🏳️🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
Joan Tower - Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman
🏳️🌈 Aaron Copland - Lincoln Portrait
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony no. 9
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
Paul Phillips, guest conductor
Hilding Rosenberg - Marionettes Overture
🏳️🌈 Camille Saint-Saens - Violin Concerto no. 3 in B minor
Soloist: 🏳️🌈 Michael Long
🏳️🌈 Benjamin Britten - Sinfonietta op. 1
William Dawson - Negro Folk Symphony
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🏳️🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
🏳️🌈Seth Grosshandler - Mountain Festival Overture (Rev. 2023)
🏳️🌈David Conte - Cello Concerto (2018)
Soloist: 🏳️🌈Emil Miland, cello
🏳️🌈Aaron Copland - Billy the Kid Suite
Igor Stravinsky - Firebird Suite
Online ticket sales end soon. Remaining tickets will be sold at the door. Please bring cash.
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
This concert is part of the California Festival of new compositions!
🏳️🌈 Dawn Harms, Musicial Director
Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73
🏳️🌈 Mary Watkins - “Soul of Remembrance“ from Five Movements in Color
🏳️🌈 Leonard Bernstein - Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety”
🏳️🌈 Soloist: Sara Davis Buechner
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🏳️🌈 Dawn Harms, Musical Director
Arnold Schoenberg - Fanfare for a Bowl Concert on Motifs of Die Gurrelieder
Florence Price - Violin Concerto No. 2
🏳️🌈 Soloist: Samuel Vargas - Sphinx Competition 2021 First Prize Senior Division Winner
🏳️🌈 Camille Saint-Saëns - Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso in A minor
🏳️🌈 Soloist: Samuel Vargas - Sphinx Competition 2021 First Prize Senior Division Winner
🏳️🌈 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 3 “Polish”
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🏳️🌈 Dawn Harms, Music Director
Giuseppe Verdi - “Triumphal March” from Aida
Tribute to Renata Tebaldi - Italian Arias
- Verdi “Ritorna, Vincitor!” from Aida
- Verdi “Pace, pace mio Dio” from La Forza del Destino
- Giacomo Puccini “D’onde lieta uscì” from La bohème
- Francesco Cilea “io son l’umile ancella” from Adriana Lecouvreur
Harold Arlen Somewhere over the Rainbow
🏳️🌈 Melody Moore (guest artist)
🏳️🌈 Jessie Montgomery - Strum
Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No.6
Tickets available now!
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
Come in your Halloween costume and enjoy an evening of classical music with internationally renowned soprano, Melody Moore. Best costumes will win a prize!
Melody is currently celebrating the centenary of the birth of legendary soprano Renata Tebaldi by recording an album featuring selections from the Italian repertoire. With BARS she will sing Italian opera arias associated with Tebaldi.
African American composer Jessie Montgomery recently became the Composer in Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. We will perform her piece Strum, as part of BARS Women composer’s series. The concert will conclude with Dvořák sublime Symphony #6.
About Melody Moore: Soprano Melody Moore is enjoying a thriving career on the world’s leading stages, prompting Opera News to label her “a revelation,” and of her sold-out appearance at Carnegie Hall to rave, “As I left the auditorium, I could only think: more of Moore, please.”
Ms. Moore enjoyed a triumphant return to LA Opera during the 2021-2022 season, repeating her tremendous success in the role of Amneris in Verdi’s Aida. The season also saw the release of Moore’s interpretation of the title role in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (available on Pentatone), and the recording of a critically acclaimed concert of Puccini’s Tosca, captured live in Berlin. In the fall of 2022, Moore will make a much-anticipated return to San Francisco Opera as Mère Marie in the Olivier Py production of Dialogues des Carmélites.
Highlights of the 2019-2020 season included her debut with the Houston Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied. In the 2018-2019 season, Ms. Moore returned to Houston Grand Opera to reprise the roles of Senta in the season opening production of Die fliegende Holländer led by Music Director Patrick Summers, and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a new production by Kasper Holten, and returned to LA Opera for a role debut as Gertrude in Hänsel and Gretel under the baton of Music Director James Conlon. Ms. Moore enjoyed a debut with the Grant Park Music Festival for Delius’ A Mass of Life. In the 2017-2018 season, Moore made three major role debuts: Elisabetta in Don Carlo at Washington National Opera; the title role in Salome at Florida Grand Opera; and Tatyana in Eugene Onegin at Hawaii Opera Theatre. Her portrayal of Desdemona in a full recording of Verdi’s Otello was also released by Pentatone.
Melody Moore is a former Adler Fellow of San Francisco Opera and an alumni of the prestigious Merola program. For more info go to https://melodymooresoprano.com/ Recordings on Pentatone https://www.pentatonemusic.com/artist/melody-moore/
Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August 2021.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
🏳️🌈 Dawn Harms, Music Director
Adolphus Hailstork - Fanfare on Amazing Grace
🏳️🌈 Alisa Rose - Embracing Roots Violin Concerto
Violinist Alisa Rose
🏳️🌈 Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 2
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
About Alisa Rose
Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Alisa Rose is a modern musician who easily navigates between many musical styles. With roots in classical music as well as the rich American musical tradition, she attracts attention for her expressive lyrical voice on the violin. Her stylistic fluidity gives her the ability to create unique and genuine music which is free from the constraints of genre.
Alisa Rose has appeared with a wide range of artists including the Real Vocal String Quartet, 2008 Rockygrass Bluegrass Band Competition winners 49 Special, and Grammy-nominated Quartet San Francisco. Alisa performed and taught throughout Eastern Europe as an Ambassador of the State Department, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, NPR's Weekend Edition, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Cleveland's Reinberger Chamber Hall, NBC's The Tonight Show as well as numerous international tours.
Alisa teaches privately as well as at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she received her B.M. and M.M. in Chamber Music studying with Camilla Wicks and Bettina Mussumeli.
🏳️🌈 Cyrus Ginwala, Guest Conductor
🏳️🌈 Barber - Second Essay for Orchestra
🏳️🌈 Schubert - Symphony No. 3
🏳️🌈 Saint-Saëns - Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
Conductor Cyrus Ginwala has appeared with the Roanoke Symphony, the Boca Pops, the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica, the Aspen Concert Orchestra and the Sewanee Summer Festival Orchestra. He has served as visiting faculty at the Peabody Conservatory and the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. Since relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005, he has conducted concerts throughout the region and at SF State, where he is Director of the School of Music and The Morrison Chamber Music Center.
Music director of the Symphony of the Mountains, a professional orchestra, youth orchestra and symphony chorus, from 1996-2005, he conducted more than 100 works in subscription and pops series, while expanding the orchestra’s concert and education programs. During the same period, Dr. Ginwala was resident conductor of the Sewanee Summer Music Center, one of the oldest summer orchestral training programs in America and, from 2002-2004 conductor of the Musica Piccola Summer Orchestra at the North Carolina School for the Arts.
He first conducted Rainbow Symphony in September of 2008 and has returned regularly as a guest since then.
🏳️🌈 Corigliano - Promenade Overture
Beethoven - Symphony No. 8
Florence Price - Symphony No. 3
Music Director & Conductor: Dawn Harms
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED due to COVID Pandemic.
We are cancelling our June 13, 2020 concert. We will post again as soon as we have our 2021-2022 season and dates planned.
🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
Beethoven - Symphony No. 9
🌈 Special performance by Beach Blanket Babylon cast members
- feat. Renee Lubin and Tammy Nelson
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
🌈 Ethel Smyth - Boatswain's Mate Overture
Chris Brubeck – Interplay for three violins
- feat. Kay Stern, Robin Mayforth and Dawn Harms, violin
Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 3
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
The Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) is participating in the “Violins of Hope”, a project from Tel Aviv honoring the spirit of musicians who were in Nazi concentration camps. The “Violins of Hope” is a collection of string instruments belonging to Jews during World War II. BARS will represent the 350,000 LGBTQ + people who perished along with Jews during the holocaust. Around 20 of the instruments will be used in the concert. The Bay Area presentation of these instruments commemorates the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The “Violins of Hope” will be featured most prominently in Chris Brubeck’s Interplay for 3 Violins. Chris Brubeck is a jazz and classical composer, who also played in his father’s David Brubeck Quartet. This triple concerto features three different styles: classical violin, jazz violin and Celtic fiddle. It was originally premiered by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (Classical), Eileen Ivers (Celtic) and Regina Carter (Jazz) and the Boston Pops. Our soloists will be BARS Music director and conductor, Oakland Symphony Co- Concertmaster, and Director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College String Orchestra, Dawn Harms (Jazz), Concertmaster of the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Conservatory faculty member, Kay Stern (classical) and Concertmaster of Symphony Silicon Valley, Robin Mayforth (Celtic).
The main piece in the program will be Mendelssohn’s Symphony #3 (Scottish). The Nazis banned Mendelssohn’s music because of his Jewish background. They destroyed monuments dedicated to Mendelssohn outside concert halls in Leipzig and Duesseldorf in 1936, which were not replaced until 2008 and 2012.
BARS is celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage by performing the Overture to Boatswain’s Mate, by lesbian composer Ethel Smyth, who dedicated two years of her life to the suffrage movement. This overture contains her March of the Women, which became the suffragette anthem. Smyth was jailed for two months for participating in a violent suffragette protest and smashing windows of politicians. In jail, she conducted women from her cell in the March with a toothbrush. BARS will be performing the West Coast premiere of this overture.
This concert is presented in association with Violins of Hope San Francisco Bay Area, a project of Music at Kohl Mansion, and is funded by a generous grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Learn more at
Women's Philharmonic Advocacy helped underwrite our performance of the Boatswain's Mate Overture.
🌈 Norman Gamboa, Guest Conductor
🌈 Samuel Barber - Essay No.1
🌈 Kyle Kindred - Flute Concerto
- Linda Watkins, Principal Flute Bay Area Rainbow Symphony
🌈 Manuel de Falla - Three Cornered Hat ballet
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
Music Director of the Sonoma County Philharmonic, Norman Gamboa is also Music Director of the Aurora Symphony Orchestra in Colorado. Gamboa is considered one of the most prominent up-and-coming Central American conductors. His numerous guest conducting appearances have included symphony orchestras throughout Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Minnesota, California, and Nevada.
Worldwide engagements include the Orchestra Filarmonica di Stato Ploieşti in Romania, Západočeský Symfonický Orchestr in the Czech Republic, Youth Orchestra of Europe, Orquesta Filarmónica de Medellín in Colombia, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo and Orquestra Orquestra Sinfônica de Ribeirão Preto in Brazil, Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado Mérida and Orquesta Sinfónica de Los Llanos in Venezuela, Orquesta Sinfónica Municipal de Cartago, UCR Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil of Costa Rica, and the national symphony orchestras of Costa Rica, Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras, to name a few.
A versatile conductor, equally at home with opera, ballet, chamber and symphonic orchestral repertoire, Norman Gamboa has conducted a large variety of innovative joint ventures, including newly choreographed productions of Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye with Ballet Midwest, The Nutcracker Ballet with the Santa Rosa Dance Theater and the Aurora Dance Arts, La Fiesta Mexicana by Owen-Reed with Fiesta Colorado Dance Company, as well as several successful fully-staged operas with the Topeka Opera Society and Opera on Tap Colorado. Festival appearances include Plzeň 2015 (Czech Republic), FOSJA-Casals Festival of Puerto Rico, Central American Festival of Chamber Music, International Music Festival of Medellín (Colombia), Villarrica Music Festival (Chile), FIA International Festival of Arts of Costa Rica, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, Bregenzer Festspiele (Austria), the Las Vegas Music Festival, OSESP-International Orchestra Conductors Competition, ITEC-Regina Music Conference in Canada, as well as the New York Brass Conference.
Norman enjoys collaborating with and championing the works of modern composers, including world-premieres by Kyle Kindred, Evelyn Stroobach, Jonathan Peters, Frank La Rocca, Robert Bradshaw, as well as renowned composers from Latin America such as Rafael Junchaya, Benjamín Gutiérrez, Lucas Galon, Carlos Escalante, and Eddie Mora.
Previously, he served as Music Director of the Powder River Symphony in Wyoming, Director of Orchestral Studies at Washburn University, Associate Conductor of the Las Vegas Music Festival, Cover Conductor for the Topeka Symphony Orchestra, Assistant Conductor of the Waco Symphony and Music Director of the Waco Symphony Youth Orchestra. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Baylor University, a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Nevada and a doctorate degree in conducting from Louisiana State University. Norman Gamboa was born in Costa Rica and now makes his home in Denver, Colorado.
🌈 Dawn Harms, Music Director
E. Humperdinck - Hansel and Gretel overture
Amy Beach - Piano concerto
- 🌈 feat. Daniel Glover, piano
D. Shostakovich, Symphony No. 10
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
Elfrida Andrée - Prelude to Fritiofs Saga
🌈Shawn Kirchner – Brokeback Mountain Suite feat. Shawn Kirchner, piano
Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique
Art by Peter Jaret
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🌈Dawn Harms, Music Director and Conductor
🌈David Conte - A Copland Portrait
🌈Copland - Our Town
Rodrigo - Guitar Concerto - featuring soloist Alec Holcomb
Florence B. Price – Symphony No. 1 in E minor
Art by Peter Jaret
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🌈Leif Bjaland, guest conductor
🌈Byron Adams - Capriccio concertante for orchestra
🌈Barber - Cello concerto feat. Evan Kahn, cellist
Elgar – Enigma Variations
Art by Peter Jaret
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
🌈Michael Morgan, guest conductor
🌈Leonard Bernstein - Three Dance Variations from Fancy Free
Bruch - Scottish Fantasy 🌈feat. Andrew Sords, violin
Mozart - Symphony No. 36 "Linz"
🌈Tchaikovsky - Capriccio Italien
Art by Peter Jaret
🌈Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series
