SFP Gift Concert to Present Soprano Sarah Shafer

Soprano Sarah Shafer (photograph by Vanessa Briceño, from the SFP event page for this performance)

Every season San Francisco Performances (SFP) offers a free Gift Concert to subscribers and donors. This special offering is made possible through the generous support of George and Camilla Smith. Once subscribers and donors have had an opportunity to respond, the remaining tickets are made available for purchase by the general public.

This season’s Gift Concert recitalist will be soprano Sarah Shafer. She will not be a stranger to many in San Francisco, since she has taken major roles in four San Francisco Opera (SFO) productions. She made her SFO debut in October of 2013, singing the role of Mary Lennox  in Jose Maria Condemi’s staging of Nolan Gasser’s two-act opera The Secret Garden. According to my records, I first wrote about her in June of 2015 in the world premiere of Marco Tutino’s Two Women. Based on Alberto Moravia’s La Ciociara (the woman from Ciociaria), the opera follows a mother and her daughter, Cesira and Rosetta, during that period of World War II when Allied forces were just beginning to prevail over the Axis powers. Shafer sang the role of Rosetta, complementing Anna Caterina Antonacci’s Cesira. The following fall Shafer made her role debut as Pamina in the Jun Kaneko production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 620 opera The Magic Flute, and in June of 2017 she sang the role of Zerlina in Jacopo Spirei’s staging of Mozart’s K. 527 Don Giovanni. Over the course of her SFO appearances, Shafer consistently combined convincing dramatic interpretation with a solid command of vocal technique.

Mozart will also figure in her SFP program with performances of four of his songs for voice and piano. She will also sing one of the “arias for reflection” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 245 setting of the Passion text taken from the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of the Gospel According to Saint John. Following the Mozart songs, her program will proceed to selections of art songs by Hugo Wolf, Francis Poulenc, and Samuel Barber. Her accompanist will be her father, pianist Timothy Shafer.

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 29. The entrance to Herbst is the the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. All remaining tickets are being sold for $45. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.