Chamber Set is a collection of four compositions by Harry Bernstein.

Duo for Alto Flute and Viola
I feel that the violin has generally been exploited and explored by composers more fully than its larger cousin, the viola. The alto flute is treated more often as a color instrument than its smaller cousin, the orchestral C flute. While the reasons for this situation may be practical and understandable, I decided to unite these soulful voices in an equal-voiced duet, with an emphasis on their lower registers. The instruments interact here in an almost conversational manner. This performance is a premiere.

Duet for Zack
During this academic year I've been participating in UCSF's Art for Recovery project by writing to Zack B., a student from Marin County. Zack writes music and plays both sax and drums. He started our correspondence by sending me a brass quintet he had written to be performed for his 13th birthday last year. I wrote Duet for Zack for Two Equal Saxophones, which was intended as encouragement for him to continue the exchange of music that we had begun. The first performance was given on February 26, 2006, with SFCCO's oboist, Philip Freihofner and myself on flute. Multi-instrumentalist Michael Cooke plays soprano saxophone with Philip on tonight's concert.

If All the World Was Apple Pie
This trio in aba' form for two violins and viola was part of a projected set of pieces for strings inspired by Mother Goose poems. Two of the movements were performed in San Francisco by members of the Marigold String Quartet at City College of San Francisco in 2003.

The version of his short poem from the _Annotated Mother Goose_ reads as follows:
If all the world was apple pie
And all the sea was ink;
And all the trees were bread and cheese,
What could we do for drink?

Color Study
Several months ago, I learned that the SFCCO would have three flutes playing in this concert and that all the performers play alto flute. I took the opportunity to write a simple piece to explore the sonority (or color) of three alto flutes. The bass part (heard today on the cello) almost seems to be playing a fourth flute part at times, while at other times it moves deeper in the bass register. This performance is a premiere.

SUITE ("SOLAR") For Oboe, Piano, and Percussion, Op. 2, by Dr. Mark Alburger, dates from 1975, and was expanded in 2005 on a grid derived from a reverse usage of George Crumb's Makrokosmos, Volume I. The work is a journey from the sun to the outer solar system and back, identified over the course of a year, with character designations in the tradition of Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, and Crumb. Other musical passengers include Webernian atonality, modal naitivity, Cowell clusters, minimalist substitutions, echoes of Mice and Men and Business As Usual, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 4, Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 9, Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Procession of Nobles, Edgar Varese's Ionization and Hyperprism, Harold Arlen's The Wizard of Oz, Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, Arnold Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, American football cheers, the Wheaties song, children's taunts, the Gregorian hymn O Come O Come Emanuel, Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 3, Guido d'Arezzo's Hymn to St. John (the original solfege song "ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la"), and 70's rock.

Quartet for Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn and Bassoon, by Philip Freihofner, began as a score for a Russian Silent Film, director Boris Barnet's 1926 romantic comedy: "Devushka S Korobkoi" (The Girl with the Hat Box). Composition started Nov. 2005, with the goal of performing in the 2006 SF Silent Film Festival, but the project had to be dropped early in 2006 due to funding difficulties. The material was then recast into its present form. The music is strongly influenced by Russian ballet and folk music, with its vigorous rhythms, frequent melodic fourths and modal shifts, and by the charm and humor in the film itself. Given the nature of film scoring, the themes did not fall squarely into standard forms, resulting in some unexpected twists and turns. There's a 4/4 section in the Waltz, a stretto morphs into a tango during the Fugue, and the Marchers get rather distracted, starting and stopping, then taking off in different directions. The Coda ends on a somber note. Ilya, who has just met and fallen for the fiery-tempered Natasha, loses her in a crowd while disembarking from a train and wonders if he will ever see her again. Similarly, the composer wonders if the he will see the resumption of this film-scoring project.

Flute Concerto: I—Flute and Drum by Alexis Alrich