Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival presents its first program of 2024, AMERICAN SPRING.
The concerts will feature a 13-instrument ensemble performing one of the great classics of American music, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, alongside a new commission for the same ensemble by local composer Sam Reider.
Saturday evening’s concert will be at Monument SF, a warehouse in the SOMA neighborhood that has been artistically converted into a live/work/event space that hosts live art, dance, and music, and offers affordable housing to a range of residents. Sunday afternoon’s matinee will be at the Century Club of California, which was founded in 1888 as a private women’s club and boasts a beautiful historic clubhouse in San Francisco’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood. Audiences must register to attend either concert at www.Groupmuse.com, the cost is $5 to register, and a suggested contribution of $25 at the door.
The Trinity Alps Festival was founded in 2011 with two missions: to offer professional musicians an intensive retreat in the scenic and rural Trinity Alps region of Northern California, and to offer concert programs and educational events to communities across the state. In the past 13 years, the festival has presented over 500 public programs, many of them in remote rural communities, and all of them open to the public on a “suggested donation” basis.
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring was written in 1944, originally titled “Ballet for Martha”. The music captures the style of early American folk music, weaving a series of dances together in a seamless suite that culminates on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”. Although the work is famous in the arrangements for a full symphonic orchestra, the original scoring was for 13 instruments: strings, piano, flute, clarinet, and bassoon. This smaller musical ensemble allowed Martha Graham’s Dance Company to easily tour with the production. It became an instant classic, and Copland won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for the piece.
Sam Reider is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated pianist, accordionist, composer, and educator from San Francisco, California. His work brings together various streams of American music, from jazz and folk tunes to popular song and contemporary composition. He has appeared as a bandleader and soloist at major festivals and venues around the world and his performances and original compositions have been featured on NPR, PBS and the BBC. Reider was the 2023 composer-in-residence at the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival. Audiences will be treated to a world premiere of his new composition for the 13-instrument ensemble, commissioned by the Trinity Alps Festival with support from InterMusic SF’s Musical Grant Project.
His work, Hyampom, is, in his own words, “Based on my childhood memories of my grandmother Emmy Abraham’s farm in the remote Northern California town of Hyampom in the Trinity Alps mountains. My piece is in conversation with Copland’s Appalachian Spring and incorporates melodies and rhythms from the American folk music my grandmother loved. Beginning with the call of the mourning dove, a sound that throughout my life has drawn my thoughts back to Hyampom, the piece contains six short movements, each one painting a picture of a particular memory, and organized into a portrait of a single day, from dawn to dusk.“
More information about the programs, performers, concerts, and the festival in general can be found at www.TrinityAlpsCMF.org.