2024 - 2025 Season | Concerts at a glance

What is the connection between the paths we create in life and how we listen? How can the act of listening to music inform our daily lives? These are questions which inspired the creation of much of Luigi Nono’s late music, and in turn are the catalyst for Left Coast’s 32nd season.

The centerpiece of the season is our Winter Wandering Festival from January 24-26 in Berkeley, and January 31-February 2 in San Francisco.

The late work of Schubert and Nono frames the festival: their music connects through a preoccupation with wandering and a concern with how the individual interacts with the world. Two new commissions, three world premieres, and collaborations across different disciplines are presented in five concerts across three days.

During the festival, Left Coast will cross paths with the chamber choir Volti, tenor Kyle Stegall, artist Adrian Arias, and the Berkeley Art and Interreligious Pilgrimage Project.

The season opens with cabaret and closes with contrasts: two central works of the twentieth century look outside the classical frame and can be heard here alongside voices which are new and artists which have been unjustly overlooked.

— Matilda Hofman, Artistic Director

FALL CONCERT

Fall Cabaret: Pierrot Lunaire

7:30pm, Saturday, November 2, 2024 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)
4:00pm, Sunday, November 3, 2024 (Berkeley Hillside Club, Berkeley)

An evening of genre-breaking works from the 20th and 21st centuries immerses the listener in interactions between poetry, music, and the human voice. The composers explore the extremes of drama and poetry within the intimate setting of chamber music.

WINTER WANDERING FESTIVAL

January 24-26 (East Bay) | January 31-February 2 (San Francisco)

Three intense days of music explore the human journey and its connections to place, space, and the imagination.

SCHUBERT QUINTET: HAY QUE CAMINAR

7:30pm, Friday, January 24, 2025 (First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley)
4:00pm, Sunday, February 2, 2025 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)

The last works of Luigi Nono and Franz Schubert, performed back to back, reveal a sense of deep beauty, profound unease, and a sensitivity to the close connection between happiness and sorrow on the threshold of life and death.

ECHO CONTEST…NEARLY

11:30am, Saturday, January 25, 2025 (First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley)

Left Coast will join with community members to create two improvisatory works which explore the spatial dimension of music within Maybeck’s innovative architecture.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF DREAMLAND

7:30pm, Saturday, January 25, 2025 (First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley)
7:30pm, Saturday, February 1, 2025 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)

A lost highway, witches, folk songs… Volti joins Left Coast for an eclectic, beautiful, and sometimes unsettling sonic journey. New works from LJ White and Todd Kitchen, exploring instability and dreams, contrast with the humor of Laurie San Martin’s Witches and Benjamin Britten’s tender folk song arrangements.

A DARK MATTER

11:30am, Sunday, January 26, 2025 (Berkeley Hillside Club, Berkeley)
11:30am, Saturday, February 1, 2025 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)

Space travel meets Art in a program which is interpreted in live painting by artist Adrian Arias.

WINTER JOURNEY

5:00pm, Sunday, January 26, 2025 (Berkeley Piano Club, Berkeley)
7:30pm, Friday, January 31, 2025 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)

In Schubert’s last song cycle, the wanderer and his landscape become one in this journey into the depths of the human soul. Emotions from tenderness to despair come together in a cathartic winter journey.

SPRING CONCERT

SPRING CONTRASTS

7:30pm, Saturday, June 7, 2025 (Piedmont Center for the Arts, Piedmont)
7:30pm, Monday, June 9, 2025 (Noe Valley Ministry, San Francisco)

The contrasting timbres of the violin, clarinet, and piano bring to life a vibrant variety of musical imaginations in this program of rhythmic vitality and melodic invention.

Image credit: Copyright Adrian Arias, used by permission of Artist. Adrian Arias is a visual artist, poet, performer, curator, activist, and cultural promoter, who brings together multidisciplinary artists to engage in community projects with messages of social justice, racial equality, climate change, peace, beauty, health, and hope in the San Francisco Bay Area.The banner image is a detail of Dream Escape #1.