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Welcome to The Berkeley Hillside Club Concert Series. Our goal is to provide a superb venue for musicians and listeners to experience the joy of live music performance. Come join us in our historic and acoustically excellent hall and see why artists and audiences are raving about our Concert Series. Our concerts generally begin at 8:00 pm (please check the individual concert listing for the exact time), and our doors open about one half hour before show time. Tickets are available at the door; we do not offer advance ticket sales. To receive timely announcements of up-coming events and other Concert Series news, please join our email list. Presidio Quartet The Berkeley Hillside Club is delighted to present the
Presidio Quartet in concert. A perennial favorite in
our Concert Series, this stellar ensemble is equally at home
with traditional classical repertoire as well as challenging new
music. Don't miss this opportunity to hear these superb artists
performing in our acoustically-excellent hall. The Ensemble The Presidio Quartet is a musical collaborative comprised of four outstanding young musicians with a wide range of international performance experience. The group performs to critical acclaim throughout the bay area and offers programs of complex yet accessible repertoire, with a focus on new music. The Presidio Quartet are: The Program Anton Webern: Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-13) The pieces chosen for the concert all explore the experience of time in some unique way. Webern condensces time into powerful hyper-expressive bursts, Arvo Pärt creates a feeling of stopping time, Ryther's Etudes for violin involve a slow transformation over time, and Beethoven's op.95 juxtaposes conflicting emotions in quick succession to create a disjunct and multifaceted experience of time. The Artists: Violinist David Ryther has brought his interpretive powers as a soloist to such festivals as the Darmstadt Summer Festival of New Music, the Banff center, and the Green Umbrella Series at the Bing theater in Los Angeles. He has been featured playing new music with adventurous ensembles sf sound group, Earplay, San Francisco Contemporary Players, the Berkeley New Music Ensemble, Sonor, and Octagon. He is a founding member of the Presidio String Quartet, a group that specializes in contemporary music. A composer and improvisor in his own right, he is composer and core member with the modern dance troupe, Dandelion Dance Theater and was chosen to be resident composer for a Magge Allsee residency at the University of Florida, Tallahasee with the New York based dance troupe Kate Weare and Company. His string orchestra piece "Scenes from Costa Rica" was commissioned by the Villa Sinfonia and was performed on their recent tour of Scotland and England. David Ryther graduated with highest honors in music from UC Santa Cruz and recently received his doctorate in contemporary violin performance from UC San Diego. Important mentors of his have included Janos Negyesy, Roy Malan, Roy Oakley, Ravi Shankar, and George Lewis. David Ryther can also be found playing in the Berkeley Symphony, the San Francisco Ballet orchestra and teaching violin at the Crowden School for Music. Deborah Katz celebrates her fourth year in the Bay Area playing violin with the Presidio String Quartet, teaching violin and viola lessons, and freelancing with local orchestras and chamber groups. Her active involvement in the music community has allowed her to draw on her affinity for contemporary as well as traditional classical music. Deborah received her bachelors of music from Indiana University where she studied with Henryk Kowalski, Nelli Shkolnikova, Yuval Yaron and Ilya Kaler. She received her Master's of Music from New England Conservatory where she studied with Malcolm Lowe, concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Deborah performed contemporary music with the Boston Callithumpian Consort, directed by Steve Drury as well as on the Harvard Composers~R Series. While at NEC she participated in various chamber ensembles collaborating with James Buswell, Lucy Chapman, Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, Mai Motobuchi, and Eliot Fisk. She was concertmaster and Principal Second of the NEC Chamber and Symphony orchestras. She also performed as soloist such as at the Malden Church in Boston, student compositions, and in collaboration with organist Tom Handel, Dean of Students at NEC. In addition to her performances in the Bay Area, New England, Colorado, and the Midwest in the U.S., she has also frequently performed abroad in Europe and Israel. In 2004 and 2006 she was invited to perform as Principal Second violinist with the Festival Ensemble of Stuttgart under Helmuth Rilling throughout Germany and Switzerland, and with the Jerusalem International Symphony in Israel. With the Presidio Quartet, she has been featured on new music concerts at Mills College, U.C. Berkeley and other San Francisco venues. Selections from the group~Rs Album, Five, have been broadcast on the San Louis Obispo classical radio station and on American Music Center's Counterstream radio online. Currently Deborah studies with Catherine Van Heusen of the San Francisco Symphony. Other teachers include Linda Cerone, Jenny Rudin and Chen Zhao. When not performing or working at Ifshin Violins, Deborah enjoys hiking amongst the redwoods, cooking, dancing, and rolling down grassy hills. Violist Ilana Matfis grew up in the Boston area and began playing the violin at age 5. After switching to the viola seven years later, she joined the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and subsequently decided on a career as a musician. Ilana received her Bachelors degree in music from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she was principal violist of the Wesleyan Orchestra and winner of the 2003 concerto competition. Looking for a change of scenery, Ilana moved to California to attend at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she received her Masters degree in viola performance as a student of both Don Ehrlich and Jodi Levitz. In past summers she has participated in the Aspen Music Festival and ENCORE school for strings. Ilana is the violist of the Berkeley Youth Orchestra's Artist in Residence String Quartet, where she coaches viola sectionals and chamber music. She is also a chamber music coach for the Villa Sinfonia Foundation's Zephyr Point Chamber Music Camp in Lake Tahoe, and the violist of the Presidio Quartet, an ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary music. Ilana currently works as a freelance violist, frequently appearing with various orchestras and ensembles in the Bay Area. She also enjoys teaching, and maintains a private violin and viola studio. Shain Carrasco began playing the cello 25 years ago. After completing High School and College at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Shain moved to San Francisco in 1999 for the Masters Degree program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Since completion of school, Shain has become the Principal Cellist for the Oakland Opera, a member of the Santa Cruz Symphony, and frequently plays with the Monterey Symphony, California Symphony, Reno Philharmonic, Berkeley Symphony, Modesto Symphony, Fresno Philharmonic, Napa Valley Symphony, San Francisco Sinfonietta, and others. Shain enjoys teaching Cello and playing chamber music. This is his first concert with the Presidio Quartet. | |||
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