Anticipating the 2020–21 SFP Season

Lawrence Brownlee, the first performer in SFP’s 41st season (photograph by Shervin Lainez, courtesy of SFP)

President Melanie Smith today announced the 2020–2021 41st season of San Francisco Performances (SFP). The season will begin on October 2, which will be the date of the annual Gala, whose festivities will include the first concert of the season. That concert will feature tenor Lawrence Brownlee presenting his Crooners program, which offers his personal homage to legendary vocalists from the Fifties and Sixties. The final program of the season will take place on May 4, 2021. Over the course of those roughly seven months, SFP will present twelve debuts, a world premiere, and a West Coast premiere. There will be over 35 events and 72 artists presenting chamber music, piano, guitar, and vocal recitals, and special events in three venues.

The new season now has its own home page on the SFP Web site. That page displays the image of the brochure for the new season, which includes a hyperlink to the PDF file for that brochure. There is also a Season Line-Up hyperlink to a Web page summarizing the entire season calendar.

Series subscriptions will go on sale on March 18. As in the past subscriptions will be sold according to different genre categories: Piano, Chamber, The Art of Song, Great Artists, Guitar, and the PIVOT Festival. There will also be a Saturday Morning Series in which Music Historian-In-Residence Robert Greenberg supplements performances with informed and spirited commentary. Finally, there will be a Beethoven All-Day Marathon sold as a series, which will begin at 10 a.m. with a lecture by Greenberg followed by concerts at both 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. That all-day event will take place on Saturday, December 12, only a few days before Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday. The sale of single tickets will begin on August 3.