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

February 2, 2026

 

Ensemble for These Times

 

Announces

 

“Women Crossing/ Liminality”

 

Performed by

 

E4TT (Megan Chartier, cello, and Margaret Halbig, piano)

With guests percussionist Haruka Fujii, violinist Lylia Guion, soprano Bryana Marrero, flutist Stacey Pelinka,

And special guest, composer-performer and media artist Pamela Z

 

Friday, April 17, 2026 at 7:30 pm

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

And livestreamed on SF Conservatory of Music’s Vimeo Channel

(Full calendar listing below)

 

San Francisco – Award-winning SF contemporary chamber group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is excited to announce “Women Crossing/ Liminality,” the ensemble’s annual commissions concert and the culmination of its two-year project exploring women's immigration and identity, featuring commissioned World Premieres by Juhi Bansal, Vivian Fung, and a new multimedia work composed and performed by world-renowned composer-performer and media artist Pamela Z. E4TT’s sixth collaboration with the SF Conservatory of Music’s Technical and Applied Composition (TAC) Department the program will also feature the winner of the E4TT/TAC student multimedia composition competition, plus works by Leilehua Lanzilotti and Sofia Jen Ouyang, with composers Fung and Z joining E4TT at 7 p.m. for a pre-concert composer talk. The concert will be free to attend in-person at Cha Chi Ming Hall, Bowes Center, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and online on the SF Conservatory of Music’s Vimeo channel.

E4TT’s 2025/26 season is supported in part by the San Francisco Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, the Amphion Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Ross McKee Foundation. E4TT is honored to be a fiscally sponsored affiliate of InterMusic SF, a non-profit organization dedicated to small-ensemble music in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

ABOUT “WOMEN CROSSING/ LIMINALITY”

The highlight of E4TT’s 2025/26 season will be Women Crossing/Liminality, the culmination of the group’s innovative multimedia exploration of women’s immigration and identity. E4TT’s annual commissions concert and its sixth multimedia collaboration with the SF Conservatory of Music’s Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) Department, “Women Crossing/ Liminality will feature three commissioned World Premieres: ”Fields of Sorrow,” a new work for voice, cello, and piano by Opera America Discovery winner, Indian-Hongkongese composer Juhi Bansal (b. 1992), and two pieces with percussion—one for found-object percussion and bass flute by JUNO Award winner, Chinese-American composer Vivian Fung (b. 1975), and the other for percussion, violin, cello, and tape by world-famous Rome Prize-winning Black composer, Pamela Z (b. 1956)—along with the World Premiere of the winner in the E4TT/TAC student multimedia composition competition with the San Francisco Conservatory’s Technical and Applied Composition Department. Two more works will round out the program: “say it in your heart, say it in your sleep” (2023) for solo piano by 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1985), and “Liminal/ity” (2021) for solo cello by Chinese-American BMI Composer Award Sophia Jen Ouyang (b. 2001).

E4TT (cellist Megan Chartier and pianist Margaret Halbig) will be joined by percussionist Haruka Fujii, violinist Lylia Guion, soprano Bryana Marrero, flutist Stacey Pelinka, and special guest, composer-performer and media artist Pamela Z. The concert will be free to attend at Cha Chi Ming Recital Hall in the Bowes Center at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (RSVPs recommended) and will also be livestreamed at no charge on SFCM’s Vimeo channel.

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.

 

Multi-percussionist HARUKA FUJII has become one of the most prominent solo percussionists and marimbists of her generation. Since 2010 Fujii has performed as an artist of the Grammy® Award winning Silkroad Ensemble, founded by Yo-Yo Ma and serves as the Associate Artistic Director. She has appeared as a soloist with the SF Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Nationale de Lyon, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra. She is a member of San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Line C3 Percussion Group, also Utari Percussion Duo, a duet project with her sister Rika. A faculty member of San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she has been a frequent guest instructor at Juilliard Summer Percussion Seminar and is the founder and creative director of the nonprofit organization Nippon Kobo, a cultural event series introducing Music Culture from contemporary Japan.

 

Violinist 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, where she has performed with the Berkeley, Oakland, California, Marin, and Skywalker Symphony Orchestras, as well as Pacific Chamber Orchestra and Midsummer Mozart Festival. She also served as concertmaster with Livermore and Pocket Opera. An avid educator, she has taught in various music schools, coached youth orchestras, and organized community concerts. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner and currently applies this method at her private violin studio.

 

E4TT 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 singers and instrumentalists. Halbig was the pianist for Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco from 2014 through 2023, and in 2013 was appointed collaborative piano coordinator of Interlochen Arts Camp. An advocate of new and contemporary music, she is the pianist and a board member of the new music collective Ninth Planet and has also. Halbig earned her DMA from UC Santa Barbara and performance degrees from the University of Missouri, Kansas City Conservatory, and University of Evansville, Indiana. 

 

Soprano BRYANA MARRERO is excited to return as a soloist with Ensemble for These Times. Her last performance with E4TT was presenting the world premier of T.J. Martin’s arrangement of Alban Berg’s Sieben Frühe Lieder. Ms. Marrero has been cast in such roles as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare, Musetta in La Boheme, and Ilia in Idomeneo. Previous roles also include Pamina and First Lady in Die Zauberflöte and Sadie in Slow Dusk. Ms. Marrero received a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Music from Tufts University. She grew up in Austin, TX, and lived in Madrid, New York, and Boston before moving to San Francisco.

 

Flutist STACEY PELINKA enjoys performing a broad spectrum of classical music, especially contemporary chamber music. A longtime member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and a founding member of the Eco Ensemble, Pelinka plays principal flute with SF Opera’s Merola Program productions and the Midsummer Mozart Festival, second flute with the Berkeley Symphony and the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, and piccolo with the Santa Rosa Symphony. She has performed with the SF Symphony and SF Opera as well as many other Bay Area ensembles. She currently teaches flute at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, and has taught Baroque Flute at the San Francisco Conservatory. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Stacey attended Cornell University and the SF Conservatory of Music. 

 

Composer-Performer and Media Artist PAMELA Z makes works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), MoMA (NY), the Venice Biennale, and Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, the Guggenheim, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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 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. E4TT’ s sixth album, “El Tiempo Latine” (Latine time–music by contemporary Latina and Latino composers) will be released on Aerocade Music on May 8, 2026 and the group launched the second season of its podcast of conversations with underrepresented creatives, “For Good Measure,” in 2024.

CALENDAR LISTING

Friday, April 17, 2026 at 7:30 pm, San Francisco, “Women Crossing/Liminality”

Artists: E4TT (cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Margaret Halbig) with guests percussionist Haruka Fujii, violinist Lylia Guion, soprano Bryana Marrero, flutist Stacey Pelinka, and special guest artist, composer-performer and media artist Pamela Z

Repertoire: “Fields of Sorrow” (World Premiere) for voice, cello, and piano by Juhi Bansal (b. 1984), a new work (title tbd) for bass flute and found-object percussion by Vivian Fung (b. 1975) and a new work for voice, violin, cello, percussion, and tape by Pamela Z (b. 1956); the winning score in the E4TT/TAC student multimedia composition competition; “say it in your heart, say it in your sleep” (2023) for solo piano by Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983); “Liminal/ity” (2021) for cello by Sofia Jen Ouyang (b. 2001)

Venue: Cha Chi Ming Recital Hall, Bowes Center, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 200 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, and online on SFCM’s Vimeo channel

Tickets: FREE in-person and online (livestreamed)

Pre-Concert Composer Talk: 7:00 pm

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

RSVP: https://sfcm.edu/experience/performances/e4tt-tac/20260417

 

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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