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Called “extravagantly charismatic” by the San Francisco Chronicle and praised by San Francisco Classical Voice for her “vivid and technically assured” singing, lyric coloratura soprano Tonia D’Amelio maintains an active performing career with opera companies, orchestras, chamber ensembles, and vocal consorts across the U.S. and abroad, with a repertoire spanning five centuries.

Tonia particularly enjoys premiering opera and concert works, having created the role of Celia in Allen Shearer’s Middlemarch in Spring for the world premiere in San Francisco and the revival with Charlottesville Opera, sung in the first performance of Ryan Brown’s Mortal Lessons at the Hot Air Festival, and joined the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys to premiere Ben Bachmann’s Fantasia on American Christmas Carols. She also performed featured roles in the modern stage premieres of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Le temple de la Gloire (1745 version) with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale and Carlo Pallavicino’s Le amazzoni nell’isole fortunate (1679) with Ars Minerva. Recent and upcoming highlights include Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate and Coronation Mass, Anthem by George Lewis, Ancient Voices of Children by George Crumb, Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass, and Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem.

A graduate of Westmar College in Iowa, Tenor Kevin Baum moved to San Francisco and joined the singing ensemble Chanticleer in 1987. He has sung operatic roles from productions that include Curlew River by Benjamin Britten, Acis & Galatea by George Frideric Handel, Go for Broke by Peter Schickele, La Daphne by Gagliano and Lamentations and Praises by Sir John Tavener, and has sung with ensembles that include the Minnesota Chorale, the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Today he is a member of Clerestory, Schola Adventus and Schola Cantorum in San Francisco and has been a featured singer with ensembles such as AVE, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Chorus and the San Francisco Lyric Chorus. He is featured on more than 20 album recordings, including two Grammy Award winners. Among these are Evening Prayer, Lost in the Stars, A Portrait, Sing We Christmas and Wondrous Love: A World Folk Song Collection with Chanticleer and While I Was Walking I Heard a Sound… by Miya Masaoka. He holds the position of cantor at St. Ignatius Catholic Church and Tenor Section Leader at the Episcopal Church if the Advent of Christ the King.

Tod Brody has had an active career as a flutist in Northern California for many years. He serves as principal flutist of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the Sacramento Opera, and the California Musical Theater, and makes frequent appearances with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras, and in other chamber and orchestral settings throughout the Bay Area. Also a contemporary music specialist, Tod is principal flutist for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, Earplay, and the Empyrean Ensemble. He has performed dozens of world premieres, and has been extensively recorded. Tod was the flute instructor at UC Davis from 1992 until 2015, and still enjoys teaching and coaching privately. In addition to his career as a performer and teacher, He has served as Executive Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the American Composers Forum and as the first Executive Director of the contemporary opera company Opera Parallèle. Since 2016, he has been Executive Director of the Marin Symphony.

The evocative and embracing resonance of the natural world is a pervasive theme in the music of Ann Callaway, a contributing director of Sonic Harvest. Her works have been premiered by the Seattle (Concerto for Bass Clarinet) and St. Louis (Amethyst for soprano & orchestra) Symphony Orchestras, the New York New Music Ensemble, Collage New Music, and Earplay. She has been composer in residence for Bella Musica and was the inaugural composer for Voci’s New Works Project, which commissioned On Music and Nature: Three Hopkins Settings (2015). The Peninsula Women’s Chorus recently performed Silvery Blue (2003, on her own poem on a local butterfly). Her 2020 project was Clamavi de tribulatione mea, a setting for double chorus of Jonah’s hymn of deliverance from the whale’s belly. Callaway is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has held residencies at the MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Leighton Artist Colony in Banff. Her music is published by Subito Music Corp.

The Cecilia Ensemble is a string quartet of musicians from San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and Bay Area Rainbow Symphony. The four (Maki Ishii Sowash, Michael Long, Paul Ehrlich and Vicky Ehrlich) came together during the pandemic to play many outdoor concerts for the community.

Concertmaster of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera and of West Edge Opera, Dan Flanagan is Instructor of Violin at UC, Berkeley. He created "The Bow and the Brush," which commissions new music inspired by paintings and sculptures. With over 30 chamber and solo works, the performances have taken place across the U.S., France, Italy, and England, including Carnegie Hall, University of California, Boston University, University of Rome, Stern Pissarro Gallery, and the American Library in Paris. Several of these works can be heard on his album The Bow and the Brush (MSR Classics). He has performed as concertmaster with the Oakland Symphony, Santa Rosa Symphony, California Symphony, California Musical Theater, Festival Opera, Symphony San Jose, Modesto Symphony, and Opera Parallèle, and performs regularly with the S. F. Opera, Trio Solano, and Eco Ensemble. As a composer, he has been commissioned by International Arts Educators Forum,, Cecilia Ensemble, Trio Solano, Farallon Quintet, Hunter’s Point Shipyard Artists, Shipyard Gallery, Gold Coast Chamber Players, the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco, and many soloists. In addition to promoting living composers and artists of diverse backgrounds, Dan regularly features his art collection to host fundraisers for charities.

Peter Josheff (composer and clarinetist) has been on the front lines of the northern California new music scene for more than 30 years. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is a co-founder of Earplay and of Sonic Harvest, a member of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Empyrean Ensemble (UC Davis), Eco Ensemble (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 the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, the Farallon Quintet, Earplay, Sonic Harvest, the Laurel Ensemble, the Bernal Hill Players, Empyrean Ensemble, and many soloists. Recent works include: Same Old Sadness (2020) for solo violin; On the Way to the Day (2020) for solo cello; Dewy not, Dewy got (2020) for solo bassoon; Warped Oracle (2019) and Images from the Past (2018) for spoken voice and piano; and The Dream Mechanic (2016), for woman’s spoken voice, tenor, and chamber orchestra. An Instructor of Clarinet at U..C., Berkeley, he is also an amateur guitarist/singer/songwriter.

Richard Mix (bass) appears with over a dozen Bay Area opera companies singing a repertoire that embraces Wagner and Monteverdi as well as Scelsi and Stockhausen. A former cellist, he made his singing debut as Truelove in Berkeley Contemporary Opera's 1992 production of The Rake's Progress and went on to the Darmstädter Sommerferienkurse für neue Musik, where he was awarded a Patenring grant and re-invited in 1994 and 1996. He has since appeared as Bartók’s Kékszakállú, Lully’s Roland, Stockhausen’s Luzifer and in Vladimir in Butterfly Country, whose Nabokovian title role was written for him by his wife, Ann Callaway. West coast premieres range from Arthur in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse to C.P.E. Bach’s 1789 Matthaeus-passion. Recent projects have been an unaccompanied recital juxtaposing newer works such as Julius Eastman's Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc with mediaeval song from the Roman de Fauvel; an evening of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis with pianist Patti Deuter; and recitals featuring Carter, Pousseur and Cage alongside Callaway’s Char: Six Poems by Shinjiro Kurahara.

Acclaimed for her versatility, musicianship and acting ability, Erina Newkirk’s operatic and concert repertoire embraces works from the Baroque Period to premiering contemporary cperas and song cycles. She has sung with opera companies, festivals and symphonies throughout the United States and Europe. Erina has performed leading roles and as concert soloist at the John F. Kennedy Center, Opera North, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Lancaster Festival, Marin Symphony, New York Opera Studio, Ottocento Festival Saludecio, American Philharmonic, Chicago Jazz Festival, Opera San Jose, Livermore Valley Opera, Delaware Valley Opera, Baroque Orchestra Festival, Montefeltro Music Festival, San Francisco Opera Guild, Opera Project Columbus, Il Teatro Sociale di Novafeltria, Villa Sinfonia, Sonic Harvest, Golden Gate Opera, Pocket Opera, Lamplighters Music Theatre, Cinnabar Opera, West Marin Music Festival, Berkeley Opera, and Oakland Opera.

Violist Darcy Rindt graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in both music and marine biology from the U.C., Santa Cruz, and earned an M.A. at S.F. State University. Her teachers were Roy Malan, Paul Yarbrough and Catherine Van Hoesen. She holds positions in the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Santa Rosa, Marin, Oakland, California and Berkeley symphonies, and has performed with the New World Symphony, the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Symphony, New Century Chamber Orchestra and Symphony Silicon Valley, as well as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Empyrean Ensemble. She is composer and arranger for Squid Inc, an alternative string quartet whose goal is to reach new audiences through original compositions and arrangements of rock, alternative and pop music. Since 2019 she has been General Manager of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. A docent naturalist at Año Nuevo State Park, she leads guided tours through the Elephants Seal Rookery each winter. She is also an unstoppable tennis player.

Ben Rudiak-Gould sings with San Francisco Choral Artists, 21V, and Cappella Cetaceae, and is the tenor section leader at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. He has sung in the past with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, San Francisco Bach Choir, and many other Bay Area choirs.

Composer Allen Shearer has been honored with the Rome Prize Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship, the Aaron Copland Award, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His opera The Dawn Makers, on a libretto by Claudia Stevens, premiered at Herbst Theatre and was selected as a finalist in the National Opera Association’s Dominick Argento Chamber Opera Competition 2015. His Three Lyrics, a work written at the Copland House, won the Sylvia Goldstein Award. The premiere production of his opera Middlemarch in Spring was named one of the Ten Best Operatic Events of 2015 by the San Francisco Examiner, and one of the year’s notable events in classical music worldwide by the Encyclopedia Brittanica. His opera Howards End, America premiered at ZSpace in San Francisco in 2019, and Prospero’s Island, on a libretto by Claudia Stevens after Shakespeare’s The Tempest, premiered last year at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco. Allen Shearer is a Contributing Director of Sonic Harvest.

As Musical Director of West Edge Opera, Jonathan Khuner has conducted over 90 productions. He has also worked as assistant conductor at the San Francisco Opera for over thirty years, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for over fifteen years, and has served on the musical staff of Chicago's Lyric Opera. In 2013 he conducted the first Wagner opera ever performed in the nation of Albania: Tannhäuser, at the National Theater in Tirana. He also has conducted performances of the New Israeli Opera, the San Francisco Opera Center, West Bay Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera, Livermore Valley Opera, San Francisco Lyric Opera, California Opera (Fresno), Verismo Opera, Opera Virago, and the Tel Aviv Symphony, and has appeared with the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, Santa Fe Opera, Miami Opera, Opera Barga in Italy, and the Israel Philharmonic. Besides directing performances, he often lectures for San Francisco Opera, serves a faculty member at Bay Area opera workshops, and accompanies recital performances. Mostly recently he has created "Celebrating Schoenberg," a series of lecture-performances for the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth..

Dorothy Isaacson Read is thankful that she has been buoyed by music throughout her life: Studying piano with Myra Palache; performing as an oboist; singing with a Balkan choral ensemble; performing as a recitalist (with deep gratitude to Allen Shearer); and currently singing with Chora Nova and the Oakland Symphony Chorus under Ash Walker.

Claudia Stevens’ creative works for her interdisciplinary solo performance have been recognized by multiple grants and artist residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RS9 Szinhaz in Budapest, the Baltimore Theater Project, Gitameit Art Center in Burma and many colleges and universities. Two of her solo plays and her libretto for A Very Large Mole appear in the avant-garde poetry journal Exquisite Corpse. Her new play, "Andersen," commissioned by Theatre CHS, will premiere in Charlottesville and Richmond, VA in October, 2024, and her opera scene, "Adela in the Cave," adapted from A Passage to India, is being published in Polish Journal of English Studies in December, 2024. Claudia is the librettist of a number of operas in collaboration with Allen Shearer, including Middlemarch in Spring and Howards End, America, both of which premiered at Z Space in San Francisco. Recent operas in collaboration with Shearer include Prospero’s Island, produced at Herbst Theatre, SF, and Einstein at Princeton, presented by Berkeley Chamber Performances, both in 2023. Claudia Stevens is a Contributing Director of Sonic Harvest.

Recognized internationally as a performer and recording artist, a charismatic educator, and a transcriber and editor of guitar literature, David Tanenbaum is one of the most admired classical guitarists of his generation. He has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, the former Soviet Union and Asia, and in 1988 he became the first American guitarist invited by the Chinese government to perform in China. His three dozen recordings, which reflect broad interests including new guitar repertoire, are available on New Albion, EMI, Nonesuch, Ars Musici, Rhino, GSP, Albany, Audiofon, Bayer, Acoustic Music Records, Bridge, Stradivarius. David Tanenbaum is Chair of the Guitar Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he received the 1995 Outstanding Professor Award, and he has been Artist-In-Residence at the Manhattan School of Music. He is in demand for master classes worldwide. HIs students have won many international competitions, and his former students hold teaching positions internationally.