Sunday, January 9, 2022

SFCM Highlights: March, 2022

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) has highlighted three concerts for the coming month of March. Two of these, including the monthly SFCM Chamber Music Tuesday concert, will be held in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on the top floor of the Ute and William K. Bowes Jr. Center for the Performing Arts. The other will be the annual opera production, which will be given two performances in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall in the Ann Getty Center for Education. As in the past, all the events enumerated below will be identified by date, time, and venue, all of which will be hyperlinked to the appropriate Web page in the online Performance Calendar. Only the performances in the Osher Recital Hall will continue to be live-streamed through a link provided on that Web page, which will also indicate whether or not tickets will be required for attendance. Specifics for this month’s events are as follows:

Tuesday, March 8, 7:30 p.m., Barbro Osher Recital Hall, 200 Van Ness Avenue: Chamber Music Tuesday will feature cellist Marcy Rosen as guest artist. Presumably, she will be the featured soloist in a performance of the second, in the key of G minor, of Ludwig van Beethoven’s two Opus 5 cello sonatas. This work will be flanked on either side by a strings-only composition. The opening selection will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 575 quartet in D major, the first of his three “Prussian” quartets, dedicated to the King of Prussia, Frederick William II. This quartet is sometimes given the nickname “The Violet.” The program will conclude with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 36 sextet in G major. (Fun fact: Opus 36 was given its “world premiere” performance in Boston on October 11, 1866.)

Friday, March 11, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, March 13, 2 p.m., Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, 50 Oak Street: This season’s fully-staged opera production will be Mozart’s K. 621 La clemenza di Tito (the clemency of Titus). This was Mozart’s final opera, given its first performance only three months before his death. The performance will be staged by James Darrah, whose name will probably be familiar to those that have seen staged performances with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Darrah plans to explore the interplay of opera and film in his staging, which may explain why, as of now, there are no plans to live-stream either of the two performances.

Saturday, March 12, 7:30 p.m., Barbro Osher Recital Hall, 200 Van Ness Avenue: David Chan, concertmaster of the orchestra for the Metropolitan Opera (known officially as the “MET Opera Musicians”) will appear as guest conductor of the SFCM Chamber Orchestra. The oldest work on the program will be Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/63 symphony in C major, given the title “La Roxelane,” named after a character in a staged work for which Haydn had provided incidental music. The entire program will be framed by twentieth-century music. The opening selection will be Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 9, his first chamber symphony, composed in the key of E major. The program will conclude with a string orchestra arrangement of Florence Price’s only string quartet. The most recent work in the program will be “A Dust in Time,” composed by Huang Ruo.

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