Attacca Quartet will Have its Own SFP Series

Attacca Quartet members Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni, Andrew Yee, and Nathan Schram (photograph by David Goddard, courtesy of SFP)

Some readers may recall that the Attacca Quartet played a major role in last year’s PIVOT Festival presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). In the coming season, the members of the quartet, violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, Nathan Schram on viola, and cellist Andrew Yee, will curate a three-concert series of their own, given the title Contemporary Chamber. Each of the three programs will have at least one contemporary offering; but there will also be “forward-looking” selections by two of the composers from the Classical period, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. Only the first of these programs will be devoted entirely to quartet music; and the guests artists for the other two will both be vocalists (who will probably be familiar to regular followers of SFP programs).

All three of the recitals will be weekend performances, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and at 7 p.m. on Sunday. The venue for the first two programs will be Herbst Theatre, on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The final performance will take place on the top floor of that same venue in the Taube Atrium Theatre. The summary of the programs is as follows:

Saturday, October 11, 7:30 p.m.: This program will be framed by two composers both associated with the string quartet genre. It will begin with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III:48 quartet in F major, the fifth of the six quartets in his Opus 50 “Prussian” collection. This will be complemented at the conclusion with a performance of Béla Bartók’s fourth string quartet, regarded by many as the most adventurous of the composer’s six quartets. Between these “bookends” the ensemble will perform their own arrangement of David Lang’s “Daisy.”

Friday, February 27, 7:30 p.m.: The first vocalist to perform with the quartet will be Theo Bleckmann. The program will be devoted entirely to the West Coast premiere of “note to a friend,” settings of three Japanese texts by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (best known for the narrative for the film Rashomon). The performance will be a monodrama that (in the words on the event page) “addresses eternal human fascinations with death, love, family, and suicide.”

Sunday, April  12, 7 p.m.: The final program will see the return of vocalist Caroline Shaw, who will also be performing on violin. The program will begin with three of her compositions, followed by the opening movement of Benkei’s Standing Death by Paul Wiancko. Schram will then present his quartet arrangement of the Radiohead song “2 + 2 = 5.” The remainder of the program will then “retreat” to more familiar repertoire. The first movement of Maurice Ravel’s only string quartet will be followed by a performance Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 131 quartet in C-sharp minor in its entirety.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $120 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $100 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $80 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through an SFP Web page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. When single tickets go on sale, they may be purchased by visiting the specific event pages. The above dates provide hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages.