Josheff Fest vol. 3

Name: Josheff Fest vol. 3
Start: 2026-04-18T16:30:00-07:00
Location: St. John’s Presbyterian Church

Sat, Apr 18

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

A special Berkeley show! Join us for a tasteful mix of solos and large instrumental works as we continue our excursions into the unique sound world of composer Peter Josheff.

Time & Location

Apr 18, 2026, 4:30 PM

St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA

About the event

PURCHASE TICKETS ($32 general admission; $10 students)

Join us for this special Berkeley concert featuring the works of Earplay clarinetist Peter Josheff, along with many of your favorite Earplayers and other special guests.

This from Peter about the concert:

"What, you may ask, is Josheff Fest?

Some may call it a retrospective. I call it housecleaning—an opportunity to go through my catalog of work, revising, editing, and presenting it in performance with my very favorite musicians. Some may call it a deep dive—a concert devoted to the work of a single composer. I call it a family gathering of my compositions.

Josheff Fest Vol. 3 features three of my favorite works of the early 2010s.

Sextet (flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano) was composed in 2010 on the heels of my chamber opera Inferno. I still remember the joy of returning to the solitude of abstract instrumental music after several years of teamwork in the world of opera composition and production.

Waiting (oboe, clarinet, violin, cello and piano) was commissioned by Earplay in 2012. The assignment was to write a work in response to Schoenberg’s early Ein Stelldichein (for the same instrumentation). Through studying Ein Stelldichein I came to love Schoenberg’s early (pre-atonal) harmony—the range of emotional nuance, tenderness and sadness he could wring out of his material, the sense of always searching. I began composing Waiting while living with and helping to care for my mother at the end of her life. I think of Waiting as a kind of chronicle of that experience.

Sutro Tower in the Fog (flute, clarinet and piano), from 2011, is one of my most-performed works and is a tribute to the ubiquitous San Francisco landmark.

Sextet, Waiting, and Sutro Tower in the Fog are siblings, written in close proximity to each other and sharing many personality traits. They are my children.

Interspersed throughout the program is a selection of solo instrument pieces: the audience favorite Big Brother (2014) for flutist Tod Brody; September (2017) for violin; as well as a couple of works composed during the pandemic: Same Old Sadness (2020), commissioned by violinist Dan Flanagan, who has recorded it and performed it extensively; and On the Way to the Day (2020) for cellist Thalia Moore, who premiered it at UC Davis this month.

The Josheff Fest players are the finest professional musicians in the Bay Area. We are also close friends and colleagues with many years of experience working together."

About Peter Josheff

Peter Josheff, composer and clarinetist, has been a mainstay of the northern California new music community for forty years. He is a founding member of Earplay (1985) and of Sonic Harvest (2000). He is a core member of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Empyrean Ensemble (at UC Davis), the Eco Ensemble (at UC Berkeley), and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. He performs frequently with Opera Parallèle and West Edge Opera.

Peter's music has been performed by many ensembles and individual performers: the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra (The Dream Mechanic); the Farallon Quintet (Groundhog Day); Earplay (House & Garden Tales, Sextet, Waiting, Big Brother); the Empyrean Ensemble (Prosperous Soul - Gregarious Heart, Viola & Mallets); Dan Flanagan, violin (September, Same Old Sadness); Rufus Olivier, bassoon (Elegy, Dewy not - dewy got); Haruka Fujii, percussion (Home Brew); Brenda Tom Vahur, piano (Sutro Tower in the Fog, Warped Oracle, Rag Wrung Dry, Exquisite Corpus); Brian Thorsett, tenor (The Cauldron, The Dream Mechanic, Europa & The Bull); and many others, including numerous premieres with Sonic Harvest. He recently completed Root Cellar (2024), a work for solo piano.