Old First Concerts: March, 2022

As of this writing, Old First Concerts (O1C) has planned twice as many performances for the month of March than have been scheduled for February. There will be two Sunday afternoon concerts, as well as one program presented on a Saturday evening and another on a Friday evening. All events will continue to be “hybrid,” allowing both live streaming and seating in the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue. Seating will remain limited to 100 tickets, all being sold for $25 (no reduced rate for seniors or students). Hyperlinks to the event pages (which include hyperlinks for streaming) will be attached to the date and time of the performances as follows:

Saturday, March 12, 7 p.m.: March offerings will begin with the Third Annual Pacific Pythagorean Music Festival. The second of these festivals took place in April of 2021, hosted by O1C and organized by the Del Sol Quartet of Sam Weiser (violin), Benjamin Kreith (violin), Charlton Lee (viola), and Kathryn Bates (cello). For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Pythagorean tuning is a system in which all intervals are represented by rational numbers with both numerator and denominator being multiples of the integers two and three, although “Pythagorean Music” often generalizes to both numerator and denominator simply being any integers. This year’s festival will focus on Persian scales; and the program will begin with Reza Vali’s fifth string quartet, given the title “Gavesht.” Del Sol will also premiere Madeline Ashman’s “Gravitation.” The remainder of the program will involve performances by Ken Ueno, Viola Yip, Hafez Modirzadeh, and Keshav Batish.

Sunday, March 13, 4 p.m.: Pianist Hadley McCarroll will present an “equal-tempered” piano recital. She will present the West Coast premiere of “How Come That Blood – seven variations and a canonic rhapsody on a local band,” composed by Brian P. Herrington to establish a “middle ground” between a Texas approach to the Gothic and a European approach to atonality. McCarroll will also play Reena Esmail’s “Rang De Basant,” which has been performed here in San Francisco by both Nicholas Phillips and Sarah Cahill. The first half of the program will be devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 90 sonata in E minor, followed by selections from the short pieces that Leoš Janáček collected under the title On an Overgrown Path.

[updated 3/17, 1:45 p.m.: The following event has been cancelled:

Friday, March 18, 8 p.m.: The Friction Quartet will return to O1C, performing with mezzo Melinda Martinez Becker as guest artist. The featured quartet will be Fanny Mendelssohn’s quartet in E-flat major. Becker will present selected songs by Clara Schumann with accompaniment arranged for string quartet.]

Sunday, March 27, 4 p.m.: This will be the annual Junior Bach Festival, showcasing performers under the age of 21 that have met both the technical and expressive challenges involved in performing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.