Last March the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) announced the launch of an international chamber music festival to be held with its sister school, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. The inaugural festival was held in Shanghai last May, and this year it is San Francisco’s turn. Our Conservatory will host a delegation of fifteen leading administrators, faculty, and students from Shanghai for a week of activities. At the end of that week, there will be public concerts on March 15 and 16 offering performances by joint ensembles of faculty and students from both schools, which will feature four premieres of specially commissioned compositions.
The March 15 concert will be particularly notable because two of those commissions were granted to students, one from each of the two Conservatories. Both will be premieres of string quartets, one by the Shanghai student Zhu Yiqing and the other by a San Francisco student yet to be announced. This program will also feature a rare performance of a composition for string quartet and sheng (a traditional Chinese wind instrument) by Shuya Xu, a member of the Shanghai faculty. These three works will be preceded by a performance of Paul Hindemith’s Opus 22 string quartet (his fourth) and followed by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34 F minor piano quintet.
The other two commissioned works will begin and end the March 16 program. Both of these will be piano quintets, one by San Francisco faculty member Elinor Armer and the other by Shanghai faculty member Shirui Zhu. The remainder of the program will feature the first (“Carillon”) string quartet by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a chamber music performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 48 string serenade in C major, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 11, two short pieces for string octet.
These two concerts will take place in the Conservatory Concert Hall at 8 PM on Thursday, March 15, and Friday, March 16, respectively. Tickets will be required for each event at $20, with the usual special $15 rate for students, seniors, and Friends of the Conservatory. These may be purchased online through the event pages for March 15 and March 16 on the Conservatory Web site. Tickets may also be purchased by calling the Box Office at 415-503-6275. (Box Office hours are 10 AM–4 PM, Monday through Friday.)
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