Sarah Cahill
Sarah Cahill, recently called “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Yoko Ono, Annea Lockwood, Mary Watkins, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, featuring more than sixty compositions by women around the globe, ranging from the 18th century to the present day, including new commissioned works. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include the Barbican Centre, University of Iowa, the Huddersfield Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Her weekly radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, is on KALW San Francisco.
Sarah Cahill website
Performance Sample Piano Break recital
Allegra Chapman
San Francisco-based pianist Allegra Chapman is an omnivorous soloist and chamber musician, adventurous curator, and passionate educator. Her performances have been described as “fervid but impeccably controlled” and “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “inspired” by the Bay Area Reporter. She is the pianist of the award-winning Delphi Trio, co-founder of the voice and piano duo Chordless, and founding co-artistic director and executive director of Bard Music West, a San Francisco-based music festival. Allegra has performed at prestigious international venues including Alice Tully Hall, San Francisco Jazz Center, and Xi’an Concert Hall, and festivals including the Aspen, Bard, and Kneisel Hall music festivals. She plays regularly with leading Bay Area ensembles including San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Left Coast Ensemble, and Earplay. Her music video with Chordless, The Night in Silence, won the Best Music Video award at the Tokyo International Short Film Festival. Allegra is on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Pre-College division and a board member of the Ross McKee Foundation. Allegra studied with Jeremy Denk and Peter Serkin at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and with Seymour Lipkin and Julian Martin at The Juilliard School.
Allegra Chapman website
Perforrmance sample Domenico Scarlatti - Sonata in D minor, K. 213
Monica Chew
Monica Chew is an Oakland pianist. In 2017 she released her first solo album, Tender and Strange, featuring works by Bartók, Janáček, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Scriabin. A “gifted player with an affinity for deeply sensitive expression” (Whole Note, June/July/August 2018), her playing is “wonderfully delicate, like tissue” (International Pianist, July/August 2018). She started composing in 2017 and couldn’t be happier about it. She premiered her first songs for soprano and piano in 2018 and completed her first commission for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection 2019 workshop. She loves playing chamber music and received a Zellerbach Family Foundation award for her work with Minsky Duo, which she co-founded in 2016. Prior to 2015, she neglected piano for nearly a decade to work as a principal software engineer on security and privacy at Mozilla and Google after receiving her Master of Music from SF Conservatory of Music and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. She lives in Oakland with her husband, an 1899 Steinway B, a clavichord, and a disused violin.
Monica Chew website
Performance Sample Piano Break performance
CRowden Student musicians
The 10 a.m. concert will feature 19 Crowden student musicians. They are listed in the program
Berkeley’s Crowden Music Center is a non-profit organization where students come to receive a world-class education with music at its core.
Crowden was founded in 1983 by Scottish violinist Anne Crowden, who envisioned a day school that would provide a supportive environment for young musicians by incorporating music into the daily curriculum. It was the first school of its kind in the nation. Crowden quickly expanded its programming to offer music instruction and events to the broader community. Today, Crowden serves more than 12,000 individuals each year with innovative programs that combine music and education to nurture, develop, and inspire music lovers of all ages.
The Crowden School, a private school for grades 3–8, offers a transformative academic curriculum with chamber music at its core. All students play either a string instrument or piano, and study ensembles, music history, music theory, composition, and chorus in addition to a full academic schedule. Crowden’s community education offerings include after-school, weekend, and summer music lessons and classes for all ages and levels of ability, serving more than 1,600 students each year. Bay Area audiences treasure Crowden’s engaging and affordable programming for the general public, including the Sundays @ Four chamber music series (always free for children) and Community Music Day, an annual free musical carnival that exposes thousands of Bay Area children to classical music and instruments for the first time. Additionally, Crowden provides access to music education and support to local public schools and teachers through its public school outreach program, and its facility rental program provides essential rehearsal and performance space to local music teachers and organizations.
At Crowden, we believe that music is an inherent part of being human, and we believe in the power of music to change lives—indeed, to change everything.
Crowden’s performers today represent a broad cross section of our music education programs, including private lesson students, youth chamber music ensembles, and The Crowden School.
Robert Fleitz
Robert Fleitz performs, commissions, and writes music to curate evocative, multi-disciplinary experiences for audiences. To this end, he has personally commissioned 120 solo, chamber and performance art pieces, and has given the world premiere to hundreds more, notably including composers Tan Dun and Paola Prestini. Praised for “mesmerizing” and “commanding” playing (The New York Times), and for musicality with “a delightful ease and lightness” (I Care If You Listen), his prolific career in performing both classical and new music has led to appearances in 24 US states and 13 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He was the winner of the André Boucourechliev Prize in the 2020 International Piano Competition of Orléans. As a composer, Robert’s music has been described as “dreamy, flowing,” and having a “surreal glow” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Robert has been recently performed or commissioned by a diverse array of artists, including the Metropolis Ensemble (NYC), Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), Jumblies Theatre (Toronto), the Druskomanija Festival (Lithuania), the Off-Broadway theatre piece Babel, and Hilary Easton Dance Company. Robert Fleitz holds degrees from The Juilliard School (B.M. & M.M.), where he was one of ten graduates to receive the Career Advancement Grant. He studies composition with Eric Wubbels, and has also worked with Martijn Padding, Simon Frisch, and Molly Joyce. He is based in New York City, where he lives with his partner, the composer Krists Auznieks.
Robert Fleitz website
Performance Sample Dylan Mattingly - "Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field"
Tammy L. Hall
Tammy L. Hall started playing piano at age 4 and decided at age 5 to be a 'good working musician'. This intention along with the desire to travel, perform and teach music has taken her all over the world to noted venues such as the Sala Filarmonica at Trento (Universita di Trento), Jazz At Lincoln Center, Miner Auditorium at SFJAZZ, Bing at Stanford,and festivals including Monterey, San Jose, Northsea Jazz, Tokyo, Belgium, France and Holland, and allowed her to work with vocalists Etta Jones, Linda Tillery (and the Cultural Heritage Choir), Kim Nalley, Tiffany Austin, the Supreme Mary Wilson, most recently, soprano Leberta Lorál, baritone Phillip Harris, violinists Regina Carter and Laurie Anderson, and orchestra leader and bassist Marcus Shelby. She received the award for Best Musical Direction from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle in 2017. In 2019 the San Francisco Human Rights Commission honored Tammy as a recipient of its inaugural Pleasant-Leidesdorff San Francisco Community Stalwart Award and she is this year's Inaugural Artist-In-Residence for Healdsburg Jazz.
Tammy Hall website.
Performance sample: "In a Sentimental Mood"
photo: Irene Young
Leberta Lorál
Leberta Lorál possesses a clarion voice that has been described as both Mezzo and Soprano, as well as artistry that are both technically impressive and emotionally intense. Highlights of 2018/2019 include exciting collaborations with Douglas Ovens in performing his composition, “Three Love Songs” on Poems of Alice Fulton for soprano and vibraphone in the Monterey County Composer’s Forum, “Winds of Change”, reappearing March 2019 as the Soprano soloist with the Camerata Singers of Monterey County in performances of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem which benefited the Veteran’s Transition Center of Monterey County and a Vocal Master Class at California State University at Monterey Bay.
In March and May 2018, Ms. Lorál was honored to perform Henry Mollicone’s Beatitude Mass with The Camerata Singers. From that concert, she had the honor of meeting and working with the composer, Rick Yramategui during the August 2018 Monterey County Composers Forum in Carmel Valley. In February 2017, Ms. Lorál was a featured soloist in the 20th Annual Conference of the African American Art Song Alliance where she performed the works of composer Richard Thompson and Undine Smith Moore. During that conference, she was asked to record the roles of Victoria and The Woman in the Bar for his original opera, Mask in the Mirror based upon the life of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. On February 8, 2019, Parma Records released it on their Naxos label. Most recently, Ms. Lorál had the extreme pleasure of meeting Ms. Tammy L. Hall and she is excited about their upcoming collaborations!
Leberta Lorál website
Performance Sample “Dawn” (from the song cycle “The Shadow of Dawn” Music by Richard Thompson - Text by Paul Laurence Dunbar)
Dylan Mattingly
Dylan Mattingly’s work is fundamentally ecstatic, committed to transformative experience. His music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma) and is often informed by his scholarship on Ancient Greek music and poetry.
Mattingly is the executive and co-artistic director of the NY-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. Among the ensembles and performers who have commissioned Mattingly’s music are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly’s in-development 6-hour multimedia opera, Stranger Love, has recently been presented on the PROTOTYPE Festival and the Bang on a Can Marathon. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Dylan is an alumnus of Crowden's John Adams Young Composers Program.
Dylan Mattingly website
Sample work "STRANGER LOVE | Act I, Scene 6 — Continuous Life"
Elizabeth Dorman
Praised by Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle for her “elegance and verve,” pianist Elizabeth Dorman enjoys performing music both new and old as a soloist and chamber musician. A finalist of the 2018 Leipzig International Bach Competition, Elizabeth has been widely recognized as a leading performer for her inquisitive interpretations of Bach’s music on the modern piano. Elizabeth has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Louisville Orchestra, the Leipzig Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Symphony Parnassus, as a soloist for interdisciplinary projects at New World Symphony, and will appear as a soloist with the Santa Rosa Symphony later this season. She has been presented as a soloist and chamber musician at venues including the Kennedy Center, Davies Symphony Hall, Herbst Theater, Merkin Hall, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik, and her live solo performances have been nationally broadcast on NPR and public radio. She has appeared at festivals including Tanglewood, Britt, Sarasota, Aspen, Toronto Summer Music, Icicle Creek, and Banff Centre. Working with the Bridge Arts Ensemble, Stony Brook University, and the Ross McKee Foundation, Elizabeth has produced concerts, lectures, and workshops for music students and was honored with the Father Merlet Award from Pro Musicis for her work training high school music students in community engagement.
Elizabeth Dorman website
Performance Sample Bach French Suite #5 in G Major, BWV 816
Marcos Silva
Marcos Silva , piano, synthesizer pianist, composer, arranger, producer and educator performs worldwide. He has toured with many artists, including Paquito D’Rivera, Bud Shank, Claudio Roditi, Raul de Souza, Toninho Horta, Leny Andrade, Edu Lobo, Emilio Santiago, Dori Caymmi and many more. Marcos was musical director for Flora Purim and Airto Moreira for 24 years. He wrote arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie’s band and replaced Gil Evansas composer-arranger of Airto’s Spiritual Mass with a 63 piece orchestra in Germany. He is sought after as a producer of CDs, including three of his own. Marcos heads the Brazilian Music Department at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.
Marcos Sliva website
Performance Sample Marcos Silva Group - Brazilian People