About This Performance

San Francisco Performances Music Historian-in-Residence Robert Greenberg will give a special lecture on the repertoire to be performed this season by Steven Isserlis, Robert Levin, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov. Greenberg deftly and humorously brings to life the music, culture, romance and politics of Beethoven's time to shed light on these performances of his works.

Artist Biography

Robert Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1978. He received a BA in music, magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1976 where his principal teachers were Edward Cone, Daniel Werts and Carlton Gamer in composition; Claudio Spies and Paul Lansky in analysis; and Jerry Kuderna in piano. In 1984, Greenberg received a Ph.D. in music composition (with distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley, where his principal teachers were Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson in composition and Richard Felciano in analysis.

Greenberg has composed over 45 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of his works have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for String Quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam.

Greenberg has received numerous honors, including three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and three Meet-The-Composer Grants. Recent commissions have been received from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Strata Ensemble, San Francisco Performances, and the XTET ensemble. He is a board member and an artistic director of COMPOSERS, INC., a composers' collective/production organization based in San Francisco. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin, and is recorded on the Innova label.

In addition to having performed, taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, Greenberg is currently Music Historian-in-Residence with San Francisco Performances, where he has lectured and performed since 1994, and is a faculty member of the Advanced Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He has served on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, California State University East Bay and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he chaired the Department of Music History and Literature from 1989-2001 and served as the Director of the Adult Extension Division from 1991-1996.

Greenberg has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony (where for ten years he was host and lecturer for the Symphony’s nationally acclaimed “Discovery Series”), the Chautauqua Institute (where he was the Everett Scholar-in-Residence during the 2006 season), the Ravinia Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Villa Montalvo, Music @ Menlo, and the University of British Columbia (where he was the Dal Grauer Lecturer in September 2006). In addition, Greenberg is a sought-after lecturer for businesses and business schools, and has recently spoken for such diverse organizations as S.C. Johnson, Canadian Pacific, Deutsches Bank, the University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaiser-Permanente, the Strategos Institute, Quintiles Transnational, the Young Presidents’ Organization, the World Presidents’ Organization, and the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

He has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, INC. Magazine, the Times of London, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, the University of California Alumni Magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly and Diablo Magazine. For many years Greenberg was the resident composer and music historian to National Public Radio's Weekend All Things Considered and presently plays that role on NPR's Weekend edition, Sunday with Liane Hansen. In February 2003, the Bangor Daily News (Maine) referred to Greenberg as the “Elvis” of music history and appreciation, an appraisal that has given more pleasure than any other.

In May 1993, Greenberg recorded a 48-lecture course entitled How to Listen to and Understand Great Music for the Teaching Company/Great Courses Program of Chantilly, Virginia. (This course was named in the January, 1996 edition of Inc. Magazine as one of “The Nine Leadership Classics You've Never Read”.) Formerly associated with the Smithsonian Institute, the Teaching Company is the preeminent producer of college level courses-on-media in the United States. Twelve further courses, including Concert Masterworks, Bach and the High Baroque, The Symphonies of Beethoven and How to Listen to and Understand Opera have been recorded since, totaling over 500 lectures.