CMC Faculty to Present Four Free Concerts

Yesterday afternoon the Community Music Center (CMC) announced the 28th season of its Shenson Faculty Concert Series. I feel more than a little embarrassed that the last time I wrote about an event at the CMC Mission Branch, which I used to visit regularly, was in May of 2022. More recently, however, Old First Concerts hosted the nineteenth annual CMC Juliet McComas Keyboard Marathon at the beginning of last month. There is considerable diversity within the CMC faculty, and they used this marathon to explore the richness and range of the keyboard repertoire.

Over the next two months CMC will present four concerts that will take place in the Mission District but not at the Mission Branch. The venue will be Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, which will probably be familiar to readers that follow the Music in the Mishkan chamber music series presented by The Bridge Players led by Music Director Randall Weiss. Each of this summer’s concerts will be curated by a different CMC faculty member accounting for a different musical genre. All four of the performances will take place on a Thursday evening at 7 p.m. Program details have not been announced, but the genres and curators are as follows:

CMC faculty members Dorisiya Yosifova, Rita Lackey, Erick Peralta, and Jon Jang (from the Eventbrite Web page for the Shenson Faculty Concert Series)

July 13: Rita Lackey is a jazz vocalist and pianist; and she has described her program as a musical “gumbo” of jazz standards, soul tunes, and original compositions.

July 20: Dorisiya Yosifova is a Bulgarian violinist. The title of her program is A Journey Through Time. She will review the Eastern European repertoire with an emphasis on women composers from the Baroque period to the present day. She will also perform a solo commission composed by Jillian Honorof, which is based on a Bulgarian folk tune.

August 3: Erick Peralta is an Afro-Latin pianist who will be leading a jazz quintet. The title of his program is The Neo-Creolism of Peruvian Music. He has prepared original arrangements that blend traditional and Peruvian folkloric sound with contemporary and jazz elements.

August 10: Chinese-American composer and pianist Jon Jang will conclude the series. The title of his program is Civil Wrongs: Music about Black American & Japanese American Incarceration. He prepared it to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Liberties Act on August 10, 1988. That legislation granted reparations to Japanese Americans, who had been wrongly incarcerated during World War II.

Congregation Sha’ar Zahav is located at 290 Dolores Street at the northwest corner of 16th Street. While there is no charge for admission, reservations will be required. Eventbrite has created a single Web page with hyperlinks for making reservations for each of the individual performances.