It's not that easy to pull off the quadruple role of full-time San Francisco Symphony member, chamber music player, teacher, and composer. But violinist Sarn Oliver does all that and he's decided to take on a new entrepreneurial career, founding a new Bay Area music event, the Marin Chamber Music Festival, which he hopes will take flight for the first time this coming summer. “I have a lot of energy,” he says. “Sometimes it drives my wife and friends a little crazy.”
To get things rolling — making the necessary personal contacts, beginning the race to secure funding and a workable, inviting venue, getting the word out — Oliver is producing a concert at the Tamalpais Community Center in Mill Valley on Sunday, January 30. The show not only includes a chamber orchestra made up of a bunch of his Symphony friends, it also includes a handful of young soloists who are following in their SFS-affiliated parents' footsteps: cellist Mariko Wyrick, pianist Robert Pearce, and violinist Anna Kolbialka (the exception, whose parents are not SFS members.)
It's a worthy endeavor — Marin County has no major summer music festival to call its own — but the concert promises to deliver some bang for your seed-money buck. Oliver has commissioned a new work from his Hawaiian buddy, the respected composer Robert Pollack, and he will play a movement of his own violin concerto, Sunlun. Pearce will take the solo part in Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso for Piano and Orchestra. As for beloved, familiar classics, Wyrick will be featured in Oliver's own orchestration of the Chopin Waltz in A Major, as well as in Rachmaninov's Vocalise, while Kobialka rips through the challenging “Winter” concerto from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
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Younger players are an integral part of Oliver's vision for the festival, which he is tentatively scheduling for two weeks in August. “It will combine colleagues who are local and from around the world to play chamber music, but additionally, to coach local kids in chamber music, chamber orchestra, and a little bit of private instruction.”
It may be that Marin, with a smaller population than the counties to the south and no major urban hub, isn't a natural place for a music festival, and perhaps that's why none have stuck there. But Oliver is optimistic: “Part of my reason for starting the festival is that during the summers there really isn't anything going on in Marin, and I'm a little surprised about that, because it really is the perfect area for something like this. And so usually during the summer I fly around and play other festivals. And I'd been doing that for a while and thinking, 'what a shame, Marin is so beautiful in the summer, and I'd like to be at home.' There are so many musicians and young talented kids here — it has everything that an area would need in order to have a really great festival.”
Oliver's current quest is to find a home for the nascent festival. “It's a litte bit tough because we need, not just the concert hall but a place that has rooms large enough for ensembles to rehearse in and be coached in, and some ensembles are also going to need a piano in the room. So I'm looking at various schools or churches, but at this moment I haven't settled on the place. And I think that as we do more events we'll make contacts with people who want to help make this work.”
Right now, the fledgling group is working under the umbrella of the invaluable San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, so that people can give tax-free donations to the new festival. “If you just make small steps and keep going, the support will come.” Trust the indefatigable Oliver on that one.