Rachel Condry, clarinet/bass clarinet

Philip Freihofner, clarinet/bass clarinet

Dr. Mark Alburger

Mark Alburger is an award-winning ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Monthly Journal, Music Theory and Literature Instructor at Diablo Valley College, and Music Critic for San Francisco Classical Voice and Commuter Times. Alburger began playing the oboe and composing with Dorothy and James Freeman, George Crumb, and Richard Wernick. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Joan Panetti and Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.), Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. Eight CDs of his music are available from North/South Consonance (Diversions [The Twelve Fingers] and American Tapestry [Symphony No. 1]), I Kill Me Music (Camino Real), and New Music (Early Oboe / Early Voice, Instruments of Deconstruction, Contrary Comotion, Desert Muse, Bass and Range, and A Windblown Rock in San Rafael). Three of Alburger's operas -- Cats, Dogs, and Divas (Harriet March Page), Waiting for Godot (after Samuel Beckett), and The Playboy of the Western World (J.M. Synge) -- will be staged in 2007, respectively at Women on the Way Festival (January 19-20, Mission Dance Theatre), Fresh Voices VII Festival of New Music (June 15, 16, 22, 24, Goat Hall), and Oakland Metro Opera (August 23-26, 201 Broadway).

Michael Cooke is a composer and performer who plays flute, bass clarinet, soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax, and bassoon. This Louis Armstrong Jazz award winner graduated from the University of North Texas, which he attended while on a competitive bassoon performance scholarship. Michael graduated cum laude with many different areas of study; jazz, ethnomusicology, music history, theory and of course composition. In 1991 Michael began his professional orchestral career performing in many north Texas area symphonies. He also performs in jazz and free improvising ensembles. Michael has toured Europe, Mexico, and across the United States with various groups. Cimarron Music and Productions began published many of Michael’s compositions in 1994. In 1999, Michael started a jazz label called Black Hat Records and is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Michael has just completed his fourth CD, “an indefinite suspension of the possible.” His other CDs have received international airplay and he has won two Sports Emmys for his work on “NASCAR on Fox”.

Philip Freihofner began playing oboe in 7th grade, but quit in his senior year, due to chronic neck strains. During the layoff, he tried his hand at various musical endeavors, including sound design (He is particularly proud of some highly praised work at the Zellarbach Playhouse) and composing modern dance settings, culminating in a collaboration with Cheryl Koehler: "The Fish and the Fire" which played at the Julia Morgan and Cowell Theaters in 1993 and '94. While working on this project, he began playing oboe once again, and has mostly been writing music for oboe since. Phil composed an accompaniment for the 1920 silent German horror film, "The Golem," that is being toured by the ensemble "WiZARDS!" and he is now working on a commission for the 2006 SF Silent Film Festival: a Russian comedy titled "The Girl with the Hatbox."

Michael A. Kimbell is composer-in-residence and principal clarinettist of the San Francisco Community Music Center Orchestra directed by Urs Leonhardt Steiner. He studied composition with Robert Palmer and Karel Husa at Cornell University where he received his D.M.A. in 1973. He has written works for orchestra, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus and theatre. His orchestral works, which were premiered by the CMC Orchestra, include Rondino Capriccioso, Kritik des Herzens (also performed by SFCCO), Taklamakán, Night Songs, and Arcadian Symphony (which was also performed by the Mission Chamber Orchestra and won the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra Competition in 1998).

David A. Graves initially studied electronic music composition at the University of Nebraska. He has composed music for multiple genres, including "neoclassical," ambient, jazz, and rock. He has also scored music for film and theatre, including A Period Piece, a play by Rachael Kerr, performed in San Francisco and New York (1995-1998) and ICON: The Photography of Gordon Parks (2003), a movie by PCTV. In 2003 and 2005, he was the resident composer at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellowship. His large-scale ambient piece, tree/sigh, was installed in a redwood canyon during Djerassi's 2003 Open House. Deciduous, his most recent electronic work, was a large-scale multimedia performance, part of last July's SURROUND>SOUND series. In the past three years, in addition to electronic and rock works, he has been scoring a lot of chamber music, especially in conjunction with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The SFCCO performed Insecurity (and Other Agencies of Government) last September. He is currently studying composition with Alexis Alrich at the Conservatory. For more information, visit www.finevermin.com.

Alexis Alrich is one of the founding members of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Her children’s piece, Island of the Blue Dolphins, will be performed by the Santa Barbara Symphony in spring 2007. She recently attended an artists’ colony in Connecticut, I-Park, where she composed Claifornia Oaks. As one of the winners of a Continental Harmony grant from the American Composers Forum she has written a piece for chorus, orchestra and soloists for the state of Maine. Avenues, her first orchestra piece, was premiered by the Women's Philharmonic and has been played around the country. Her chamber compositions have been performed by members of the San Francisco ballet, opera and symphony orchestras and ensembles including Bay Brass, City Winds, the Ahlert and Schwab guitar and mandolin duo in Germany, the Ariel Ensemble, New Release Alliance and Earplay in San Francisco. Ms. Alrich is one of four hosts of a weekly radio show on KUSF in San Francisco, “Classical Salon” with little-heard music from 1800 to the present.

Lisa Scola Prosek was raised in Rome, Italy, and began studying piano at the age of 4. Her mother, Elena Scola, is an accomplished painter and entertained many of the great artists living in Rome at the time. Moving to the United States at the age of 11, Lisa graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss in New York. During this time, Lisa developed a great love for the voice, and studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met. After Princeton, Lisa returned to Italy, where she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini.
To date Lisa has composed 4 operas, in Italian and English, including Satyricon, reviewed by the San Francisco Observer as a “Tour de Force” and featured on KRON TV; and Leonardo’s Notebooks, in Italian, which premiered to capacity audiences in May 2006, and was featured on KQED’s West Coast Live. The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly writes:” This composer’s work is steeped in the Mediterranean world of gestures, writ both big and small. Her vocal writing references bel canto and the madrigal, and the instrumental writing, with it’s shadowy inner voices, has character and point. Intricate and highly expressive music.” Sequenza 21. Lisa Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including for her latest work for choir and orchestra, Libera Me, which premiered in June 2006, with the Schola Cantorum Choir, and the SFCCO Orchestra.