Features

All kinds of instrumental combinations occur in classical music, though chamber music is by far the most diverse, in terms of instrumentation and variety. If you’ve shunned this area, you’re missing out on much of the world’s greatest music, since many composers have poured their finest concepts into chamber music, especially the string quartet.

It’s the purity of chamber music that attracts composers. 

San Domenico School’s Virtuoso Program, which will travel from its San Anselmo home to San Francisco for a showcase program here on March 29, goes back to Venetian girls’ orphanages in the 17th century. That, at least, is what the program’s founder, Faith France, told me many years ago. She was teaching music at San Domenico, a small independent school in Marin (which originally opened in Monterey in 1850), when she had an epiphany while visiting Venice.

Of all the underrated genius-level composers of the 19th century, none is more undeserving of his second-tier status than Felix Mendelssohn, whose bicentennial occurs this Tuesday, February 3. Few displayed a more natural or more all-encompassing talent than he, and from a remarkably early age, at that. In a way, he was the Mozart of the Romantic age.

St. Martin de Porres is a small parochial school in North Oakland. It is named for a 17th-century Dominican brother from Peru who was famous for establishing orphanages and children’s hospitals. He was canonized in 1962.

St. Martin’s has some 200 “students of color,” fully 90 percent of them on financial assistance, and as many qualifying for a free or reduced-cost lunch. But the school had no music program whatsoever.