SFCM Orchestra will Open Season with Conte

Edwin Outwater conducting the SFCM Orchestra in March of 2023 (from the SFCM event page for the concert being described)

Readers may recall that, about a month and a half ago, Pentatone celebrated composer David Conte’s 70th birthday with the release of the album whose full title is Intimate Voices: Chamber Music of David Conte. Conte is Composition Chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM); and, this coming Saturday, the SFCM Orchestra will offer its own celebration by beginning the first concert of the season with Conte’s “Sinfonietta for Classical Orchestra.” As usual, the conductor will be Edwin Outwater.

Conte’s sinfonietta will be complemented at the conclusion of the program with the concerto for orchestra completed by Witold Lutosławski in 1954 (after about four years of effort). Between these “bookends” Outwater will conduct compositions by Claude Debussy on either side of the intermission. The first half of the program will conclude with “Ibéria,” the only multi-movement piece in the composer’s Images pour orchestre collection of three works, each inspired by a different European country. The intermission will then be followed by what is probably the most-performed of Debussy’s orchestral pieces, the “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune” (prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Student conductor  Chih-Yao Chang will take the podium for the performance of this work.

As of this writing, all tickets to the performance in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at 50 Oak Street have been sold. The good news is that there will be a Vimeo livestream of the event. The Web page for this site has been created; but (obviously) the connection to the Concert Hall has not yet been activated. I plan to attend the performance through this site; and, in my past experiences, activation usually takes place about five or ten minutes prior to the beginning of the event.