The Pacific Musical Society, San Francisco's oldest and noblest support organization for young musicians has been helping to launch careers since 1910, with a roster of hundreds of alumni.
The list includes Yehudi Menuhin (the first prize winner), Pierre Salinger (pianist and press secretary to President Kennedy), tenor Jess Thomas, composer David Del Tredici, pianists Leon Fleisher and Roy Bogas, cellist Matt Haimovitz, and many, many more.
The major source of funding grants to competing youngsters is the annual gala, a major social-artistic event. This year, it takes place on Dec. 6, at the Metropolitan Club — a historic venue only five years younger than the Society, built at the apex of the women’s suffrage movement, and the first women’s clubhouse in the state designed on the model of a Renaissance palazzo, a style associated in the past with business and masculine institutions.
For the first time in years, the gala will go on without Frederica von Stade, called away on family business, but she is participating in preparations, and remains one of the mainstays of the organization (as she is of many similar groups working for the welfare and success of young talent). The gala will honor Sheri Greenawald, director of the San Francisco Opera Center; performances are by award-winning young artists, the Society's Marcelle Dronkers (soprano), accompanied by James Meredith (piano).
Meredith is the Society's vice president, along with Claudia Landivar; Monica Foyer is the president. They and the rest of the board relish the group's vigorous growth, increasing first-prize awards to $4,000, recruiting important new board members and supporters, starting several new initiatives, such as the Living Legends video recording project "to connect younger musicians with the collected wisdom of the past." A three-hour video interview with legendary pianist Ruth Slenczynska has been completed, next up are Flicka and Olivia Stapp, with plans for many more.
Meredith is also founder/director of the Sonos Handbell Ensemble, which celebrates its 25th anniversary next year, and a key faculty member of Berkeley's Young Musicians Choral Orchestra which, he reports, "is going strong with this year's crop of graduating seniors getting their applications in to colleges and conservatories." YMCO will have a program on Dec. 18, featuring Flicka; I will have more information when it becomes available.