Early Music/Baroque

It has become a tradition for Chamber Music San Francisco to offer the Brandenburg Concertos on Mother’s Day weekend. 

For its final regular season concert, American Bach Soloists will present Handel’s dramatic cantata Apollo e Dafne (1709-1710). 

Jepetha, one of the greatest music dramas ever penned, promises to be a fine performance.

It might seem crazy to some, but the Bay Area is hosting two great harpsichordists in concerts on the same day over the first April weekend.

Cantare con Vivo is doing Sergei Rachmaninov’s deeply moving Vespers (All-Night Vigil) as their spring concert. 

Clerestory, the men’s choral group that is partly a spin-off from Chanticleer, is back in action on the weekend, with a program they’re calling “Bacchanalia”, a celebration of spring and music about springtime appetites.

This is a decorous early-music concert featuring the marvelous soprano Laura Heimes, trumpeter-extraordinaire John Thiessen, and the crew from Voices of Music, faves of SFCV and famed already for their widely-viewed YouTube and Vimeo channels.

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra Artistic Director Ben Simon always concocts a hook that appeals to me and puts me in the mood to hear a concert.

The Bay Area is so awash in great early music players, that when San Francisco Early Music Society decided to feature more local groups on their programming, it opened itself to more diversity than probably anyone but the local HIP community knew was out there.

Last year’s performance of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion by the American Bach Soloists was predictably one of the highlights of the spring season.