For the 11th year, SF Music Day brings together performers from a wide variety of genres and styles to play a marathon series of concerts. Presented by InterMusic SF, this year’s festival offers 39 different ensembles, with styles ranging from early music to jazz, to new music, with the idea that people can be introduced to many of the small groups that make up the music community in the Bay Area. Executive Director Corey Combs says the theme this year at the at the War Memorial Veterans Building is ‘Colors of the Keyboard.’
There’s more information, and a schedule of performers at the InterMusic SF website.
One of the many ensembles participating this year, the Curium Trio was just formed last year. “Our trio, we are dedicated to performing works of female composers, in addition to the traditional piano trio repertoire,” violinist Agnieszka Peszko says. “There are so many women that wrote music, but haven’t been actually performed that often. So women are really underrepresented, so our goal is to show one of those pieces on the SF Music Day.” Another group, the Delphi Trio, has played in several previous SF Music Day performances, since they came together eight and a half years ago. Pianist Jeffrey LaDeur says this year they’ll be playing the a work that’s both challenging, and important to them as a trio. “This year we’re playing Maurice Ravel’s Trio, which was actually the first piece that we learned as an ensemble. And we’ve come back to it many times. It’s a piece that you just keep re-learning, and always finding more… It’s one of the most viciously difficult piano parts in the repertoire. The string parts are not any easier. But Ravel was just good enough a pianist to be dangerous. So he basically takes all of his solo piano music up til 1914, when the trio was written, and combines all those elements.” Whatever your musical tastes, Corey Combs says, the day is meant for discovery. “We welcome you to start with what you know, in terms of either a group or a band or a style. But then explore and visit. And if you’re ten minutes into a group, it’s not as formal that you have to stay put, you can get up and try something else. So, we just welcome that exploration.”
