Early Music News

SFEMS 2018 Annual Meeting

Board and Staff Changes, BFX and Affiliates Reports The San Francisco Early Music Society held its annual membership meeting at Berkeley’s Musical Offering café and record store on Wednesday evening, September 12. After some pleasant socializing...

Annual Meeting Will Take Place September 12

SFEMS will hold its Annual Members’ Meeting on Wednesday, September 12, from 7:00 to 8:15 p.m., at The Musical Offering, 2430 Bancroft Way in Berkeley. All SFEMS members are cordially invited to attend. This is your chance to meet your Board...

American Recorder Rally Coming to the Bay Area

Matthias Maute, whose Ensemble Caprice will be featured on the SFEMS concert series next spring, will be in the Bay Area in early September, and our community of recorder players has been presented with a rare opportunity to play in concert with one...

Voices Shaping Time

SFEMS 2018–19 SFEMS Concert Season The SFEMS annual concert series always seems a bit like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. You never know quite what you’ll get, but you may be sure it will be sweet. Last year’s series certainly was broadest in...

Unsung Voices

In 1991, Concerto Amabile with soprano Nancy Zylstra gave a concert on the SFEMS series titled “Unsung Heroines,” a program of music by women: Barbara Strozzi, Isabella Leonarda, Maddalena Lombardini, Ana Bon, and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la...

Lost Songs

One of the main themes of the upcoming Berkeley Festival is reexamining the nature and meaning of “early music.” Some of the most fascinating happenings the Festival will be presentations of music from the extremes of the historical spectrum. Much...

Debussy as Early Music

The Piano and the Pianist in the Early Twentieth Century by Nicholas Mathew The upcoming Berkeley Festival features perhaps the broadest range of historical music ever presented at an early music festival—a claim which should be made with some...