Spring Benefit '25
MARCH 29, 2025
What
Join us for a joyful and inspiring evening of music as we celebrate the profound impact of a Crowden education on our students, families, and community.
When
March 29, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Where
Ciel Creative Space (935 Carleton Street, Berkeley, CA 94710)
Program
5:30 Wine & Bites, Music, & Silent Auction
6:30 Dinner, Performance by Mads Tolling Trio, Raffle, Fund-A-Need, & more
Ticket Info
$175 general admission, $85 accessibly priced tickets for professional performing artists or Crowden School alumni. (Request a discount code by emailing development@crowden.org.)
Event Chairs
Sandy Walsh-Wilson
Sandy Walsh-Wilson, a native of Northumberland, England, studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Royal College of Music, and the Royal Danish Conservatory. He performed with the Royal Danish Ballet and studied with Niels Viggo Bentzon and Erling Blöndal-Bengtsson. At 21, he became principal cellist of the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft Orchestra in Luzern, performing extensively with pianist Hedy Salquin. Moving to the U.S. in 1979, he earned a degree at Yale while studying with Aldo Parisot and the Tokyo Quartet. A co-founder of the Alexander String Quartet in 1981, he has since focused on chamber music, education, and advocacy.
Deborah O'Grady
Deborah O’Grady is a fine art photographer and videographer. She has a Master’s degree in Music Composition and Theory from UC San Diego, and served as Director of Operations and Educational Programs for the San Francisco Symphony, among other non-profit administrative positions. Service on non-profit boards includes Berkeley Symphony, the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco, the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, and Fotokids, an educational program serving at risk youth in Guatemala. Deborah served on Crowden’s board from the late ‘80s to the early 2000’s and was instrumental in the acquisition and move to our current historic landmark campus. She is the mother of two Crowden alums.
Performers
Mads Tolling Trio
Mads Tolling, an internationally renowned violinist and composer, is a two-time Grammy Award-Winner and the 2016 DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star Violinist. As a former nine-year member of both Turtle Island Quartet and Stanley Clarke’s band, Mads has spent most of his professional life touring internationally. Mads has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his recordings have received rave reviews in Downbeat Magazine, Strings Magazine, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has performed live with Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Kenny Barron, Leo Kottke, Sergio & Odair Assad and Paquito D’Rivera.
Robert Greenberg
Known as the “Elvis of music history” (Bangor Daily News), Dr. Robert Greenberg is a composer, historian, speaker, and the San Francisco Performances Music Historian-in-Residence. A graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Greenberg holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He has seen his compositions—which include more than fifty works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles—performed all over the world, including 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.
Dr. Greenberg has served on the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley; California State University, Hayward; and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, and the Chicago Symphony. For fifteen years Greenberg was the resident composer and music historian to NPR’s “Weekend All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition, Sunday” with Liane Hansen.
Dr. Greenberg has a long relationship as a professor with the Teaching Company/Great Courses, where he has recorded more the 550 lectures on a range of composers and classical music genres which have gained him an audience across the world. Dr. Greenberg’s book, How to Listen to Great Music, was published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books in April 2011. Among many honors, Dr. Greenberg is an official Steinway Artist, and holds three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress. He has been profiled in various major publications, including The Wall Street Journal; Inc. magazine; and the London Times. Dr. Greenberg currently resides in Oakland, California.