Inside Music Talks
Join us at Davies Symphony Hall and Flint Center one hour before each DSH, Open Rehearsal, and Flint Center subscription concerts for a free pre-concert talk.
Inside Music Pre-Concert Talks
Inside Music Talks are designed to enhance your enjoyment of the concert by providing insights into the works on the program—bringing you “inside” the music. Our roster of speakers includes a variety of music professionals who will bring different viewpoints and approaches to their conversations about the music. Some of the approaches might include: exploring why a composer wrote a particular work, examining the social and historical context of a piece of music, looking at how a piece of music is constructed, and guided listening through recorded excerpts of the works being performed.
Inside Music Talks are offered free to all concertgoers and presented before most San Francisco Symphony subscription concerts and open rehearsals.
Speaker Biographies
Alexandra Amati-Camperi, originally from Italy, holds a BA/MA in Slavic Studies and Philology from the Università degli Studi di Pisa (Italy), degrees in piano from the Conservatory of Music of Lucca (Italy), and both an MA and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University. She is presently Associate Professor and Director of the Music Program at the University of San Francisco. Her interests include the Italian Renaissance, Italian opera, Feminist criticism, Romantic piano music, and German Baroque choral music. She has published books and papers on Renaissance, operatic, and gender related topics. She is now working on a book about the presentation and treatment of women in opera, as seen through a few settings of the Orpheus myth, tentatively titled Euridice: The Evolution of the Mythical and Musical Other. An article on the castrati in feminine roles is forthcoming, and one on the first operatic heroines has just been published. She is a professional program annotator and pre-concert lecturer for many Bay Area organizations, including the SF Symphony, the SF Opera and its six Bay Area Guilds, the SF Bach Choir, the SF Boys Chorus, Philharmonia Baroque, and others.
Scott Foglesong is currently the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he has been a faculty member since 1978. Mr. Foglesong also teaches in the Fall Freshman Program at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has the privilege of introducing young people to the glories of Western art music. As a pianist he has appeared with the Francesco Trio, Chanticleer, members of the San Francisco Symphony, and has played solo and chamber recitals nationwide in a repertoire ranging from Renaissance through ragtime, jazz, and modern idioms. He regularly contributes program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, and has published pieces on music in diverse publications. Originally trained at the Peabody Conservatory, he studied piano with Konrad Wolff; later at the San Francisco Conservatory he studied piano with Nathan Schwartz, harpsichord with Laurette Golberg, and theory with both Sol Joseph and John Adams.
James Gaffigan joined the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) as Associate Conductor in the fall of 2006 and leads the orchestra in numerous concerts throughout the season, including subscription weeks and all classical Summer in the City series concerts. He also assists SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas during his Davies Symphony Hall conducting weeks, national and international tours, and with SFS recording and multimedia projects. He made his subscription concert conducting debut with the SFS in March 2007. Previously, Gaffigan was Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra from 2003-2006. Appointed to that post by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, his responsibilities in Cleveland included assisting Welser-Möst throughout the season, conducting and covering subscription concerts at Severance Hall and the Blossom Music Festival and serving as Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. Born in 1979 in New York City, Gaffigan began his musical studies at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School Preparatory Division. He received his undergraduate degree from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music where he majored in bassoon performance and began his conducting studies with Frank Battisti. In May 2003 he earned his Masters of Music in conducting at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, where he worked with Lawrence Rachleff. One of eight young conductors chosen by David Zinman to participate in the inaugural year of the American Academy of Conducting in Aspen as an Academy Conductor during the summer of 2000, Mr. Gaffigan was the recipient of the Academy’s first Robert Harth Conducting Award in summer 2002. That same summer he made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival as part of a collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and the Aspen Music Festival and School. The following summer he was selected as one of two conducting fellows to study at the Tanglewood Music Center and has subsequently covered concerts for and coached by Michael Tilson Thomas, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kurt Masur, Andre Previn, Hans Graf, Robert Spano, and Jorma Panula. In September 2004, James Gaffigan was one of two first prize winners at the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt, Germany and during the 2005/2006 season made his debut with the Frankfurt Gesellschaft Museum Orchestra as a part of his competition award. In the United States, Mr. Gaffigan’s guest conducting has included appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, the Toronto, New World, Indianapolis, Pacific, Columbus, Utah, Charlotte and San Antonio symphonies and a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert. He is also the Music Director of CityMusic Cleveland, a chamber orchestra in Cleveland which presents free concerts throughout the city. In June 2008, he received the League of American Orchestra’s Helen M. Thompson Award for his work with CityMusic. Increasingly active as an opera conductor, James Gaffigan led his first opera production in 2003, conducting six performances of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at the Shepherd School of Music. He made his professional opera debut at the Zurich Opera in June 2005 conducting La Boheme, and returned to Zurich for seven revival performances of the same production in May 2006. During the fall of 2009, Mr. Gaffigan will conduct eight performances of Verdi’s Falstaff with Glyndebourne on Tour. He also makes his debuts with Opera Theatre St. Louis conducting a production of John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer in June 2010 and with the Houston Grand Opera conducting a production of Marriage of Figaro in April 2011.
Peter Grunberg served as Head of Music Staff at San Francisco Opera from 1992 to 1999 and is currently Musical Assistant to Michael Tilson Thomas. He has appeared as piano soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, has performed at the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg festivals, and has collaborated in recital with such artists as Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, and Joshua Bell. He has also conducted at the Moscow Conservatory, Grand Théâtre de Genève, and the Pacific Music Festival. In 2003 he played and spoke at the “Visual Sounds” symposium at SF MOMA, part of the SFS’s festival on Wagner, Weill, and the Weimar Republic.
James M. Keller, the San Francisco Symphony’s Program Annotator since 2000, also serves as Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic, where this season he has been named Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence. He holds degrees in music history and Romance languages from Oberlin College and a graduate degree in music history from Yale University. He was on the staff of The New Yorker for ten years, and he was honored with the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for his writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he serves as Contributing Editor. His many articles include contributions to the Encyclopedia of New York City (Yale University Press, 1995), George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound (Colorado College Music Press, 2005), and Leonard Bernstein: American Original (HarperCollins, 2008). His book Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide will be published in 2009 by Oxford University Press.
Susan Key is a musicologist specializing in American music. She has taught at the University of Maryland, the College of William and Mary, and Stanford University. A co-editor (with Larry Rothe) of American Mavericks: Musical Visionaries, Pioneers, Iconoclasts, published by University of California Press, she has also published articles on Stephen Foster, John Cage, and American music on early radio. Ms. Key currently directs the education component of Keeping Score: MTT on Music, the Symphony's multimedia program to connect listeners with music and the emotions it conveys.
John R. Palmer completed his Ph.D. at UC Davis and has taught courses on the music of Wagner, Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart and Verdi, as well as on popular music, cultural history, and writing. Dr. Palmer studied at the University of Vienna as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and has since worked at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco and San Francisco Opera. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Sonoma State University Department of Music, which has recently moved into its new home in the Green Music Center.
Laura Stanfield Prichard is a conductor, musicologist, and vocalist specializing in choral music and modernism. She is a lecturer and writer for the summer Berkshire Choral Festival, teaches courses in Musicology for the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and is the Director of Fine Arts for the Arlington, MA public schools. Since moving to the Boston area in 2003, Ms. Prichard led the Boston-based Sharing a New Song Chorus on collaborative concert tours of South Africa and Vietnam and conducted the Yale Alumni Chorus in Moscow and the Netherlands. She lecturers regularly for the Boston Baroque and directs the music program at the First Parish UU Church in Arlington, MA, which has led significant relief efforts and reconstruction trips to the UU churches of New Orleans. An alumna of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, she performs regularly with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. From 2003-2006, she conducted the award-winning Sängerchor Boston, the oldest German-language choir in the US, and is the Assistant Conductor of the New World Chorale, the choir-in-residence for the Longwood Symphony and the Boston Ballet. She taught music and dance at California State University-East Bay (Hayward) and San Francisco State University for eight years, and has presented lectures at the San Francisco Symphony since 1996.
Benjamin Shwartz, joined the SFS's conducting staff in 2005 as Assistant Conductor and Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO). In 2006 he was appointed Resident Conductor in addition to his position with the Youth Orchestra. He works closely with SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas throughout the year and leads the SFSYO in its entire season of concerts. In the summer of 2008 he led the SFSYO in its eighth international tour with concerts throughout Germany and the Czech Republic. The tour included the SFSYO's debuts at Berlin's Berliner Philharmonie, Munich's Philharmonie im Gasteig and Prague's Smetana Hall, as well as three acclaimed music festivals throughout Germany with concerts in Rostock, Passau, and Ingolstadt. Mr. Shwartz made his SFS subscription concert debut last season when he conducted the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Asteroids in June 2008. Benjamin Shwartz has also conducted the New World Symphony, the Symphonies of Delaware, Newark, and Reading, and the Riva Festival Orchestra, Italy and will make his debut with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony, and will direct his first opera at the Curtis Institute of Music this season. Committed to new music, Benjamin Shwartz has led numerous world premieres of works by composers of his generation. Benjamin is the conductor of Mercury Soul, a new music project, which he curates together with composer Mason Bates and designer Anne Patterson. The ensemble presents new music for acoustic and electronic instruments in clubs and other unusual locations blurring the lines between classical, experimental, and electronic music. Raised in Los Angeles and Israel, Benjamin Shwartz attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he received the Shanis Fellowship to study conducting. While at Curtis, Benjamin Shwartz worked closely with Christoph Eschenbach in preparing the Curtis Orchestra for concerts. He also studied composition with James Primosch at the University of Pennsylvania, Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany, and at IRCAM in Paris. Benjamin Shwartz has received numerous awards for his work including the Presser Music Award and was a prize-winner in the 2007 Bamberg Symphony Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition.
Michael Steinberg, a contributing writer to the San Francisco Symphony's program book, served as SFS Program Annotator for twenty years. He is the author of three “Listener’s Guides,” The Symphony, The Concerto, and Choral Masterworks, as well as For the Love of Music, a volume of essays (with Larry Rothe). All of these are published by Oxford University Press (and available at the Symphony Store, in the orchestra lobby).