Concerts at the Collins


Sacred Heart Cathedral is proud to announce another outstanding lineup for this year’s Concerts at the Collins! Now, in its second season, this outstanding concert series offers members of the SHC community the opportunity to experience brilliant talent in a world-class performance venue. Click here to purchase tickets.

September 21, 2012 – Mads Tolling Quartet in Concert

Mads Tolling, internationally renowned musician and composer, is a two-time Grammy Award-Winning violinist. As a former nine-year member of both Turtle Island Quartet and bassist in the Stanley Clarke Band, Tolling spent most his professional life touring internationally. Since 2007, Tolling has led his own group, Mads Tolling Quartet. Their 2009 album, The Playmaker, features Stanley Clarke and jazz greats Russell Ferrante & Stefon Harris. A brand new MTQ album, Celebrating Jean-Luc Ponty – Live at Yoshi’s, was released in May 2012. Tolling has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his recordings have received rave reviews in Downbeat Magazine, Strings Magazine, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. He has performed with Chick Corea, Ramsey Lewis, Kenny Barron and Paquito D’Rivera. Purchase your tickets here.

November 16, 2012 – Alex Conde

“Flamenco pianist Alex Conde’s music has an endless virtuosism, dedication and passion,” says iconic Latin jazz artist, Ruben Blades. Conde graduated in classical music from the Jose Iturbi Conservatory of Music in Valencia, Spain and Piano Jazz by el Liceu de Barcelona, Spain. He moved to Boston in 2007 with a scholarship to attend the Berklee School of Music, and studied with top jazz artists such as Danilo Perez, Wayne Shorter, Maria Schneider, Joe Lovano, Dave Santoro and many others. Alex Conde has performed all over the United States and Canada in numerous flamenco festivals, collaborating with artists such as Nino de los Reyes, Jose Luis Rodriguez, Kina Mendez, Coral de los Reyes, Jose Valle ”Chuscales” and Jesule de Utrera. He has also been featured at Yoshi’s, the SF Jazz Hotplate and the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.  

February 15, 2013 – Killing My Lobster

The Lobster Theater Project, better known as Killing My Lobster (KML), provides artists with the opportunity to generate and produce performance art across a range of disciplines that provokes, amuses, educates, entertains and inspires. KML was founded to give a group of comedians with day jobs a home for creating insightful comedic work they simply were not seeing produced in San Francisco. Since KML’s first show in a 25-seat converted office in the Mission on Valentine’s Day, 1997, the group has worked with more than 400 Bay Area artists to create exciting original work for local audiences and national outlets. Today, KML is hailed by the Chronicle as “the closest thing we have to Second City” and heralded as “an orgy of comic genius” by Comedy Central. It has created original work for HBO, is a two-time winner of the Best of the Fringe Award at the SF Fringe Festival and was voted Best Comedy Group by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. 

April 19, 2013 – Shay and Michael Black

Shay and Michael Black are singing siblings from Ireland’s foremost family of song, The Black Family, which also includes their sisters, Mary and Frances, and brother, Martin. Hailed in The Irish Echo as “one of the most impressive groups of Irish singers to be found anywhere; exquisite, exhilarating and nothing short of thrilling,” they raise their sibling rivalry to revelry. The Blacks adroitly accompany themselves on banjo, cittern and guitar. The musical lineup also features fiddle virtuoso Bobbi Nikles, cellist Myra Joy and keyboardist Bryan Seet. At their concerts one can expect to hear traditional Irish ballads, Dublin street songs, music hall ditties, contemporary folk compositions, rollicking reels and joyful jigs, all interspersed with comic stories, jokes and humorous childhood anecdotes that invariably have audiences smiling broadly and joining in on the choruses. Shay and Michael are close harmony singers, with a special fondness for songs that include their audience in chorus, and many of the songs are narratives with stories.