Ensemble for These Times Announces the Pianists for its “E4TT/RMF New Music Piano Summit”

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

Media Contacts:
Nanette McGuinness / nanette@E4TT.org
Renata Volchinskaya / renata@E4TT.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 21, 2025

Ensemble for These Times

Announces the

Pianists for its “E4TT/RMF New Music Piano Summit”:

E4TT Emerita Pianist Dale Tsang

Joined by guests

LaDene Otsuki, and

Ross McKee Foundation Laureates Mehana Ellis and Letian Lei

Sunday, March 1, 2026 at 3:00 p.m.
In-Person and Livestreamed at the Berkeley Piano Club

(Full calendar listing below)

San Francisco – Award-winning SF contemporary chamber group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is excited to announce the guest pianists for its E4TT/RMF New Music Piano Summit in a program consisting of the nine scores chosen in E4TT’s 2025 Call for Scores for Piano Four Hands, a new collaboration with the Ross McKee Foundation intended to foster appreciation of and encourage composers to write for this fascinating and sonorous instrumental combination. The winning works will be performed by E4TT emerita pianist extraordinaire, Dale Tsang joined by Bay Area pianist LaDene Otsuki and recent Ross McKee Foundation laureates Mehana Ellis and Letian Lei. The group’s first-ever program for piano four hands, the concert is a collaboration with the Ross McKee Foundation and will be performed at the Berkeley Piano Club on Sunday, March 1, 2026, at 3:00 p.m., as well as for an online audience on E4TT’s YouTube channel.



ABOUT THE CALL FOR SCORES

Following her wildly successful solo Call for Scores piano recitals for Ensemble for These Times in 2024 and 2022, E4TT emerita pianist extraordinaire Dale Tsang will return in 2026 to perform nine works chosen from the group’s first-ever Call for Scores for piano four hands, joined by Ross McKee Foundation laureates and Bay Area pianist LaDene Otsuki. A new collaboration between the Ross McKee Foundation and Ensemble for These Times, the E4TT/RMF New Music Piano Summit will present the winners from its latest Call for Scores for piano four hands, chosen to hold the call for piano four hands to encourage composers to write for this less-frequently heard but richly rewarding instrumental combination.

For its 2025 Call for Scores the group received 44 works by 36 composers arriving in the official two-week submission window. Scores came from composers hailing from 11 countries (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S.) and a dozen states in the U.S., with the composers ranging from students to established composers to professionals in non-musical fields. As ever, the quality and variety of the submissions made choosing the winners challenging.

The nine works chosen for performance are: “Game Overture” (2023) by Michele Allegro (b. 1990); “Tennis for Two” (2020) by Matt Browne (b. 1988); Joie de vivre (2023) by R. Michael Daugherty (b. 1949); “The Villains” (2018) by Justin Levitt (b.1977); Cuatro ritmos (2019) by Edna Alejandra Longoria (b. 1988); “Potboiler” (2024) by Stephen McCarthy (b. 2000); “Cable Car Canter” (2025) by Joshua Muetzel (b. 1994); “Prima Goodman Fantasy” (2023) by Kelly-Marie Murphy (b. 1964); and “Hyperlooping” (2018) by Sam Wu (b. 1995). E4TT’s emerita pianist Dale Tsang will perform “Hyperlooping” (2018) and Cuatro ritmos (2019) with RMF laureates Letian Lei and Mehana Ellis, respectively, and both laureates will also receive coaching with Dale as part of the summit. LaDene Otsuki will join Dale in performing the remaining 7 winning scores. The summit will take place on March 1, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. at the Berkeley Piano Club and will also be livestreamed for an online audience on E4TT’s YouTube channel.

NINE WORKS BY NINE OUTSTANDING COMPOSERS

Pianist-composer MICHELE ALLEGRO (b. 1990) teaches piano at the I.C. “Rita Levi Montalcini” in Partanna. He obtained a II level degree in piano with full marks and honors, at the "A. Boito" Conservatory in Parma, under the guidance of Maestros Roberto Cappello and Gianpaolo Nuti. In 2016 he obtained a II level degree in Chamber Music with full marks, under the guidance of Maestro Pierpaolo Maurizzi, at the “A. Boito” Conservatory in Parma. He studied composition with Luigi Abbate and piano accompaniment for the operatic repertoire with Carmen Santoro at the “A. Boito” Conservatory in Parma. From 2020 to 2023 he taught piano accompaniment at the “A. Toscanini” Conservatory in Ribera. He has an intense concert activity as a soloist and in chamber groups in Italy and abroad, in the compositional field he stands out for the vivacity and rhythm of his music, regularly performed in Europe and the United States. Regularly invited as a composer in residence at international festivals, his musical activity takes place in close contact with international conductors, chamber groups and orchestras.

Colorado-based composer MATT BROWNE (b. 1988) strives to create music that meets Sergei Diaghilev’s famous challenge to Jean Cocteau: “Astonish me!”, through incorporating such eclectic influences as the timbral imagination and playfulness of György Ligeti, the shocking and humorous polystylism of Alfred Schnittke, and the relentless rhythmic energy of Igor Stravinsky. His music has been praised for its “unbridled humor” (New Music Box) and described as “witty” (The Strad) and “beautifully crafted and considered” (What’s On London). Browne has had the honor to collaborate with such ensembles as the Minnesota Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Quartet, Albany Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and the Eastman Wind Ensemble. His music has received honors such as the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers award, and a BMI Student Composer award. He received his DMA from the University of Michigan. Previous teachers include Michael Daugherty and Carter Pann.

The catalog of compositions by R. MICHAEL DAUGHERTY (b. 1949) contains over 400 works in a wide variety of genres. These include over 40 works for orchestra and band that span his career from 1983 to the present, and over 150 chamber music and solo instrumental works. Most of his works reflect the great orchestral heritage of the past, but he is not afraid to incorporate extended techniques when they support the musical context. Daugherty holds a B.A. degree in musical and literary composition from Denison University, studying with Elliot Borishansky and M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in music composition from The Ohio State University studying with Marshall Barnes. He retired after 35 years as a music theory instructor at Coastal Carolina Community College, Jacksonville, North Carolina, in June of 2011 and moved to Vero Beach, Florida, in March of 2015 with his wife Lorraine. They both enjoy both living near the ocean and the cultural activities available along Florida’s Treasure Coast.

JUSTIN LEVITT (b. 1977) is an award-winning pianist and composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over his career, he has written hundreds of pieces, published ten volumes of piano solos, and won seven MTAC state competition awards. Justin has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, composed symphonies, and created music for the Diablo Ballet, both for stage productions and short films. His score for the Diablo Ballet film "Spiritus" earned him a Gold Telly Award for best music. He is also published in the Australian Music Examination Board (AMEB) syllabus and has two piano duets published by FJH Music. Levitt recently released “Bootleg the Movie,” a film of four-hand piano improvisations, which earned him a Silver Telly Award. In addition to his creative work, Levitt manages the Steinway Piano Gallery in Northern California, helping others find inspiration and joy through music. Outside of his professional life, he finds his greatest inspiration and support in his loving family. He embraces life’s ups and downs with gratitude, considering himself truly blessed, and is dedicated to sharing his passion for music every day.

EDNA ALEJANDRA LONGORIA (b. 1988) is a Mexican-American composer born in McAllen, Texas, and raised in Mexico. Longoria earned her Master of Music in Composition from the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach, and holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She draws inspiration from her Latin heritage, as well as from minimalist and classical music. Longoria has recently been selected as one of the composers for the 2024 EarShot Readings organized by the American Composers Orchestra. Additionally, she is a winner of the 2024 SOLI’s 30x30x30 call for scores and has received the 2024 Vibrant Shores Prize for her composition “El Bailongo.” In addition, Longoria was a winner of the 2019 LunArt Festival call for scores with her piece “Danzas Cautivas” and was honored with the San Antonio NALAC Grant Award in 2020, as well as the San Antonio Performing Arts Grant Award in 2019. Longoria also has a passion for composing film scores and has won several accolades including “Best Music Score” at the Chandler International Film Festival, “Best Original Score” at the Vegas Movie Awards, and “Best Soundtrack” at the New York International Film Awards.

STEPHEN MCCARTHY (b. 2000) is an emerging composer born and currently residing in Sydney, Australia. Having begun to compose early in his high school years, he later took lessons in theory and counterpoint from internationally renowned contemporary composer Nicholas Vines. His overture to Aristophanes’ The Birds received a Silver Award in the 2025 FENIX Composition Competition, making him the highest-ranked composer from the Southern Hemisphere. His orchestral overture “Potboiler” was premiered in November 2024, performed by the UNSW Orchestra under Dr. Steven Hillinger, and later received Second Prize in the 2025 World’s Best Musicians Competition. Other works to date include solo piano music (a Sonatina and Improvisation), works for choir featuring settings of poetry by W. H. Davies (Songs of Joy; for Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass chorus with piano) and Robert Bridges (Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913; for two Sopranos, Alto, Tenor and two Basses unaccompanied) and songs for bass voice and piano.

With music described as “breathtaking” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “imaginative and expressive” (The National Post), “a pulse-pounding barrage on the senses” (The Globe and Mail), and “Bartok on steroids” (Birmingham News), the compositional voice of KELLY-MARIE MURPHY (b. 1964) is well known on the Canadian music scene. She has created a number of memorable works for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles, including the Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, The Gryphon Trio, James Campbell, Shauna Rolston, the Cecilia and Afiara String Quartets, and Judy Loman. Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna, Italy, and grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary with William Jordan and Allan Bell, and later received a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds, England, where she studied with Philip Wilby. After living and working for many years in the Washington D.C. area where she was designated "an alien of extraordinary ability" by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, she is now based in Ottawa, quietly pursuing a career as a freelance composer. Murphy is a recipient of the Jules Léger Prize, and the Azrieli Music Prize.

JOSHUA MUETZEL (b. 1994) is a Miami-based composer whose work explores the commonalities in human experience and the fundamental and mystical qualities of nature. He is interested in numbers and order in nature, climate change, interpersonal relationships, and personal introspection. He explores these concepts through a narrative compositional style that transcends categorizations of genre. Josh writes for large and small ensembles alike and performs on the steel pan. He holds degrees from the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver and Texas A&M University. His principal instructors have been Sean Friar, Peter Lieuwen, and David Wilborn.

SAM WU’s (b. 1995) music “abounds in delicate colors, wisps of sound and sylvan textures” (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life. Selected for the American Composers Orchestra's EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and First Prize at the Washington International Competition, Wu also received Harvard's Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard's Palmer Dixon Prize. His collaborations span five continents, notably with the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, and icarus Quartets, conductors Osmo Vänskä, Marin Alsop, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dina Gilbert, and Benjamin Northey, violinist Johan Dalene, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei. Wu has been featured on the National Geographic Channel, Business Insider, Harvard Crimson, Sydney Morning Herald, Asahi Shimbun, People's Daily, CCTV, among others. From Melbourne, Australia, Sam holds degrees from Harvard, Juilliard, and Rice. He is currently on faculty at Whitman College, as their Visiting Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

E4TT emerita pianist DALE TSANG earned her Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from the University of Southern California, her MM from the University of Michigan, and her DMA from Rice University. She is a faculty member at Laney College, teaches an inspiring assortment of adult students, and serves as a competition adjudicator for a number of local and statewide piano competitions. A winner of numerous competitions and an active solo and chamber musician, she frequently performs locally and in Europe and Asia. As a core member of Ensemble for These Times, she championed 20th and 21st-century music and collaborated in many commissions, premieres and international performances. She continues to enthusiastically disseminate the music of living composers.

LADENE OTSUKI is among the Bay Area's most renowned collaborative pianists. She has performed in ensembles large and small, notably with the Bay Area's Women's Philharmonic, Oakland and Berkeley Symphonies, Earplay, Composers, Inc., the San Francisco and UC Davis Contemporary Players as well as numerous chamber music concerts throughout California and Europe. For more than 20 years, she was a member of the faculty of the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley, where she taught piano and chamber music. A graduate of Stanford University, Otsuki maintains an active private piano studio in North Oakland.

MEHANA ELLIS is a UC Berkeley student studying piano under Prof. Betty Woo, having previously studied with Annamarie McCarthy at SFCM. Mehana was named a Ross McKee Young Artist in the 25th Annual Ross McKee Piano Competition, Grand Prize winner of the 2nd Elena Leonova International Young Pianists Competition, and participated in the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in 2022 and International Music Festival of the Adriatic in 2023. Mehana studied with Anton Nel at the Aspen Music Festival and School in 2024, where she performed in a masterclass with Mikhail Voskresensky. She has performed at 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall, SFCM’s Bowes Center, UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, Harris Hall (Aspen), and abroad in Austria, England, France, Italy, Serbia, and Slovenia.

LETIAN LEI, an eighteen-years-old pianist and flutist, began his musical journey at five with the piano and expanded his passion to the flute at ten. Driven by his dream of a musical career, Letian joined the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s pre-college program at the age of 15. Letian studied under the guidance of Professors Meikui Matsushima for piano along with Catherine Payne for flute, continually refining his artistry and pursuing his passion for classical music.

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 Megan Chartier, 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 SF Bay Area at the German Consulate General, the SF 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 LISTING

Sunday, March 1, 2026 at 3:00 pm, Berkeley, “E4TT/RMF New Music Piano Summit”
Artist: E4TT emerita pianist Dale Tsang, joined by Mehana Ellis, Letian Lei, and LaDene Otsuki
Repertoire: “Game Overture” (2023) by Michele Allegro (b. 1990); “Tennis for Two” (2020) by Matt Browne (b. 1988); Joie de vivre (2023) by R. Michael Daugherty (b. 1949); “The Villains” (2018) by Justin Levitt (b. 1977); Cuatro ritmos (2019) by Edna Alejandra Longoria (b. 1988); “Potboiler” (2024) by Stephen McCarthy (b. 2000); “Cable Car Canter” (2025) by Joshua Muetzel (b. 1994); “Prima-Goodman Fantasy” (2023) by Kelly-Marie Murphy (b. 1964); and “Hyperlooping” (2018) by Sam Wu (b. 1995).
Venue: Berkeley Piano Club, 2724 Haste Street, Berkeley, and livestreamed on YouTube
Tickets: $30/$15/$5 (in-person, no one turned away for lack of ability to pay); free livestream (donations welcome)
Info: https://E4TT.org/summit.html

Purchase tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/e4tt-rmf-new-music-piano-summit-tickets-
1510879163249?aff=oddtdtcreator

For more information about E4TT’s 2025/26 Bay Area Home Season, please visit our website.
High resolution jpgs are available for download https://E4tt.org/presskit.html.

For more information about E4TT’s latest 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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