🌈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.