2025–26 Concert Proposals

BACKGROUND

Since 1976, SFEMS has presented chamber concerts featuring local, national, and international ensembles of high artistic merit, with due attention given to historical performance practice. Historically, concerts have focused on Western European music from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through the early Classical era, presented in “traditional” concert formats featuring two 40- to 45-minute halves of music.

In 2023, SFEMS undertook a strategic planning process; among many topics, a task force of board and staff members focused on increasing concert accessibility, reviewing SFEMS’ concert curation process, and rethinking audience experience. The task force was charged with carrying out SFEMS’ revised mission to promote “historically informed performance spanning centuries and cultures,” while “creating a community reflective of our region’s diversity.” This reflected the organization’s exploration in recent seasons of non-Western traditional music, promoting a range of artists to augment more familiar ensembles SFEMS audiences already knew and loved.

SFEMS had already taken immediate and bold steps to increase concert accessibility through its pay-what-you-can initiative, becoming the largest classical arts organization in the Bay Area to do so. In discussions about concert curation and audience engagement, the task force reaffirmed SFEMS’ commitment to local artists—a major component of why the Bay Area became one of the world’s preeminent centers for historically informed performance. It also acknowledged the organization’s unique role in presenting traditional chamber performances of early music in the Bay Area, while also imagining how SFEMS could also create new concert experiences that prioritize informality, intimacy, and storytelling.

Based on the task force’s recommendations, the SFEMS board implemented in spring 2024 a new concert curation model that seeks broader input for concert selection, creating a process that hopefully will produce a wider variety of concert experiences, as well as increased support for local artists. A diagram for the structure is provided below, with explanations following.

The Board moved to select current SFEMS executive director Derek Tam to serve as artistic director, augmenting his pre-existing role as the artistic director of the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition. In addition to the concert committee (currently led by board member Joyce Johnson Hamilton), which will remain central in discussions of selecting local and touring groups, additional community input is solicited through post-show surveys, as well as an end-of-season survey asking the membership and audience about what ensembles they might like to see in future seasons. One particularly novel aspect of this new structure is the potential hiring of artistic partners—local artists of standing and great imagination—to curate concerts from the “ground up.”

In conclusion, this new concert curation structure will allow SFEMS to make the best use of our resources to support artists and to create compelling concert experiences that:

  • build upon the organization’s reputation as one of nation’s foremost presenters of early music;

  • provide additional performance opportunities and financial support for Bay Area musicians;

  • present innovative concerts that reflect “historically informed performance spanning centuries and cultures” and serve the needs of our diverse local community.