Old First Concerts: March, 2023

March is going to be a busy month at Old First Presbyterian Church. The pull-down menu for Concerts on the Old First Concerts (O1C) home page currently lists seven events for that month. This amounts to a more-than-generous share of diversity, suggesting that all readers are likely to find at least one of the offerings to be of interest. Furthermore, because we are still dealing with COVID recovery conditions, O1C will continue to allow both live streaming and seating in the Old First Presbyterian Church at 1751 Sacramento Street on the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue. General admission tickets will be sold for $25 with reduced rates for seniors ($20) and students ($5). The suggested donation for those viewing the live stream is $20. 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 11, 8 p.m.: Pianist Gabriele Baldocci has prepared a solo piano recital of impressive diversity. He will begin with Franz Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor. Having seized listener attention, he will then play three United States premiere performances, the first of which will be his own bagatelle, composed in the key of G major. The other composers to be premiered will be David Winkler and Douglas Finch. The program will then continue with “Poem of the Bohemian” by Michael Glenn Williams and conclude with Baldocci improvising on Beethoven themes.

Sunday, March 12, 4 p.m.: The Ives Collective last performed at Old First at the end of last month. However, at that time, co-manager Susan Freier was unable to play second violin due to injury. She should be sufficiently recovered by next month to perform with her co-manager, cellist Stephen Harrison, and first violinist Kay Stern and violist Clio Tilton. The pianist for this program will be Keisuke Nakagoshi, and there will also be guest appearances by oboist Kyle Bruckmann and flautist Tod Brody. Bruckmann will perform the opening selection with Stern and Harrison, a trio composed in 1936 by Grażnya Bacewicz. Brody will then join the string quartet members in a performance of Amy Beach’s Opus 80, a set of variations on a theme first composed in 1916 and revised in 1920. For the second half of the program, Nakagoshi will join the quartet to play Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 81 quintet in A major.

Friday, March 17, 8 p.m.: The Lang/Rainwater Project is the duo of trombonist William Lang and pianist Anne Rainwater. Some readers may recall that Rainwater was one of the pianists to participate in the Piano Break series, presented under the auspices of the Ross McKee Foundation and live-streamed through a YouTube Web page during pandemic conditions in September of 2020. She will accompany Lang in a performance of Beach’s Opus 23 “Romance,” originally scored for violin and piano. The program will also include “All We Could See From the Window was Water” by Alex Temple and compositions by Eli Greenhoe and Arvo Pärt, whose specific works have not yet been announced.

Saturday, March 18, 7:30 p.m.: This will be the 70th Junior Bach Festival, an annual event involving performances of music by Johann Sebastian Bach by young soloists and ensembles; program details have not yet been finalized.

Sunday, March 19, 4 p.m.: Prayers for a Feverish Planet is the result of pianist Ann DuHamel putting out a call for scores asking composers to share their works about climate change. She has now accumulated over 300 movements for either solo piano or piano with electronics. The themes behind these compositions include water, grief/anxiety, shadows and light, time, human “progress,” trees, and hope. For this program DuHamel has selected works composed as early as 2002 and as late as 2020. The contributing composers will be (in order of performance) Erik Tapia, Karen Lemon, Frank Horvat, Laura Schwendinger, Chris Williams, Dario Duarte, Ian Dicke, Daniel Blinkhorn, Clifton Callender, Alex Burtzos, and Gunter Gaupp.

Soprano Heidi Moss (from the O1C event page)

Friday, March 24, 8 p.m.: Soprano Heidi Moss, violinist Joel Pattinson, cellist Peter Myers, and pianist Paul Schrage will join forces to present a program that invites the audience to reflect on the violence that occurred on September 11, 2001, as well as the twenty years of war that followed. The program will begin with a piano trio by Afghan composer Arson Fahim, who was born in 2000. This will be followed by Songs of Afghan Women, a song cycle by William Harvey inspired by the time he spent teaching violin and viola at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. The program will then conclude with “Aftermath,” which Ned Rorem composed as a reaction to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Sunday, March 26, 4 p.m.: This performance by the Bernal Hill Players will feature Martha Rodríguez-Salazar in flutes and vihuela, Annelise Zamula on saxophones and flute, Leah di Tullio on clarinets, Jennifer Peringer on piano and tablas, and Sharon Wayne on guitar. The title of the program will be Forces of Nature; and the selections will evoke moods both calm and stormy, with Italian volcanoes, Brazilian rainforests, Japanese seas, English forests, New York rain showers, French spring mornings, and California canyons. All of the works on the program were composed in either the twentieth century or the 21st. Two of them were written on commission by Bay Area composers.