San Francisco Chamber Orchestra encourages audiences to get up and dance in Very First Concerts, a classical series designed with the youngest listeners in mind. Each concert features a central theme, short selections, and hands-on musical activities geared toward families with young children (infants to 7 year-olds).

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Very First: The Wonderful World of Woodwinds!

Berkeley Public Library

World Premiere for Chamber Orchestra
commissioned by the SFCO with NEA and Emerging Black Composers Project.

MainStage 4 - Onwards and Upwards

First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley

First United Methodist Church

St. Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco

Five San Francisco Chamber Orchestra All-Stars team up for their annual program of viola quintets; no, that’s not five violas but rather a string quartet enhanced by a second violist.  Masterpieces by Mozart and Brahms.

Monday Night Chamber Music Society

The Freight and Salvage

Back by popular demand, the SF Opera’s stellar concertmaster performs a program of amazing duos with our own Ben Simon (viola). Works by Martinu, Bartok and Mozart will show off these virtuosic players and astound you with what two bows and eight strings can do!
Our Classical at the Freight concerts are ticketed events. General admission is$9 in advance, $11 at the door; all SFCO members get two tickets for the price of one.

Bach's Birthday with Kay Stern & Friends

World Premiere for String Quartet
commissioned by the SFCO with NEA and Emerging Black Composers Project.

MainStage 3 - Quartets and Quintets

First Congregational Church of Berkeley

War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

Our annual salute to the Salzburg scribbler, celebrating Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 267th birthday with a program of chamber music masterpieces. Featuring three amazing woodwind players, our program includes a bassoon duo, a flute quartet, and his incredible clarinet quintet. Great chamber music by the numero uno classical genius.

Mozart Birthday Celebration

My final MainStage program goes from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again. Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (he died too soon to finish it) is paired with the wacky musical humor of PDQ Bach’s (the last and oddest of JS Bach’s twenty-odd children) Unbegun Symphony, for which he was born too late to start! My chosen soloist for this final program is the remarkable Amaryn Olmeda, a 14-year old virtuso who is already making her mark on the classical music scene. Amaryn is a tremendous talent with unlimited potential, and will performing one of my favorite violin concerti. Felix Mendelssohn’s famous Violin Concerto E minor.
We finish this concert with the very apt Farewell Symphony by Franz Josef Haydn, in which the players leave the stage one by one during the final movement. Composed as a humorous reminder to his employer Prince Esterhazy that his musicians all wished to return from his summer estate to their homes in Vienna, it’s a brilliant piece of musical theater and seems a fitting close to my twenty-one wonderful years leading this amazing orchestra. I am leaving my heart with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra!

MainStage 2 - Greetings and Farewell

Saint Mark's Episcopal Church

University of California, Berkeley

We’re back! ViolaMania 5, the Holiday Edition, promises to be our biggest and best violafest yet. The Northern California Viola Society invites you to bring a viola for $1 off admission and join us in our fifth attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the Most Violists Playing Together. Hear the Bay Area’s top violists and learn a few new viola jokes. Don’t miss the fun and great viola ensemble music.

Viola Mania 5.0 Holiday!

Oakland Fairyland’s beloved puppeteers team up with the SFCO for a delightful version of Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic. Designed for young audiences, this production features the acrobatic antics of The Puppet Company’s miniature cast accompanied by the SFCO performing highlights from this beloved ballet.

Nutcracker Sweet with the Puppet Company

Mitchell Park

Noe Valley Ministry

Our esteemed concertmaster, Robin Sharp, leads an ensemble of San Francisco Chamber Orchestra All-Stars in a program of string quartet masterpieces. Joined by Natasha Makhhijani (violin), Ben Simon, (viola), and Eric Gaenslen (cello) this kickoff concert to our 2022-23 Classical at the Freight season will be amazing chamber music performed with poise and polish by our A-team of SFCO players.

Robin Sharp and Friends

For my penultimate program as Music Director of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, I’ve chosen three true chamber orchestra works close to my heart. Aaron Copland’s own chamber arrangement of his famous Appalachian Spring suite is a lovely distillation of the large orchestral version and an iconic classic of American music. Samuel Barber’s beautiful Knoxville: Summer of 1915 , featuring wonderful Bay Area soprano Ann Moss, is a nostalgic look back at a simpler time in our history and another well-loved bit of Americana.
Igor Stravinsky’s earth- shattering Rite of Spring, causing the audience to a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913, is a powerful shot across the bow of classical music by the 31 year old Russian composer. Written for a huge symphony orchestra, this amazing chamber orchestra version was commissioned by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra in 2011 as the first of our  Incredible Shrinking Orchestra Projet under the direction of Gabriela Lena Frank, working with six graduate composers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It’s a work I’ve always wanted a second chance to perform and it’s freshness and power remains in our “Rite Lite” version.

MainStage I - Beginnings and Endings

Five San Francisco Chamber Orchestra All-Stars team up for their annual program of viola quintets; no, that’s not five violas but rather a string quartet enhanced by a second violist.  Masterpieces by Mozart and Brahms.    Our Classical at the Freight concerts are ticketed events. General admission is $9 in advance, $11 at the door; all SFCO members get two tickets for the price of one.

Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse

Join the SFCO and two acclaimed choirs, San Francisco’s stellar Volti and the amazing young singers of the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir for the world premiere of Michael Gilbertson’s final commission as our BMI Composer-in-Residence.  Denial, set to both ancient and contemporary texts, is a powerful meditation on climate change and our current political deadlock.

MainStage IV - Beethoven's Seventh and Michael Gilbertson's Denial

First Congregational Church

Join us for a fun, friendly competition between our twelve musicians, as four woodwind, four string, and four brass players vie for the crown of “favorite instrument”. In this delightful and interactive show, the audience gets to vote as each musician plays a short solo from Michael Gilbertson’s charming piece “Jigsaw”.  Who will get to wear the crown?  It’s up to you!

The Great Classical Playoff

Oakland Asian Cultural Center

Back by popular demand, the SF Opera’s stellar concertmaster performs a program of amazing string trios by Beethoven and Dohnanyi with noted Bay Area cellist Gianna Abondolo and erstwhile violist Ben Simon. 

Kay Stern & Friends

We continue our Beethoven cycle with his charming Eighth Symphony, another infrequently heard masterpiece sandwiched between two towering and extremely popular symphonies.  Plus exciting new works from Jessica Hunt and Carlos Simon, commissioned by Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, an amazing incubator for talent founded by the prize-winning composer on her Boonville, CA farm.  

MainStage III - Beethoven's 8th plus Two World Premieres

Back by popular demand, the CMS fo SF is four young, passionate players (and SFCO All-Stars) dedicated to bringing masterworks of the chamber music repertoire to diverse audiences in intimate settings around the Bay Area. (https://chambermusicsocietysf.org/)  Join the Chamber Music Society of San Francisco and guest artists Stephen Prutsman and Evan Price for a boisterous program featuring works by Amy Beach, Johannes Brahms, and William Grant Still.  Our Classical at the Freight concerts are ticketed events. General admission is $9 in advance, $11 at the door;  all SFCO members get two tickets for the price of one.

Chamber Music Society of San Francisco

Happy Summer Solstice! Get ready for Summer with great music as only the SFCO does it!  The program kicks off with Fanny Mendehlssohn-Hensel’s Overture in C Major. 

MainStage II - Beethoven Four plus Four

From Greenland to Grenada, California to the Czech Republic, every culture has its rich musical tradition. Join our versatile band of SFCO All-Stars as we travel the globe to bring you souvenirs in song and dance; no passport required.  

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra

Jun 17, 2023

Very First: The Wonderful World of Woodwinds!

26 - 28 May, 2023

MainStage 4 - Onwards and Upwards

May 8, 2023

Monday Night Chamber Music Society

Mar 26, 2023

Bach's Birthday with Kay Stern & Friends

24 - 26 Feb, 2023

MainStage 3 - Quartets and Quintets

San Francisco Chamber Orchestra

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