GOCAA Chamber Music Concert -San Francisco

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GOCAA Chamber Music Training Camp

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Competitors are invited sign up for the GOCAA chamber music festival.  We will invite Northern California's leading musicians to conduct master classes, coach participants on selective repertoires, culminating in the final concert where participants will have an opportunity to perform with the professional musicians.  This is an extraordinary opportunity for young musicians to experience the joy of listening to and playing with each other, and a rare opportunity to share the stage with award wining musicians.  Repertoire will be distributed to students to practice in advance after successful registration.   Festival includes : 2 masterclass, 2 time rehearsal / 1 time concert . 

 Venue: Recital Hall, San Francisco Conservatory of Music

 Collaborating musicians Friction Quartet, lauded for performances described as "terribly beautiful" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "stunningly passionate" (Calgary Herald), and "exquisitely skilled" (ZealNYC), is dedicated to modernizing the chamber music experience and expanding the string quartet repertoire. The quartet achieves its mission by commissioning cutting-edge composers, curating imaginative concert programs, collaborating with diverse artists, and engaging in interactive educational outreach. 

Friction made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. They returned in March of 2018 to perform George Crumb’s Black Angels as part of “The 60’s” festival and their performance was described as, “one of the truest and most moving things I’ve ever heard or seen.” (Zeal NYC)

Since forming in 2011, Friction has commissioned 47 works for string quartet and given world premiere performances of more than 100 works. They developed the Friction Commissioning Initiative in 2017 as a way to work together with their audience to fund specific commissions. The money raised to date has helped Friction commission a total of 12 new works, including six by young composers between the ages 16 and 21. They were awarded a 2019 Intermusic SF Musical Grant to develop a participatory educational program with composer Danny Clay that is designed to be accessible and sensory-friendly. Friction’s past grants include a grant from Chamber Music America that was used to commission a piano quintet from Andy Akiho, which debuted in November 2016, as well as project grants from Intermusic SF and Zellerbach Family Foundation supporting special projects involving the performance of commissioned works.

While Friction has garnered international attention as commissioners and interpreters of new music, they are also devoted to performing masterworks of the string quartet repertoire at the highest level. They won Second Prize in the 2016 Schoenfeld Competition, they were quarter-finalists in the 2015 Fischoff Competition and placed second at the 2015 Frances Walton Competition

Friction has held residencies at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark, Interlochen Arts Camp, Lunenburg Academy of Music in Nova Scotia, Napa Valley Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and was the first ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music.

Friction Quartet is dedicated to building new audiences for contemporary music through interactive musical enrichment programs. They participated for three consecutive years in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program, visiting over 60 public schools annually.  They are Ensemble Partners with Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop, workshopping and premiering new works written by young composers in the Bay Area. They have also given presentations at Oakland public schools through KDFC’s Playground Pop Up program. In collaboration with Meridian Hill Pictures, they created a short documentary, titled Friction, that profiles their early educational outreach in Washington DC’s Mundo Verde Public Charter School. Their presentations regularly utilize Doug’s adventurous arrangements of pop songs alongside excerpts from standard string quartet repertoire to help young audiences build connections to musical concepts.

Friction appears on recordings with National Sawdust Tracks, Innova Records, Albany Records, Pinna Records, and many independent releases. They released their full-length debut album, resolve, in 2018 through Bandcamp. Friction has appeared on radio stations such as NPR, KALW, KING-FM, and KUT, among others.

Friction’s video of the second movement of First Quartet by John Adams was named the #2 video of the year in 2015 by Second Inversion. John Adams shared this video on his own homepage and called it “spectacular.” Their video for Andy Akiho’s In/ Exchange, featuring Friction and Akiho, was also chosen by Second Inversion for their Top 5 videos of 2016. The video was also featured on American Public Media’s Performance Today.

Friction Quartet takes risks to enlarge the audience’s understanding of what a string quartet can be using arrangements of pop music, digital processing, percussion, amplification, movement, and additional media. Their multimedia and interdisciplinary projects have received critical acclaim. In 2017 they produced Spaced Out, an evening-length suite of music about the cosmos that utilizes surround sound electronics and includes a Friction Commission written by Jon Kulpa.  The San Francisco Classical Voice called it “accessible, yet surreal.” No matter where their musical exploration takes them, they never lose sight of the string quartet’s essence– the timeless and endlessly nuanced interaction of four analog voices.

1. Benjamin Tsai Shostakovich - Gavotte for Two Violins and Piano 2. Audrey Zhu Tchaikovsky - Dance Of Sugar Plum Fairy from the Nutcracker Ballet 3. Audrey Liu Mendelssohn - Piano Trio No.1 in D Minor Op.49  - III. Scherzo 4. Winnie Zhang Beethoven-piano trio in D major, Op.70, No.1 ‘ghost’ - I. Allegro vivace e con brio 5. Melody Chen  Mozart - Piano Quartet in G Minor KV 478 - I. Allegro