Lectures

We are pleased to offer free lectures one hour prior to most of our Sunday performances. (Please check concert listings.) These informal, entertaining and informative talks are presented by Alexandra Amati-Camperi, who also writes the program notes in our concert programs and on our web site.

Alexandra Amati-Camperi is Associate Professor and Director of the Music Program at the University of San Francisco. Originally from Italy, she holds a BA/MA in Slavic Studies and Philology from the Università degli Studi di Pisa (Italy), degrees in piano from the Conservatory of Music of Lucca (Italy), and both an MA and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard University, UC Davis, and the Graduate Program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and is presently Associate Professor and Director of the Music Program at the University of San Francisco, which she designed and implemented in 2000.

Her interests include the Italian Renaissance, Italian opera, Feminist criticism, Romantic piano music, and German Baroque choral music. She has published and read papers on Renaissance, operatic, and gender related topics in several journals and conferences. Her book, Philippe Verdelot: Madrigali a sei voci, was published in 2004. The critical edition of Rossini's 1810 one-act farsa La cambiale di matrimonio for Baerenreiter Verlag is in the editing stages, and she is now working on a book about the presentation and treatment of women in opera, as seen through a few settings of the Orpheus myth, tentatively titled Euridice: The Evolution of the Mythical and Musical Other. An article on the castrati in feminine roles and one on the first operatic heroines have recently been published.

She has served on the Council of the American Musicological Society, as the President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bach Choir, the Chair of the Artistic Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Boys Chorus, and on the Board of Directors of the Lycée Français Lapérouse. She is a professional program annotator and pre-concert lecturer for many Bay Area organizations, including the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera and its six Bay Area Guilds, the San Francisco Bach Choir, the San Francisco Boys Chorus, Philharmonia Baroque, and others. Her favorite non academic activities include singing and playing the piano, working out, skiing, reading, knitting, and especially spending time with her three children and watching them grow, musically and otherwise.