SFP to “Catch Up” with Second Gift Concert

The members of the Esmé Quartet (photography courtesy of Sihoo Kim)

If I can count on my memory (which is not as agile as it used to be), San Francisco Performances (SFP) would hold its annual free Gift Concert for subscribers and donors in the spring. However, the Gift Concert for the 2019–2020 season took place on November 6, 2019, which turned out to be fortuitous by “getting the jump on” the closure of all War Memorial facilities the following March. (For the record, the preceding gift concert also took place in 2019 on April 29!)

The next time SFP announced a Gift Concert was for a performance that took place last year on November 16. However, perhaps to make up for the lack of a Gift Concert for the 2020–2021 season, next month SFP will present a second gift concert for the 2021–2022 season. The performing ensemble will be the Esmé Quartet, which was formed in 2016 by four Korean musicians studying at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (in Cologne, Germany). The quartet members are Wonhee Bae (first violin), Yuna Ha (second violin), Jiwon Kim (viola), and Ye-eun Heo (cello). This may be part of their first tour of the United States, if not the first performance in that tour. (In 2018 they participated in the 2018 McGill International String Quartet Academy in Montreal.)

They will present a “three centuries” program. It will begin in the eighteenth century with one of Joseph Haydn’s final quartets, Hoboken III/81 in G major, the first of the two quartets composed for Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, published in 1799 as his Opus 77. The program will then advance to the twentieth century with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 26 (second) string quartet in E-flat major. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 106 (thirteenth) quartet in G major.

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel.

As of this writing, only complementary tickets are available for SFP members and subscribers. Tickets must be ordered by February 25, either by calling the Ticket Office at 415-677-0325 or by sending electronic mail providing name, mailing address, and telephone number to tickets@sfperformances.org. There is a limit of two tickets per household. Tickets will be mailed on February 28. At that time SFP will decide whether tickets will be made available to the general public and at what price. (As a point of reference, the price of tickets sold for last November’s Gift Concert was $45. They were available for purchase through an SFP secure Web page or by contacting the Ticket Office.)