Garden in the Hills Party
You are cordially invited to the SFEMS Garden in the Hills House Concert taking place on Sunday, May 19, from 1:30 to 4:00 p.m., at the home of Dr. Carol Baird and Alan Harper, in Oakland. This special party and concert will benefit the 2018 Berkeley Festival and Exhibition. Music. The event features wine, hors […]
Debussy as Early Music: The Piano and the Pianist in the Early Twentieth Century
Berkeley Festival Event, Sponsored by the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies by Nicholas Mathew There was a time, not so long ago, when “early music” meant sackbuts and shawms: the lusty hey-nonny-nonnying of Alfred Deller, the austere anti-romantic stylings of Paul Hindemith and his followers, the twang of Wanda Landowska’s massive Pleyel harpsichords, and […]
Reimagining, Reinventing, Redefining Early Music
This summer —at the 15th biennial Berkeley Festival and Exhibition— we invite you to celebrate with us as we delve into the history of our art, sampling the great wealth and power of our musical heritage. Over a period of 8 days we will present world-class performances of works from […]
Lee McRae (1923–2016)
Helping Others Discover Early Music The death of Lee McRae on June 1, a few weeks before her 93rd birthday, adds a bittersweet touch to the San Francisco Early Music Society’s 40th anniversary and to this year’s Berkeley Festival, just two of the many institutions to which she contributed, but it also gives us a […]
Who We Are—What We Have Created
This is a quiet week for early music in the Bay Area—a late Spring Break, so to speak, after the regular seasons of our resident groups have ended and preparations for next week’s Early Music Bonanza are being finalized. The only concert, in fact, is a Festival preview Thursday noon by upcoming Fringe ensemble La […]
THE READER
The Indispensable Guide to a Remarkable Week When you arrive at the Festival, one of the first things to do is pick up a copy of the 2016 BERKELEY FESTIVAL & EXHIBITION READER. This beautiful and comprehensive guidebook offers you—all in one place—everything you need to know to get maximum enjoyment from our week-long musical […]
Keyboard Revelations
Time is short, so let me just say this flat out. If you don’t have tickets yet to hear Kristian Bezuidenhout at the 2016 Berkeley Festival, get them now. There are rare performances that go well past great, beyond memorable, surpassing even some ideal of “perfection.” They are revelations, fundamentally changing how we perceive music. […]
Expose Yourself to Great Art
. . . at the 2016 Berkeley Festival Exhibition and Marketplace! Among the lost treasures lamented by those who remember the early days of SFEMS, the late Ken Johnson’s Musica Antiqua holds a high place. It was a wonderful, early music store on California Street in San Francisco, carrying a wide range of historical instruments—winds, […]
Robert Mealy and Juilliard415 at the Dawn of a New Era
Bringing it all back home Writing for The New Yorker in 2013, critic Alex Ross remarked, “For decades, New York was considered a backwater in the early-music world, secondary in importance to the thriving scenes in Boston and Berkeley.” The fact that is no longer the case may be credited both to vigorous grass-roots advocacy […]
Celebrating the Festival Fringe
One of the most exciting components of every Berkeley Festival is the Fringe—that superfluity of self-produced concerts by ensembles and solo artists from near and far that spring up like wildflowers around our Main Stages every two years. The Fringe established itself at the first Festival in 1990 and never has lost its edge or […]