Alexander Barantschik, Concertmaster
Inside Music Pre-Concert Talks
Join us at Davies Symphony Hall one hour before select concerts for a free pre-concert talk! Inside Music talks are designed to enhance your enjoyment of the concert by providing insights into the works on the program—bringing you “inside” the music.
Our roster of speakers includes a variety of music professionals who will bring different viewpoints and approaches to their conversations about the music. Some of the approaches might include exploring why a composer wrote a particular work, examining the social and historical context of a piece of music, looking at how a piece of music is constructed, and guided listening through recorded excerpts of the works being performed.
From our season calendar, simply click on your upcoming concert to view whether the concert includes an Inside Music talk.
Speaker Biographies
Alexandra Amati-Camperi, originally from Italy, holds a BA/MA in Slavic Studies and Philology from the Università degli Studi di Pisa (Italy), degrees in piano from the Conservatory of Music of Lucca (Italy), and both an MA and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University. She is Professor of Music and Chair of the Performing Arts Department at the University of San Francisco.
Her interests include the Italian Renaissance, Italian opera, Feminist criticism, Romantic piano music, and German Baroque choral music. She has published books and papers on Renaissance, operatic, and gender related topics. She is working on a book about the presentation and treatment of women in opera, as seen through a few settings of the Orpheus myth, tentatively titled Euridice: The Evolution of the Mythical and Musical Other. She has recently published articles on castrati in feminine roles, early operatic female roles, and Venetian 17th-century opera.
She is a professional program annotator and pre-concert lecturer for many Bay Area organizations, including the SF Symphony, the SF Opera and its six Bay Area Guilds, the SF Bach Choir, the SF Boys Chorus, Philharmonia Baroque, and others.
Scott Foglesong is currently the Chair of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he has been a faculty member since 1978. In 2008 he was the recipient of the Sarlo Family Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching. Mr. Foglesong also teaches in the Fall Freshman Program at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has the privilege of introducing young people to the glories of Western art music.
He is on the faculty of the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at USF, and also serves as Program Annotator and Scholar in Residence for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He is a Contributing Writer for the San Francisco Symphony’s Playbill, authored S.F. Classical Music Examiner during 2008-2009, and has published pieces on music in diverse publications.
As a pianist, he has appeared with the Francesco Trio, Chanticleer, members of the San Francisco Symphony, and has played solo and chamber recitals nationwide in a repertoire ranging from Renaissance through ragtime, jazz, and modern idioms. As both pianist and lecturer he has been heard on radio shows such as West Coast Weekend and My Favorite Things and also appears on recordings from various labels. Originally trained at the Peabody Conservatory, he studied piano with Elizabeth Katzenellenbogen; later at the San Francisco Conservatory he studied piano with Nathan Schwartz, harpsichord with Laurette Goldberg, and theory with both Sol Joseph and John Adams.
Ronald Gallman, the San Francisco Symphony’s Director of Education and Youth Orchestra, is a music educator who has written and lectured extensively on symphonic repertoire, chamber music, and opera. Gallman manages the San Francisco Symphony’s “Inside Music” talks and oversees the SFS’s extensive slate of education initiatives.
Peter Grunberg served as Head of Music Staff at San Francisco Opera from 1992 to 1999 and is currently Musical Assistant to Michael Tilson Thomas. He has appeared as piano soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, has performed at the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg festivals, and has collaborated in recital with such artists as Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, and Joshua Bell.
He has also conducted at the Moscow Conservatory, Grand Théâtre de Genève, and the Pacific Music Festival. Over the last few years, Mr. Grunberg has been a principal collaborator on the Symphony's Keeping Score project, both as music editor for the documentaries, and as music consultant for the website.
James M. Keller, the San Francisco Symphony’s Program Annotator since 2000, also serves as Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic, where in the 2008-2009 season he was Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence. His book Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press.
His many articles include contributions to Leonard Bernstein at Work: His Final Years, 1984-1990 (Amadeus Press), Leonard Bernstein: American Original (HarperCollins), George Crumb and the Alchemy of Sound (Colorado College Music Press), and the Encyclopedia of New York City (Yale University Press).
He was a staff writer-editor at The New Yorker for ten years, and he was honored with the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for his writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he serves as Contributing Editor. He is critic-at-large for The Santa Fe New Mexican, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, and is curator of the exhibition Singing the Golden State, spotlighting historical popular music about California, which runs from January through December 2012 at the Society of California Pioneers in San Francisco.
Susan Key is a musicologist specializing in American music. She has taught at the University of Maryland, the College of William and Mary, and Stanford University. A co-editor (with Larry Rothe) of American Mavericks: Musical Visionaries, Pioneers, Iconoclasts, published by University of California Press, she has also published articles on Stephen Foster, John Cage, and American music on early radio. Ms. Key currently works on a variety of special projects in media, education, and artistic planning.
John R. Palmer completed his Ph.D. at UC Davis and has taught courses on the music of Wagner, Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart and Verdi, as well as on popular music, cultural history, and writing. Dr. Palmer studied at the University of Vienna as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and has since worked at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco and San Francisco Opera.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Sonoma State University Department of Music, which has recently moved into its new home in the Green Music Center.
Laura Stanfield Prichard, educated at Yale and the University of Illinois, Laura is a regular lecturer and writer for the Chicago Symphony, Boston Baroque, Boston Ballet, and the summer Berkshire Choral Festival. A strong advocate of music education, she teaches courses in Music and History for the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, conducts student choirs for Merriam School in Acton, MA, is the Musical Director for the Winchester (MA) Cooperative Theater, and directs the music program at the First Parish UU Church in Arlington, MA.
Both she and her husband Michael perform regularly with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Pops, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since moving to the Boston area in 2003, Dr. Prichard conducted the choirs at Lawrence Academy of Groton, led the Boston-based Sharing a New Song Chorus on collaborative concert tours of South Africa and Vietnam and conducted the Yale Alumni Chorus in Moscow and the Netherlands.
From 2003-2006, she directed the award-winning Sängerchor Boston, the oldest German-language choir in the US, and was the Assistant Conductor of the New World Chorale, the choir-in-residence for the Longwood Symphony and the Boston Ballet. She has written articles for the forthcoming Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latin Music, the forthcoming New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and writes editorial prefaces for the Musikproduktion Höflich publishing company in Munich.
An alumna of the San Francisco Chamber Singers (Volti) and former assistant conductor to Vance George for the SF Symphony Chorus, she taught music and dance at California State University-East Bay (Hayward) and San Francisco State University for eight years, and has presented lectures for the San Francisco Symphony since 1996.