Music for Strings
String instruments are among humankind’s most durable inventions, from ancient Greece lyres to priceless Stradivari violins, from imposing concert harps to elegant classical guitars. Music for string instruments makes up a significant portion of the repertory. Consider: Baroque trio sonatas, Brahms’s violin and ‘cello sonatas, Mendelssohn’s string symphonies, Beethoven’s string quartets, Bach’s suites for solo violin and solo cello, Rodrigo’s concerto for guitar and Ginastera’s for harp—the list goes on and on. Furthermore, great players of those string instruments count among our most legendary virtuosi: Joseph Joachim, Jascha Heifetz, Andrés Segovia, Mischa Elman, and Pablo Casals, not to mention the current crop of brilliant performers such as Viktoria Mullova, Gautier Capuçon, Gil Shaham, Daniel Hope, and many others.
Foglesong, Scott
Scott Foglesong is the Chair of Musicianship & Music Theory at the SF Conservatory of Music, where he has been a faculty member since 1978. In 2008, he was the recipient of the Sarlo Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also teaches at UC Berkeley, where he has the privilege of introducing young people to Western art music. A Contributing Writer and Pre-Concert Lecturer for the SF Symphony, he also serves as Program Annotator for the California Symphony, Las Vegas Philharmonic, San Luis Obispo Symphony, and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. As a pianist, he has appeared with the Francesco Trio, Chanticleer, members of the SF Symphony, and solo/chamber recitals nationwide in a repertoire ranging from Renaissance through ragtime, jazz, and modern. At Peabody Conservatory, he studied piano with Katzenellenbogen and Wolff; later at the SF Conservatory he studied piano with Nathan Schwarz, harpsichord with Laurette Goldberg, and theory with Sol Joseph and John Adams.