Chamber Music San Francisco’s founder and director, Daniel Levenstein, has announced what he anticipates will be his final season with the organization — “still on the job, stepping down July 1, assuming they have found my successor by then,” he told SF Classical Voice.
When complimented on the 2024 programming, Levenstein responded: “Truth be told, all our seasons have pretty much been at this high level of quality.”
Levenstein’s bio on the CMSF website lists some of his many previous showbiz jobs before running the chamber music organization:
“In 1993, after working with the late choreographer Michael Smuin on dozens of projects (including Anything Goes on Broadway, the Geena Davis film Angie, and a show for Siegfried & Roy), Levenstein co-founded Smuin Ballet and served as its executive director until 2001.”
CMSF is still offering performances of select programs in Walnut Creek and Palo Alto, even after SF Grants for the Art’s cut its support for the organization. The full run of concerts will be in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre:
— Zlata Chochieva, piano (Feb. 11 at 3 p.m.): works by Alexander Scriabin, Frédéric Chopin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff
— Tiffany Poon, piano (Feb. 25 at 3 p.m.): works by Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, J.S. Bach, and Chopin
— Esmé Quartet with Yekwon Sunwoo, piano (March 3 at 3 p.m.): works by Haydn, Debussy, and Brahms
— Rafał Blechacz, piano (March 10 at 3 p.m.): works by Mozart, Debussy, Karol Szymanowski, and Chopin
— Boccherini String Trio (March 24 at 3 p.m.): works by Beethoven, Ernő Dohnányi, and Mozart
— Steven Isserlis, cello, with Connie Shih, piano (April 14 at 3 p.m.): works by Ferruccio Busoni, Franz Schubert, Ernest Bloch, Gabriel Fauré, and Francis Poulenc
— Daniel Hope, violin, with Simon Crawford-Phillips, piano (April 30 at 8 p.m.): works by George Enescu, Maurice Ravel, Jake Heggie, and César Franck
— Viano String Quartet (May 7 at 8 p.m.): works by Haydn, Bedřich Smetana, and Beethoven
— Mayuko Kamio, violin, with Noreen Polera, piano (May 12 at 3 p.m.): works by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Edward Elgar, Antonín Dvořák, Manuel Ponce, Grigoraș Dinicu, Vittorio Monti, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Fritz Kreisler, and Rachmaninoff
— Bruce Liu, piano (May 17 at 8 p.m.): works by Haydn, Chopin, Nikolai Kapustin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Sergei Prokofiev
