SFCA+1 Program

The SFCA+1 program aims to enlarge the repertoire for chamber choir and a single instrument or common ensemble. Each season SFCA selects a guest instrumentalist, and commissions one or more composers to create a new work for the combined forces of the SFCA chamber choir and the guest instrumentalist.

2019 SFCA+1 Guest Artists: Jillon Stoppels Dupree & Paul Hale

Described as “superb” by the New York Times, harpsichordist Jillon Stoppels Dupree has performed with the Seattle and Portland Baroque Orchestras, the Seattle Symphony, and numerous international soloists.  A Fulbright and NEA grant winner, she has recorded for Delos, Decca and meridian Records.

Cellist Paul Hale performs with many orchestras and choirs in his native Bay Area on both modern and baroque cello.  He is a member of Opera San Jose, California Symphony, and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and has played on most of PBO’s recordings.

Previous SFCA+1 Composers & Guest Artists

2018 SFCA+1 Guest Artists: Brian Thorsett & Teresa McCollough

Hailed as “a strikingly gifted tenor, with a deeply moving, unblemished voice” (sfmusicjournal.com), Brian Thorsett is excelling in opera, oratorio and recital across the world. He has been seen and heard in over 100 diverse operatic roles, ranging from Monteverdi to Britten, back to Rameau and ahead again to works composed specifically for his talents. As a concert singer Thorsett fosters a stylistically diversified repertoire of over 250 works, which has taken him to concert halls across the US and Europe. Future engagements include Evangelist and soloist in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, Mass in B minor, Mass in G minor and several cantatas, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Handel’s Messiah, Britten’s War Requiem and Cantata Misericordium, the Requiems of Mozart and Verdi, Haydn’s Creation, Bruckner’s Te Deum, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, a rare performance of Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony and the world premiere of Stacey Garrop’s Terra Nostra.

Pianist Teresa McCollough has developed an international reputation for her dynamic and expressive playing. As a leading interpreter and advocate for contemporary music, she has commissioned, premiered, and performed many new compositions by today’s emerging and established composers including Alvin Singleton, Lou Harrison, Joan Tower, Alex Shapiro, Belinda Reynolds, Zhou Long, Charles Griffin, David Rakowski, Tomas Svoboda, Henry Martin, George Crumb, and others. McCollough has performed around the world, appeared on local and national television and radio, with orchestras across the United States, and in festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, the New American Music Festival, the Aki Festival of New Music, April in Santa Cruz, the Festivale Internationale di Cremona, Spoleto Festival-USA, and others.

2017 SFCA+1 Guest Artist: Peter Maund

A native of San Francisco, Peter Maund studied percussion at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and music, folklore and ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. A founding member of Ensemble Alcatraz and Alasdair Fraser’s Skyedance, he has performed with early and contemporary music ensembles including Alboka, Anonymous 4, Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players, Chanticleer, Davka, El Mundo, The Harp Consort, Hesperion XX, Kitka, Los Cenzontles, Musica Pacifica, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Voices of Music, among others. Presenters and venues include Cal Performances, Carnegie Hall, Celtic Connections (Glasgow); Cervantino Festival (Guanajuato), Confederation House (Jerusalem); Edinburgh Festival; Festival Interceltique de Lorient; Festival Pau Casals; Folkfestival Dranouter; Horizante Orient Okzident (Berlin); The Kennedy Center; Lincoln Center; Palacio Congresos (Madrid); Queen Elizabeth Hall (London); and Tage Alter Musik (Regensburg). He is the author of “Percussion” in A Performers Guide to Medieval Music, Indiana University Press, 2000. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as well as in workshops sponsored by Amherst Early Music, the San Francisco Early Music Society, the American Recorder Society and the American Orff-Schulwerk Association. Described by the Glasgow Herald as “the most considerate and imaginative of percussionists” he can be heard on over 50 recordings.

2017 SFCA+1 Composers

Jean Ahn

2016 SFCA+1 Guest Artist: Galax Quartet

Founded in 2005, the Galax Quartet—two violins, viola da gamba and ‘cello—explores the realm where early music and Baroque instruments intersect with new music and living composers, in classical quartets, film scores, song cycles, jazz, and collaborations with poets and mad scientists.

2016 SFCA+1 Composers

Ted Allen
Robinson McClellan
Roy Wheldon

2016 SFCA+1 Guest Artist: Mads Tolling

Mads Tolling, internationally renowned violinist and composer, is a two-time Grammy Award-Winner and the 2016 DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star winning violinist. As a former nine year member of both Turtle Island Quartet and bassist Stanley Clarke’s band, Mads has spent most his professional life touring internationally. Since 2007 Mads has lead his own group, Mads Tolling Quartet. “The Playmaker” released in the fall of 2009, features Stanley Clarke and jazz greats Russell Ferrante & Stefon Harris. A MTQ album: “Celebrating Jean-Luc Ponty – Live at Yoshi’s” was released in May, 2012. Mads’ latest album is called “Mads Tolling & The Mads Men – Playing the 60s,” which features classic songs from TV, film and radio in fresh jazzy versions with guest vocalists Kenny Washington and Spencer Day. Mads has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his recordings have received rave reviews in Downbeat Magazine, Strings Magazine, Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has performed with Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Kenny Barron & Paquito D’Rivera.

2015 SFCA+1 Composers

Tina Harrington
Frederick Himebaugh