Thursday, August 25, 2016

Chamber Music at the Community Music Center: September, 2016

About a week ago this site announced that the Amaranth Quartet would begin their Music of Cultural Coexistence series of concerts next month at the Community Music Center (CMC). It turns out that September will be a good month for chamber music at CMC for both faculty and invited performers. Two events that will follow the Amaranth concert on September 9 are particularly worth noting, both of which will take place on a Sunday, which tends to be a flexible day for making concert choices:

September 11, 7:30 p.m.: Following up on the Women in Music History concert given at CMC this past March, the Fête Concert Series will return with a program entitled Amy’s Music Beach Party. This will serve as a celebration for the composer Amy Beach, whose 149th birthday will take place this coming September 5. Sopranos Chelsea Hollow and Katie Nix are preparing a selection taken from the roughly 150 songs that Beach composed, and flutist Victoria Hauk will be performing her Opus 34 sonata for flute and piano. The pianists for this concert will be Paul Dab, one of the founding members of the Fête Concert Series, and Magdalena Shumanova.

Tickets will be $15 for general admission and $10 for students and seniors. This will be the first concert in the third season of the Fête Concert Series. The full season will consist of four concerts celebration the birthdays of influential artists. While the entire plan is still in progress, Brown Paper Tickets has set up an event page for purchasing both full subscriptions and single tickets to the September 11 concert. Single tickets may also be purchased at the door.

September 25, 3 p.m.: This will be the debut performance of the Liberty Street Piano Trio. This group was formed by three recipients of CMC Faculty Enrichment Grants, violinist Josepha Fath, cellist Poppea Dorsam, and pianist Lauren Cony. They have prepared a program of youthful masterworks of great composers. One selection will be a trio arrangement of a composition originally written for solo piano, the C-sharp minor étude that is the first of three short pieces Alexander Scriabin collected as his Opus 2. This brief but intense work will be sandwiched between two major piano trios, the third (in the key of C minor) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 1 trios and Johannes Brahms’ Opus 8 trio in B major. This will be a free concert.

Like the Amaranth recital, both concerts will be held in the CMC Concert Hall at 544 Capp Street in the Mission between 20th Street and 21st Street and between Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue.

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