Date & Time: Saturday October 15, 2022, 7:30 p.m.
Venue: Incarnation Episcopal Church, 1750 29th Avenue, San Francisco
Tickets: $25 General, $20 Seniors/Students
Eventbrite Ticketing: Buy online
Health and Safety
In accordance with health and safety guidelines from the City and County of San Francisco, a face covering is required for all concerts at Incarnation Episcopal church and must be worn at all times. Face masks must completely cover nose and mouth and have ear loops or similar to hold in place. Gaiters and bandanas are not acceptable. Please click here for full details.
Program
A program of music composed by women composers, ranging from Dora Pejacevic to Chen Yi, Marion Bauer, and Kala Ramnath.
About the Artists
Sofia Schütte and Ines Guanchez founded Duo Avila in 2019, because they were disappointed with the lack of female and Latin American composers in classical music programming. Their collaboration — Sofia on violin, Ines on piano — happened naturally, built upon years of friendship and musical understanding.
Sofia and Ines met at a summer music camp in 2010 and, being among a handful of Venezuelans attending, forged a strong friendship. In addition, both of their families had moved to Costa Rica for different reasons, and by a quirk of fate, ended up in the same neighborhood. They been friends ever since.
We started giving recitals in 2015, and as time went by, we realized a common concern: What could we, two Venezuelan musicians beginning their careers, do to help address the lack of diversity we often witnessed in the Western classical music world?
The answer was simple in concept: We would use our combined musical knowledge, skills and passion to perform the music of female and Latin composers and share it with audiences. For our first concert, we wanted to program music written by female composers whose music, due to the time and society in which they were born, hadn’t received the same attention and respect as that of their male counterparts.
– Ines Guanchez
Through the support of the University of Minnesota’s School of Music and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture and Youth, Duo Avila was able to secure a debut concert “Reinventing the Classics,” at the National Theater of Costa Rica on Oct. 11, 2020. The free live-streamed concert featured Amy Beach’s Piano and Violin Sonata, Clara Wieck-Schumann’s Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22, and Lili Boulanger’s D’un Matin de Printemps.
The concert was created with three primary goals:
First, we wanted to give audiences in Costa Rica and around the world an opportunity to listen to music at a time when attending concerts is difficult, if not impossible. In particular, we wanted to broadcast the concert from the Foyer of the Costa Rican National Theater, a building considered to be one of the most important cultural patrimonies of the country, and a beloved venue that Costa Ricans haven’t been able to visit since early March.
Second, we wanted to share the music of female Western classical composers to engage women and girls in the audience. We hope that by seeing themselves represented not only in the performers, but also the composers, these women and girls will be inspired to pursue classical music.
Finally, we hope to inspire other performers to play this music. These works contain musical depth and compositional techniques that have challenged us and helped us grow as musicians. They are pieces that we firmly believe are of a high caliber and deserve to be performed regularly within the classical repertoire.
We hope that one day, orchestras and performers will include more female and Latin composers in their everyday concerts, judging them solely by the unbiased merit of their music. We look forward to a future where this music will be heard in concert halls across the world and performed by students and professionals alike.
– Ines Guanchez