There is no better demonstration of what dedication and hard work can accomplish than the continuing saga of 405 Shrader, San Francisco’s "intimate concert hall" of 41 seats, a season of free performances, and imaginative programming.
Ellen and Victor Milenski open the series of six "aperitif concerts" — all starting at 7 p.m., and lasting about an hour — on Oct. 11, as violist Don Ehrlich performs Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola with pianist Ellen Milenski, and mezzo soprano Betany Coffland sings five songs by Rebecca Clark, including The Seal Man (1922), a celtic legend in which a seal becomes a man who lures women to a watery death.
Clarke (1886-1979) was an English composer whose works embody musical trends of the early 20th century, particularly those of Maurice Ravel and Ernst Bloch. She was a violist, among the first women to break into the male fraternity of orchestra players. The Clarke oeuvre is small, her major chamber works were composed between 1919 and 1923. Most of her songs for voice and piano appear in the later 'Twenties, the final ones composed in 1942. The viola sonata (1919) has become a mainstay of the solo viola repertory, her songs, of great beauty, remain far less known.
British cellist Hannah Sloane follows on Oct. 25, performing the Richard Strauss Sonata for Cello, Op. 6, with pianist Allegra Chapman. Also on the program is Zemlimsky’s early, Brahms-like Three Pieces for Cello (1891), plus Anton Webern’s very first composition, the brief Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (1899) — 45 bars of music, and his spartan Three Pieces for Cello and Piano, Opus 11 (1914) — 2 1/2 minutes duration.
The November calendar of concerts begins on Nov. 8 with pianist Daniel Glover performing Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the Szymanowski Etudes Op. 12, followed on Nov. 15 by Milenski playing the Rameau Suite in A minor for harpsichord, edited for piano by Camille Saint-Saëns and three Messiaen Preludes for piano.
On Nov. 22, DuoW, cellist Meta Weiss and violinist Arianna Warsaw-Fan perform the two best-known pieces for violin-cello duet, the duos by Kodaly and Ravel. On Nov. 29 pianist Ian Scarfe, clarinetist Sasha Rattle, violinist Edwin Huizinga and cellist Charly Akert perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.