Ensemble for These Times announces “Women in Transit”

55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102/ E4TT.org/ (510) 684-0505

 

Media Contacts:

Nanette McGuinness / nanette@E4TT.org

Jessica Folson / jessica@E4TT.org

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 9, 2025

 

Ensemble for These Times

Announces

“Women in Transit”

A Multimedia Musical Evening Featuring 

Commissioned World Premieres by Han Lash, Tamara McLeod and Niloufar Nourbakhsh,

Plus the winner of the E4TT/ TAC Student Composition Competition 

 

Performed by

Nanette McGuinness, soprano/narrator, Lylia Guion, violin, Megan Chartier, cello, Taylor Chan, piano,  

And Han Lash, dancer

 

Friday, April 4, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. 

In-Person at the Cha Chi Ming Hall, Bowes Center, SF Conservatory of Music

With livestreaming on SF Conservatory of Music’s Vimeo Channel

(Full calendar listing below)

 

Ensemble for These Times is proud to announce “Women in Transit,” its newest commissioning initiative and the centerpiece of the group’s 2024/2025 season, in a multimedia musical evening exploring women’s migration and identity in a program featuring three commissioned world premieres by Niloufar Nourbakhsh, Han Lash, and Tamara McLeod, works by Leilehua Lanzilotti and Emma O’Halloran, and the winning entry in the E4TT/TAC Multimedia Student Composition Competition. E4TT’s fifth collaboration with the Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the concert will be livestreamed on the SF Conservatory of Music’s Vimeo Channel and also be performed for an in-person audience at the Cha Chi Ming Recital Hall in the Bowes Center on Friday, April 4, 2025 at 7:30 p.m., preceded by a pre-concert composer talk at 7:00 p.m. Visuals by Pegah Pasalar, Tamara McLeod, and E4TT’s own Stephanie M. Neumann, along with an appearance by Han Lash, dancing their own work, will cap off this exciting program (free to the public), the first of two commissions concert from E4TT’s  new two-year project, “Women Crossing/Liminality.” 

Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by the Mellon Foundation. E4TT's 2024/25 season is sponsored, in part, by grants from the Ross McKee Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, SF Grants for the Arts, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund, funded in part by The Amphion Foundation, Inc, and supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. 

 

ABOUT “WOMEN IN TRANSIT”

Transitions and their intricately entwined effects on women are the focus of E4TT’s 2024/25 annual commissions concert, “Women in Transit,” the first presentation in E4TT’s exciting new two-year project, “Women Crossing/Liminality,” an innovative exploration of women’s migration and identity. The group’s fifth collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Department, the program will feature three commissioned World Premieres—“Cavities” a new piano trio by Opera America Discovery Grant recipient, Iranian-American Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992) with  a  new film by Iranian-American filmmaker Pegah Pasalar (b. 1992); “Orchesography,” a  suite for piano trio, narrator, and dancer focusing on the conventions of identity and gender, composed and danced by Han Lash (b. 1981); and “Okean” by SF Conservatory of Music recent graduate Tamara McLeod (b. 1999) for cello and fixed media, with visuals by McLeod, as well as the winning work from the E4TT/TAC Multimedia Student Composition Competition. Additional works on the program will be  “Vertical Fields” (2014) for piano trio by Emma O’Halloran (b. 1982), which “explores sound that mutates and evolves as if it’s being pushed through different atmospheric densities” (in the composer’s words), and ko’u inoa (2017) for solo cello by Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1985), the title of which means "my name is” and which “frames a perspective and statement to absorb the meaning of identity” via a “homesick bariolage.” (Dr. Michael-Thomas Foumai, Lecturer, Academy of Creative Media, University of Hawai?i West O?ahu). Visuals for the latter two will be by E4TT’s Stephanie M. Neumann and the program will be preceded by a pre-concert talk with Lash, McLeod, Nourbakhsh, and Pasalar.

Performed by soprano/narrator Nanette McGuinness, dancer Han Lash, violinist Lylia Guion, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Taylor Chan. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

LYLIA GUION has performed as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician in France and in the Bay Area. Her extensive orchestral experience includes the Orchestre Philharmonique of Radio-France (Paris) before moving to California in 1997, pursuing with Berkeley, Oakland, California, Marin and Skywalker Symphony, as well as Pacific Chamber Orchestra and Midsummer Mozart Festival. She served as concertmaster with Livermore and Pocket opera. As an avid educator, she has taught in various music schools, coached youth orchestras and organized community concerts. She became a Feldenkrais practitioner and now applies this method at her busy private violin studio in Alameda where she lives with her husband and raised three grown-up children.

 

Cellist MEGAN CHARTIER is “unafraid to display gutsy abandon,” as described by the South Florida Classical Review.  She has performed throughout North America and Europe 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 in California. In recent seasons, she has served as principal cellist of the Miami Symphony Orchestra and principal cellist of the Pacific Region International Summer Music Academy in Vancouver, and also recently performed with orchestras including the San Antonio Symphony, One Found Sound in San Francisco, 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 Orchestra. 

 

Hailed in the press for her "creamy golden tone" and "glorious soprano," soprano, co-founder, and Artistic Executive Director NANETTE MCGUINNESS has performed in 13 languages on two continents in over 25 roles, with the Silesian State Opera (Czech Republic), Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera, and Livermore Valley Opera, among others. Solo concert engagements include Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, Shéhérézade (Ravel), Nuits d’étés (Berlioz), Stabat Mater (Rossini), Requiem (Fauré), Gloria (Vivaldi), Lord Nelson Mass (Haydn), Vesperae Solennes (Mozart), and Handel oratorios. A passionate advocate of music by living composers and women artists, McGuinness has been featured on eight recordings with Centaur and Yuggoth Records; her debut CD of music by women composers, “Fabulous Femmes,” was called “perfect for the song recital lover” (Chamber Music Magazine). She earned her PhD in Music (specializing in musicology) at UC Berkeley, MM in Vocal Performance from Holy Names College, and BA in Music from Cornell University he earned her PhD in Music at UC Berkeley and her MM in Vocal Performance from Holy Names College.

Pianist TAYLOR CHAN learned the art of collaboration—in music and in life—while completing her MM in Collaborative Piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she is currently a staff accompanist and coach to voice students. She has also held various administrative positions at SFCM and is proud to have expanded her skillset to include technical writing, data management, building time-saving systems, and identifying ways to optimize collaborative workflow. Her current pursuit is to codify methodologies and create course materials to support the musical andragogy of undergraduates.

 

 

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 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. E4TT has performed locally 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 has released five albums, all of which have medaled in the Global Music Awards: “Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood” (2024) featuring music by composers who fled the Nazis for Hollywood and changed 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; “Surviving: Women’s Words,” (2016), new music to poetry by women survivors

 

CALENDAR LISTING

Friday, April 4, 2025 at 7:30 p.m., San Francisco
“Women in Transit”
Artists: Soprano/narrator Nanette McGuinness, dancer Han Lash, violinist Lylia Guion, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Taylor Chan
Repertoire: “Cavities” (2024, World Premiere) for piano trio by Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992) with ; “Orchesography” for piano trio, narrator, and dancer by Han Lash (b. 1981); "Okean" for cello and fixed media by Tamara McLeod (b. 1999); "Vertical Fields" for piano trio by Emma O’Halloran (b. 1982); ko'u inoa for solo cello by Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1985); and the winning work from the E4TT/TAC Multimedia Student Composition Competition with the San Francisco Conservatory’s Technology and Applied Composition Department.
Pre-concert programming: Composer talk at 7:00 p.m. 
Venue: Cha Chi Ming Recital Hall, Bowes Center, San Francisco, and livestreamed on SFCM’s Vimeo channel
Tickets: FREE
Info: https://www.e4tt.org/transit.html

Purchase tickets: https://sfcm.edu/experience/performances/concert-e4tttac/20250404

 

For more information about E4TT’s 2024/25 Bay Area Home Season, please visit our website.

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

For more information about E4TT’s latest recording, “Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood,” please visit https://E4TT.org/emigresEPK.html

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