HEAR | TOGETHER is a celebration of the return of live music safely, in the open air, and the diverse range of pianists and composers in the Bay Area. Presented by a consortium of nonprofits — Alternating Currents, Crowden Music Center, Contemporaneous, New Music Bay Area, and The Ross McKee Foundation — the event will be an outdoor showcase for remarkable Bay Area pianists and composers and Crowden students, culminating in the brilliant two-hour solo piano piece by Bay Area composer Dylan Mattingly, titled Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field.
Get your free tickets for each set here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hear-together-tickets-151830688677
Hear | Together will be an all-day piano extravaganza, from 10am to 7 pm, offering audiences a safe opportunity to hear concerts in person. Each pianist will perform a 45-minute set, with 15-minute breaks (the exception being Mattingly’s two-hour piece, to be performed by pianist Robert Fleitz). Listeners, all socially distanced and masked, can hear a range of music, from the Brazilian jazz of Marcos Silva to Indian-American composer Reena Esmail played by Allegra Chapman, from American songbook standards performed by Tammy Hall to Nigerian composer Fred Onovwerosuoke’s playful Etudes with pianist Monica Chew. Sarah Cahill will premiere a new piece, Humanitas, by composer Frederic Rzewski. Special guests include vocalist Leberta Lorál. Crowden students will kick off the day of performances with an hour of solo and chamber music.
This event will provide a rare chance to hear live music, outdoors, by a diverse range of some of the Bay Area’s finest pianists and composers.
SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES & PROGRAM
• 10 am
Crowden students
• 11 am
Monica Chew: Book 1 of Etudes by Fred Onovwerosuoke / selections from Elena Kats-Chernin’s Unsent Love Letters
Elizabeth Dorman: works by Timo Andres / Scarlatti / Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
• 1 pm
Tammy Hall and Leberta Lorál : original compositions / American songbook standards / The Nearness of You and Blue Divine – an original by Tammy Hall
Marcos Silva
• 3 pm
Allegra Chapman: selections from J.S. Bach’s Partita in G Major, BMW 829 / Reena Esmail Rang de Basant / selections from Harry Burleigh’s From the Southland / selections from Grazyna Bacewicz’s 10 Studies for Piano
Dylan Mattingly: Improvisations
Sarah Cahill: selections from Frederic Rzewski’s Humanitas (premiere) / Mary Watkins’ Summer Days / Margaret Bonds Troubled Water / Paul Dresher’s Two Entwined
• 5–7 pm
Robert Fleitz: Dylan Mattingly’s Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field
PERFORMERS:
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
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: https://www.elizabethdorman.com
Performance Sample Bach French Suite #5 in G Major, BWV 816 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ-O62avWUs
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 Hall
A native of Dallas, Hall began her life with the piano at age four, honing her skills in the church and later in studies at Oakland’s Mills College before setting out on a professional career that would find her warm and intuitive mix of jazz, classical, and gospel approaches in great demand. An intensive period of club performances and band building while living in Belgium for two years helped prepare Hall for her life as a collaborator and leader, and upon her return, she built a career in collaboration with a roster of major artists including Mary Wilson, Kim Nalley, Marcus Shelby, Houston Person, David “Fathead” Newman, Pamela Rose, Queen Esther Marrow, Ernestine Anderson, and Regina Carter, among dozens of others. She was a featured guest on NPR’s Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland, and is a dedicated educator, working extensively with SFJAZZ’s education department as well as the SFUSD, Stanford Jazz Workshop, the Musically Minded Academy, and more. She has led or co-led a number of albums under her name including her latest, Blue Soul.
Tammy Hall website.
Performance sample: “In a Sentimental Mood”
Leberta Lorál
Soprano Leberta Lorál possesses a clarion Spinto voice, as well as artistry that are both technically impressive and emotionally intense.
A regional winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, she has appeared numerous times as a featured soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s Summer Concert Series at Hollywood Bowl, Southeast Symphony, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. To critical acclaim, she has performed a broad spectrum of concert works, ranging from the Baroque to Contemporary periods.
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 Mattingly website
Sample work “STRANGER LOVE | Act I, Scene 6 — Continuous Life”
Marcos Silva
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and educator Marcos Silva performs worldwide. Nominated for a Grammy, he has toured with many world-renowned artists, including Paquito D’Rivera, Bud Shank, Dori Caymmi, and many others. He was musical director for Flora Purim and Airto Moreira for 23 years. Marcos has written arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie’s band and replaced Gil Evans as arranger-composer of Airto’s Spiritual Mass in Germany. He is sought after as a producer of CDs, including two 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
Tickets for this event are free! If you would like to support the organizations making this possible, please visit: www.contemporaneous.org/donate! Any contribution will support Alternating Currents, Contemporaneous, Crowden Music Center, and New Music Bay Area.
To ensure the safety of performers and audience members, all attendees are required to wear masks for the duration of each performance. All tickets must be reserved in advance; no walk-ins will be allowed in compliance with state and county COVID safety guidelines. Proof of vaccination or negative results of a COVID-19 test within three days will also be required and must be provided at the gate.
