Voices of Music Announces 2019–2020 Season

Once again, the early music ensemble Voices of Music has prepared a series of four stimulating concerts for its new (2019–2020) season. All San Francisco performances will take place at 8 p.m. Once again the venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street.

Subscriptions for the entire season will be $165 with a reduced rate of $145 for seniors and members of SFEMS, EMA, or ARS. The Voices of Music Web site does not appear to be set up for processing subscription orders; so those interested are invited to call 415-260-4687. General admission for individual concerts will be $50, and the reduced rate will be $45. A single Arts People event page has been created with hyperlinks for tickets to each of the four concerts in the season. Dates and program plans for the four concerts are as follows:

1. Saturday, October 12: This concert will be part of an ongoing Voices of Music effort called the Women in Music Project. The program will present virtuoso Italian vocal music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. The female composer on that program will be Barbara Strozzi. The other composers to be included on the program will be Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio, and Claudio Monteverdi. The vocalists will be sopranos Sophie Junker and Sherezade Panthaki. The violinists will be Elizabeth Blumenstock and Alana Youssefian, joined by Elisabeth Reed on gamba. Voices of Music co-director Hanneke van Proosdij will alternate among recorder, harpsichord, and organ. Her fellow co-director David Tayler will play archlute and baroque guitar.
2. Saturday, December 21: The annual Holiday Celebration will again feature virtuoso concertos. Youssefian will play the final concerto in Pietro Locatelli’s Opus 3 collection of twelve concertos entitled L'arte del violino (the art of the violin). The first movement of the twelfth concerto is a capriccio with the inscription:
   

   Laberinto armonico: “Facilis aditus; difficilis exitus.”

   This translates as:
   

   Harmonic labyrinth: “Easy to enter; difficult to escape.”

   There will also be violin concerto music by Antonio Vivaldi and a cello concerto by Giovanni Benedetto Platti. The program will also feature the Voices of Music debut of violinist Rachell Wong. This season the program will also include dramatic arias by George Frideric Handel sung by countertenor Christopher Lowrey.
3. Saturday, February 15: The title of the third program will be Stylus Phantasticus. The featured soloist will be Doron Sherwin on cornetto with further wind support from sackbut players Greg Ingles, Mack Ramsey, and Erik Schmalz. The program selections will explore seventeenth-century links between Italy and German in the virtuoso composition approach known as the “fantastic style.”
4. Friday, April 3: This will be an evening of sacred German baroque music performed by the vocal quartet of soprano Jennifer Ellis Kampani, alto Meg Bragle, tenor Brian Thorsett, and baritone Jesse Blumberg. They will present Johann Sebastian Bach’s rarely performed BWV 235 Mass setting in the key of G minor. They will also sing Dieterich Buxtehude’s BuxWV 63 cantata Jesu, meines Lebens Leben (Jesus, life of my life).