Hello and welcome back to our email preview series! As a way to prepare for the upcoming concert, Magical Joy of Piano Fourhands, we are diving into the world of piano music across the composers that will be represented in the concerts in November! While you’re here, don’t forget to RSVP– we sold out our last concerts 😜 We have previously covered the Schumanns and their work in these guided listening blog posts: Today, we will discuss their contributions to Piano fourhands m

Hello and welcome back to our email preview series! As a way to prepare for the upcoming concert, Magical Joy of Piano Fourhands, we are diving into the world of piano music across the composers that will be represented in the concerts in November! While you’re here, don’t forget to RSVP– we sold out our last concerts 😜 Walter Gieseking was a famous Franco-German pianist and composer of the early 20th century. He was most well known for his intuitive and effortless playing o

Hello and welcome back to our email preview series! As a way to prepare for the upcoming concert, Magical Joy of Piano Fourhands, we are diving into the world of piano music across the composers that will be represented in the concerts in November! While you’re here, don’t forget to RSVP– we sold out our last concerts 😜 Brahms at the Piano Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer who produced a large and diverse œuvre (over 120 opus works and numerous uncategorized

For our final guided listening, we will explore the life and work of Gabriella Smith. Make sure you attend one of our concerts starting next week! Gabriella Smith was born in San Francisco and has gone on to achieve momentous success as a composer and climate activist. Her recent concerto, Lost Coast was premiered in 2023 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gabriel Cabezas under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. For our introduction to Gabriella Smith’s music, I’ve chosen to

Hello and welcome to our third installment of posts for our upcoming concert, Fascinating Rhythms premiering September 19th at the Miramar House. There will be 2 additional concerts on September 25th and 26th! Make sure to reserve your spot before they run out :-) Cooper Grosscup | Bound Bound came about as an attempt to merge the practice of “historical composition” with more modern technique and language. When composing historically, one tries to employ specific idioms and

Hello and welcome back to our email introduction to our program, Fascinating Rhythms. Make sure you catch our live performances of these brilliant composers later this month! American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) was highly influential in many different musical genres. Though he mostly composed for Broadway, he was known for blending the styles of pop, jazz, and classical music. Gershwin dropped out of school at age 15 and began making piano rolls for player pianos

Hello Insight fam and welcome back to Insight’s season! We are so happy to be back with our next season of concerts, and pleased to introduce you to the great composers in this season. Guided Listening | Jeu d'eau At the head of this concert is none other than one of my favorite composers, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). After his admittance into the Paris Conservatoire at age 14, he composed Pavane for a Dead Princess, and his String Quartet in F major. Following his studies, he

Hello and welcome to the last preview of our upcoming concert, Haven't I Heard That Before with Daniel Anastasio! To introduce you to Daniel and his work, we will spotlight his videos and respond to them below! Follow along for some fun insights from Daniel and our team and join us June 6th and 7th to hear his performance live at the Clocktower Salon. Des pas sur la neige (Footsteps in the Snow) | Claude Debussy Des pas sur la neige is a movement of Debussy's set of 24 prelud

Hello and welcome to the third preview of our upcoming concert, Haven't I Heard That Before with Daniel Anastasio! To introduce you to Daniel and his work, we will spotlight his videos and respond to them below! Follow along for some fun insights from Daniel and our team and join us June 6th and 7th to hear his performance live at the Clocktower Salon. Symphony No. 7 | Ludwig van Beethoven Above is an excerpt of Daniel's upcoming show, Haven't I Heard That Before which he wil

Hello and welcome to the second preview of our upcoming concert, Haven't I Heard That Before with Daniel Anastasio! To introduce you to Daniel and his work, we will spotlight his videos and respond to them below! Follow along for some fun insights from Daniel and our team and join us June 6th and 7th to hear his performance live at the Clocktower Salon. Hallelujah Junction mine – Photo by Brendan Traw Hallelujah Junction | John Adams "Hallelujah Junction is a tiny truck stop

Hello and welcome to the first preview of our upcoming concert, Haven't I Heard That Before with Daniel Anastasio! To introduce you to Daniel and his work, we will spotlight his videos and respond to them below! Follow along for some fun insights from Daniel and our team and join us June 6th and 7th to hear his performance live at the Clocktower Salon. Kinderszenen | Scenes from Childhood by Robert Schumann "Kinderszenen is fascinating from a piano pedagogy standpoint and oft

Hello and welcome to the final preview for our upcoming show, Spotlight Series: The Prepared Piano coming up NEXT SUNDAY!! For this week, we got a chance to interview one of the composers, Lukáš Janata. Janata, Tin Yi Chelsea, and Leah overlapped in conservatory thus bringing this collaboration into existence! Since graduating from the conservatory, Janata has been commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Alarm Will Sound, Cantori New York, Frictio

Hello and welcome back to our preview for our concert Spotlight Series: the Prepared Piano. This week we will explore the career of the composer and pianist, Fazil Say whose work, Black Earth will be performed at our concert Sunday March 22nd! Fazil Say was born in Ankara, Turkey and showed an enormous amount of potential at a young age being able to sound out various Turkish folk tunes and melodies. Recognizing his talents, his father quickly enrolled him in piano lessons wi

Hello again! Welcome to our preview series for our upcoming concert, The Prepared Piano with Tin Yi Chelsea Wong ! We wanted to do a bit of extra pre-insight for this cycle as the Prepared Piano is a very niche and cool pocket of the classical world! Everyone is familiar with a normal piano, but a Prepared Piano is an umbrella term for a piano which has added… “hardware” to it. From the image above, you can see that the composer called for the addition of various screws and

Hi and welcome to our last preview of Tenth Muse! Concerts begin Saturday, February 15th. We hope this round of newsletters has been helpful in introducing you to our upcoming program! For our last preview, we will focus on Cooper Grosscup's inspiration for Tenth Muse, Sappho. To read our previous post on Cooper, click here . Sappho's Life Sappho and Alcaeus, Sir Laweence Alma Tadema 1881 Sappho was an ancient Greek poet born approximately c.610. She specialized in lyric poe

Hello and welcome back to our third installment of our preview for Tenth Muse coming up later this month! We are pivoting to the contemporary world of Dominick Argento (1927-2019) and his muse Virginia Woolf, who inspired his piece on our program. Dominick Argento Argento was best known for his vocal music; he composed 13 operas over his lifetime. He married the soprano, Carolyn Bailey, who was a collaborative partner and premiered many of his works. The drive to create voca

Hello and welcome back to our preview series for Tenth Muse! Last week we covered the life of Robert Schumann and his inspiration from his wife, Clara . This week we will do a deep dive into Clara’s life before and after her marriage with Robert, as well as on her impact on future generations of women performers and composers. To hear Clara’s work performed live, come to our concerts next month! Clara's Life As mentioned last week, Clara’s father was a renowned piano pedago

Happy New Year! Welcome back to our Insight Previews. Over the next few weeks we’ll cover the composers and poets who we will showcase in Tenth Muse, our upcoming concert series featuring work by and about women. Use the link below for tickets and information about the cycle! Robert Schumann and his Muse Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was a German pianist and composer during the romantic period. Many of his most famous works were either written for or edited by his wife, Clara

The Insight Chamber community would love to wish you a very Happy Holidays and New Year! We celebrated last weekend with a thank you dinner for our hosts, donors, and volunteers at the Clocktower Salon. The evening was filled with delicious food and a guided listening of Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E Minor and Rondo k. 373 performed by Leah and Yunyi. " Your concerts provide us with joy that lasts weeks after you're done playing. Continue filling our cups and souls. THANK YOU"

We’ve reached our last spotlight on Falling into Folk which begins next weekend! This week, we will feature our resident composer, José Daniel Vargas and his inspirations while writing Variations on Luna Llorona which you will hear soon! To read more about José’s background, check out his previous blog post . A photo of my family in traditional Mexican garb. Our heritage was always an important part of our identity, and the guitar in my hands was only one of the tons of instr