Ensemble For These Times to Tour to the East Coast

Media Contacts:

Nanette McGuinness / nanette@E4TT.org

                                                                                                                                                Kalli Sobania / kalli@E4TT.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                                       

August 5, 2025

 

Ensemble for These Times

 

Announces its

 

2025 EAST COAST TOUR

 

To Brooklyn and Boston

 

September 20, 2025: “BK/ In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices”

With works by Madeline Clara Cheng, Jodi Goble, Ursula Kwong-Brown, inti figgis-vizueta, Darian Donovan Thomas, Niloufar Nourbakhsh and Pegah Pasalar

 

September 22, 2025: Niloufar Nourbakhsh Faculty Recital

 

Performances by

Soprano Nanette McGuinness, Cellist Megan Chartier,

Violinist Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman, and Pianist Margaret Halbig

(Full Calendar Listing Below)

 

 

San Francisco – Award-winning San Francisco contemporary music group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is excited to announce its first-ever tour to the East Coast of the U.S. from September 18-23, with performances in Brooklyn and Boston. The group will perform “BK/In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices” on September 20, 2025 at the Brooklyn Art Haus, in a program featuring favorite works and commissions from their past two seasons by Madeline Clara Cheng, Jodi Goble, Ursula Kwong-Brown, inti figgis-vizueta, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh, with a video by filmmaker Pegah Pasalar. In Boston, E4TT will appear on composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s Faculty Recital at the Longy School of Music at Bard College on September 22, 2025, and will also take part in several classes on September 22-23. For both concerts, E4TT will be joined by accomplished new music specialist Mia Nardi-Huffman, violin, who performed with the group in San Francisco in 2022/23. Both programs will be offered in person and online.

 

A TOUR TO THE EAST COAST

While Ensemble for These Times has toured extensively in Europe and California, September 18-23, 2025, will be the first time the group heads to the East Coast, for programs in Brooklyn and Boston. The centerpiece of the tour will be the East Coast Premiere of the group’s 2024  commission, “Cavities”* by Iranian-American composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992), for piano trio and electronics, with a video by Iranian-American filmmaker Pegah Pasalar. The first concert, BK/In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices, will take place on Saturday, September 20 at 7:30 p.m., with a pre-concert talk at 7:00 p.m., at the Brooklyn Art Haus in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to “Cavities,” works to be performed will feature the East Coast Premieres of two additional commissions for piano trio that E4TT premiered in 2024, “And I Made My Own Way, Deciphering That Fire” (inspired by Pablo Neruda) by NYC native and Columbia graduate, Chinese-American composer Ursula Kwong-Brown (b. 1987) and “Ubi Lux Floret” by queer Brooklyn composer Darian Donovan Thomas (b. 1993). Three more works will round out the program: “the motion between three worlds” (2020) for cello by non-binary Quechua/Latinx Brooklyn composer inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993); “Forget Your Scarf in My Life” (inspired by a Mikko Harvey poem) for piano trio by E4TT/ Luna Composition Lab alum Call for Scores winner, emerging Chinese-American composer Madeline Clara Cheng (b. 2004); and a song cycle for voice and piano by NATS Art Song Composition Competition winner Jodi Goble (b. 1974), “Twelve Chairs,” setting US Poet Laureate Rita Dove's cycle of 13 short poems about personal identity and the U.S. judicial system.  E4TT will also perform “Cavities” on Monday, September 22 as part of Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s faculty recital at Longy School of Music at Bard College, along with two more of her works, “Veiled” for cello, electronics, and fixed media, and Cello Sonata for cello and piano. Members of the group will take part in several classes on September 22-23 as well.  Both concerts are part of E4TT’s two-year project exploring women’s immigration, transitions, and identity, “Women Crossing/ Liminality,” and will be offered in hybrid format for both in-person and livestream attendance.

Performers on the tour will be Nanette McGuinness, soprano, Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman, violin, Megan Chartier, cello, and Margaret Halbig, piano.

_{*”Cavities” by Niloufar Nourbakhsh was made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by the Mellon}

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Cellist MEGAN CHARTIER is “unafraid to display gutsy abandon” (South Florida Classical Review). She has performed internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral cellist. Her current positions include core cellist of the Astralis Chamber Ensemble and principal cellist of Opera San Luis Obispo. Past positions include principal cellist of the Miami Symphony and the Pacific Region International Summer Music Academy; she has also recently performed with the San Antonio Symphony One Found Sound, Nu Deco Ensemble, and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. A semi-finalist in the 2017 PRISMA Concerto Competition, she won 1st prize in the Ann Arbor Society of Musical Arts’ 2015 Young Artist Competition and the 2015 Miami Music Festival Concerto Competition, conducted by Grzegorz Nowak of the Royal Philharmonic.

 

Pianist MARGARET HALBIG is in high demand as a collaborative artist in both the instrumental and vocal fields. She is currently Associate Chair of the Voice Department and Principal Vocal Coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she also frequently collaborates with faculty and student instrumentalists. During the summer, Halbig is Collaborative Piano Coordinator of Interlochen Arts Camp. An advocate of new and contemporary music, Halbig is the pianist for Ninth Planet, a San Francisco-based new music collective where she also serves on the board. She is a member of Frequency 49, a wind and piano sextet, which performs all over the Bay Area.  Margaret earned her DMA from the University of California Santa Barbara under the tutelage of Robert Koenig and also holds performance degrees from the University of Missouri, Kansas City Conservatory and University of Evansville, Indiana.

 

Soprano and E4TT co-founder and Artistic Executive Director NANETTE MCGUINNESS has performed in 13 languages on two continents in over 25 roles with the Silesian State (Czech Republic), Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera, Trinity Lyric Opera, and Livermore Valley Opera, among others. Solo concert engagements include Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, as well as Shéhérézade (Ravel), Nuits d’étés (Berlioz), Stabat Mater (Rossini), Requiem (Fauré), Gloria (Vivaldi), Lord Nelson Mass (Haydn), Vesperae Solennes (Mozart), and Handel’s Messiah and Solomon. McGuinness has been featured on seven albums with Centaur and Yuggoth Records, and her CD of music by 19^th and 20^th century women composers, Fabulous Femmes (Centaur)—was called “perfect for the song recital lover” by Chamber Music Magazine. She earned her PhD in Music at UC Berkeley and her MM in Vocal Performance from Holy Names College.

New York City-based violinist MIA ROSE NARDI-HUFFMAN is a versatile performer whose work spans Beethoven to Black Sabbath. She has appeared across North America and Europe in venues including Carnegie Hall, SF JAZZ Center, Herbst Theatre, and Shoreline Amphitheatre. Mia is founder and first violinist of the ASTRAEUS Chamber Collective, a touring member of Spirit Mother, and concertmaster of the nationally touring Emo Orchestra. She also performs with Sphinx of Black Quartz Judge My Vows, the Brooklyn Chamber Players, and Ensemble for These Times. Passionate about new music, she has held composition residencies at Stanford University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Cal State East Bay, Diablo Valley College, and UC Santa Cruz. Mia holds BM and MM degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she was concertmaster and recipient of the Sergei Barsukov Violin Scholarship.

 

ABOUT ENSEMBLE FOR THESE TIMES

Winner of The American Prize in 2021 for Chamber Music Performance, ENSEMBLE FOR THESE TIMES (E4TT) consists of award-winning soprano/Artistic Executive Director Nanette McGuinness, cellist/Social Media Assistant Abigail Monroe, pianist Margaret Halbig, and co-founder/Senior Artistic Advisor composer David Garner. E4TT made its international debut in Berlin in 2012; was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Budapest for a four-city tour of Hungary in 2014; and performed at the Krakow Culture Festival in 2016 and 2022, and at the Conservatorio Teresa Berganza in Madrid in 2017. In California, E4TT has performed at the Paderewski Festival, the LAMOTH, UCLA, and in the Bay Area at the German Consulate General, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Old First Concerts, JCC Peninsula, Trinity Chamber Concerts, and Noontime Concerts, among other venues. E4TT’s five albums have all medaled in the Global Music Awards: “Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood” (2024) featuring music by some of the talented émigré composers who fled persecution during WWII for Hollywood, changing movie music as we know it; “The Guernica Project” (2022), commemorating the 85th anniversary of the horrific carpet bombing of civilians and Picasso’s masterwork in response; “Once/Memory/Night: Paul Celan” (2020), honoring the centennial of the seminal 20th-century poet; “The Hungarians: From Rózsa to Justus” (2018), with works by Hungarian émigré Miklós Rózsa, and three of his compatriots who perished in the Holocaust; and “Surviving: Women’s Words,” (2016), new music to poetry by women Holocaust survivors. The group recorded its sixth album, of music by Latine composers, in summer 2025 and launched the second season of its podcast of conversations with underrepresented creatives, “For Good Measure,” in 2024.

 

 

CALENDAR LISTINGS

Saturday, September 20, 2025 at 7:30pm, Brooklyn, “BK/In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices”

Artists: E4TT soprano Nanette McGuinness, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Margaret Halbig, with guest violinist Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman

Repertoire: “Forget Your Scarf in My Life” (2021) for piano trio by Madeline Clara Cheng (b. 2004); “Twelve Chairs” (2016) for soprano and piano by Jodi Goble (b. 1974); “And I Made My Way, Deciphering That Fire” (2024) for piano trio, by Ursula Kwong-Brown (b. 1987); “the motion between three worlds” (2020) for solo cello by inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993); “Ubi lux floret” (2024) for piano trio by Darian Donovan (b. 1993); and “Cavities” (2024) for piano trio by Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992), to a film by Pegah Pasalar

Pre-concert Programming:  Composer talk at 7:00 p.m.

Venue:  Brooklyn Art Haus, 24 Marcy Ave, Brooklyn, NY, and livestreamed

Tickets: $25/$20 (in-person); $15 (suggested donation for livestream)

Info: https://E4TT.org/eastcoast.html

Purchase Tickets:  https://www.stellartickets.com/o/brooklyn-art-haus--2/events/bk-in-motion-new-music-by-marginalized-voices/occurrences/68e9d80a-d8d4-4461-86e4-35fe74289121 or http://bit.ly/4l8Z5cY

 

 

Monday, September 22, 2025 at 7:30pm, Cambridge, Niloufar Nourbakhsh Faculty Recital

Artists: E4TT cellist Megan Chartier and pianist Margaret Halbig, with guest violinist Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman

Repertoire: “Cavities” (2024) for piano trio, “Cello Sonata” (2012) for cello and piano, and “Veiled” (2019) for solo cello and electronics plus fixed media, all by Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992)

Venue: Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, MA, and livestreamed

Tickets: FREE in-person and online (livestreamed)

Info: https://E4TT.org/eastcoast.html

 

For more information about E4TT’s 2025/26 Bay Area Home Season, please visit our website.

High resolution jpgs are available for download http://www.e4tt.org/presskit.html.

 

For more information about E4TT’s newest recording, “Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood,” please visit https://E4TT.org/emigresEPK.html or contact Max Horowitz 347.267.9563 / maxcrossover@gmail.com

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