San Francisco Girls Chorus to Finish Off Season with Concert Featuring Carla Kihlstedt, 6/5

San Francisco, CA, April 13, 2015 -The five-time Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Girls Chorus will conclude its 2014-2015 season with an ambitious and ingenious program exploring the serious fun of modern and contemporary music Friday, June 5, at 8 pm at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Artistic Director Lisa Bielawa has announced. Conducted by SFGC Music Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe and featuring guest composer/violinist Carla Kihlstedt, the program includes a new work by Kihlstedt and her Hold my own with the composer as soloist, John Cage's iconic Living Room Music, Meredith Monk's Panda Chant, selections from Lou Harrison's Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day, Einojuhani Rautavaara's Viatonten Valsi and John Adams' Desert Chorus-both with Kihlstedt on violin, William Schuman's Requiescat and To Thy Love, Lisa Bielawa's Opening: Forest from the opera Vireo and The Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "Beat Me Daddy". The concert's repertoire will be performed by the Girls Chorus on tour in Estonia, Finland and Sweden in June.

Tickets are priced $36 for Reserved; $26 and $18 (Students) for General Admission. They are available for purchase through City Box Office; by phone at 415-392-4400; online at www.cityboxoffice.com; or in person at City Box Office, 180 Redwood Street, Suite 100, San Francisco (Monday - Friday, 9:30am-5pm).

Artistic Director Lisa Bielawa says, "Just days after this season-closing concert, our young singers will fly to Estonia, Finland and Sweden, countries with deep and vibrant choral traditions, each with a unique cultural sound. There they will share the stage with some of the finest girls choruses in the world--and this concert unveils some of the music we will bring with us as ambassadors of the American sound! What do fellow musicians around the world admire in our American Vanguard? They know us as innovators, as expansive thinkers, forward-thinking, experimental, joyful and playful at times, rigorous and hard-working too. And so we will Represent! Here we have the expansive beauty of the music of John Adams and William Schuman; the playful sounds of Meredith Monk; experimental innovator John Cage; the style-crossing songstress Carla Kihlstedt, who will appear onstage with our girls as violinist-vocalist in her own work and also as soloist in other works by her American Vanguard composer colleagues. Hearkening back to another time when young American women toured the world bringing the vibrant sounds of American music, some of our soloists will channel the Andrews Sisters in renditions of their war-time arrangements. All of this combined with a few tips of the hat to composers from the countries we will be visiting, so that we can join voices with these superb sister groups that will greet us there."

About Carla Kihlstadt

Composer/violinist Carla Kihlstadt writes, "Music is a perfect vehicle for the alchemy of thoughts, instincts, emotions and ideas. It expands and contracts to reflect and create worlds that are intimate and expansive, crafted and spontaneous, ordered and cacophonous. My music lives in the fertile places where genres overlap and aesthetic values transmute. I play the violin, sing, improvise and compose, sometimes at the service of a simple song, and other times, a large-scale all-encompassing performance.

"I have always been drawn to collaborations for the way that they keep my language and thoughts evolving in new ways. My ongoing collaborative projects cover a wide spectrum of sounds from the rich and subtle acoustic composers' collective Tin Hat, to the dramatic and alarming experimental rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and from the intimate, incisive purveyors of song, 2 Foot Yard, to the fiercely spontaneous improvisational duo with pianist Satoko Fujii, Minamo.

"On the larger scale of a theater stage, with poet Rafael Oses, I've written a song cycle for seven musicians and narrator called Necessary Monsters, based on Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, and am currently developing a new piece with my husband, musician and actor Matthias Bossi, that looks at family histories as interpreted by personal memories and myths.

"Though the cornerstone of my musical vocabulary comes from my classical training as a violinist (Peabody Institute, and the San Francisco and Oberlin Conservatories of Music) my world now comfortably reaches far beyond the concert hall. I've spent much of the last dozen years traveling in the U.S. and abroad with my many bands, playing in concert halls, rock clubs, and theaters, for rock, classical, and experimental audiences. As it turns out, the things that divide one audience from another exist only on the very surface. When you so much as blow on them, they all but disappear.

"I've been lucky enough to work with many of my favorite musicians, including Fred Frith, Tom Waits, Blixa Bargeld, Zeena Parkins, Shahzad Ismaily, Matthias Bossi, Nels Cline, Ben Goldberg, Carla Bozulich, Lisa Bielawa, Colin Jacobsen and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. I've written scores for dance and theater companies including Flyaway Productions, inkBoat, the Joe Goode Performance Group, and Deborah Slater Dance Theater, and concert pieces for The ROVA Saxophone Quartet, The Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the Eclipse String Quartet."