Overlapping Groupmuses Coming on March 14

It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. One week from Saturday will see two recitals beginning at the same time in the afternoon. The distance between the venues will be such that one will not be able to listen to the first half of one program and then move over for the second half of the other! Tickets will be available for both of the events through Groupmuse. One will be at the Presidio Theatre, and the other will be a “house concert” in the Mission. Both performances will begin at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 14.

The Presidio event will be the next performance by the New Century Chamber Orchestra, led by Music Director and Concertmaster Daniel Hope. Hope will also be the soloist in the performance of the Opus 5, Number 2, violin concerto in A major by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. There will also be two works composed on New Century commissions, “Overture” by Jake Heggie, which will begin the program (of course) and Nathaniel Stookey’s “Bubble Chamber,” commissioned in honor of Gordon Getty. The program will conclude with the one work likely to be familiar to most listeners, the “Souvenir de Florence” string sextet in D minor composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. For those that do not yet know, the Presidio Theatre is located in the Presidio (of course) at 99 Moraga Avenue.

One of the rooms in the Ashram Mansion of the Yoga Society of San Francisco

The second event will be hosted by the Yoga Society of San Francisco, and information about the venue is more limited than usual. Violinist Vanness Yu will give a duo performance with Phoebe Wu at the piano. The scope of the entire program is a little less than two centuries.

The earliest work on the program will be the BWV 1003 sonata for violin solo in A minor, one of the six works collected under the title Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. The most recent could not be more different, the “Love Theme” that Ennio Morricone composed for the film Cinema Paradisio. Yu’s solo performance will be followed by Wu playing the first of the three Intermezzi composed for solo piano by Johannes Brahms. As might be guessed, the program will also include Ludwig van Beethoven with the performance of his Opus 47, the ninth “Kreutzer” sonata composed in 1803.

The entire program will be framed by music from the early twentieth century. The opening selection will be Antonín Dvořák’s “Songs my Mother Taught Me,” composed for voice and piano and arranged for violin and piano in 1914 by Fritz Kreisler. The program will conclude with what is probably Manuel Ponce’s best-known song, “Estrellita,” which Jascha Heifetz arranged for violin and piano in 1912. Igor Frolov’s “Fantasy on Themes from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess” will be situated between the Brahms and Beethoven selections.