin at 7:30 p.m., four on Saturday evenings and the last one on a Wednesday evening. Specifics dates and venues are as follows:
Saturday, October 24, Herbst Theatre: Guitarist Berta Rojas will make her SFP debut. She will be joined by clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, with whom she has collaborated frequently. Program specifics have not yet been announced.
Saturday, November 7, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: This will be a solo performance by Djiboutian-French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre. He is a previous winner of the Guitar Foundation of America Competition. He has prepared a program with a rich diversity of composers: Francisco Tárrega, Isaac Albéniz, Miguel Llobet, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Domenico Scarlatti, Agustín Barrios, Antonio Lauro, Leo Brouwer, Sergio Assad, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Astor Piazzolla, and Roland Dyens.
Saturday, November 14, Herbst Theatre: Guitarist Antigoni Goni is a former SFP Artist-in-Residence. She will return with two other guitarists, Luca Isolani and Maarten Vandenbemden. Together they form the Volterra Project Trio. Isolani will also contribute as composer of the final selections on the program. All of the preceding selections will be arrangements, beginning with the eight Valses Poéticos, composed for piano by Enrique Granados. This will be followed by arrangements of orchestral sources: music composed by Edvard Grieg for the play Peer Gynt, the “Danse Macabre” composed by Camille Saint-Saëns, and selections of music that Leonard Bernstein composed for West Side Story.
Saturday, January 23, Herbst Theatre: Ziggy and Miles are Australian brothers (and guitarists), whose program has not yet been finalized.
The Dreamers’ Circus trio of Nikolaj Busk, Ale Carr, and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (from the SFP Web page for their coming performance)
Wednesday, April 7, Herbst Theatre: Dreamer’s Circus last visited Herbst at the beginning of March in 2023. The guitarist of the group is Ale Carr from Sweden, who specializes in Nordic folk music; but, when he is playing with his Dreamers’ Circus colleagues, he plays a Nordic cittern. He is joined by Dane Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, a classical violinist in the Danish String Quartet, who plays fiddle for the trio’s repertoire, and Danish jazz pianist Nikolaj Busk, who will probably put more time into playing the accordion. They plan to announce their selections from the stage (which is what they did when they last visited in March of 2023).
