sé·ance   n.  A meeting of people to receive spiritualistic messages.

Complete Program can be viewed here.

CONCERT NO. 1 (full program here.)
1:00 PM
BIRDS IN WARPED TIME
Solo piano works by Luciano Berio, Percy Grainger, Berkeley teen Dylan Mattingly, Meredith Monk, Per Nørgård, Tan Dun, and Lois Vierk, Violin & piano duets by Grazyna Bacewicz, Olivier Messiaen, and Somei Satoh, plus Steed Cowart: Blackberry Winter (world premiere)

CONCERT NO. 2 (full program here.)
4:00 PM
DEEP RIVER DREAMS
Music for violin & piano from 1904 by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, solo piano works by Samuel Barber, Morton Feldman, Mamoru Fujieda, Ingram Marshall (world premiere), and Olivier Messiaen, and selections from Sueos de Chambi by Gabriela Lena Frank

Special Presentation: RUTH CRAWFORD AND HER MILIEU (full program here.)
7:00 PM
Pre-concert Talk with Judith Tick, Northeastern University
Tick discusses the life and achievements of Ruth Crawford, and her place in a resolute group of "ultra-modernist" composers who flourished in the decades between the two World Wars.

CONCERT NO. 3 (full program here.)
8:00 PM
RUTH CRAWFORD AND HER MILIEU
Crawford's Sonata for Violin and Piano (1924), Study in Mixed Accents (1920) and selections from Nine Preludes (1927-8), plus violin & piano duets by Johanna Beyer and Henry Cowell, and solo piano works of Beyer, Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, Lou Harrison, and Alexander Scriabin

SLIDING SCALE TICKETS (single concert / series):
SEER - $25 / $65
MEDIUM - $40 / $110
PSYCHIC - $60 / $170
Complimentary tonics and libations for all ticket-holders.
Series tickets on the Psychic Level include 6 PM buffet dinner with the artists.

MUSICIANS

Sarah Cahill, piano

Sarah Cahill, recently called "as tenacious and committed an advocate as any composer could dream of" by Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle, has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated music to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Morricone, and Evan Ziporyn, and she has also premiered pieces by Lou Harrison, Julia Wolfe, Ingram Marshall, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ursula Mamlok, George Lewis, Leo Ornstein, and many others.

Cahill is particularly fascinated by how the early 20th-Century American modernists have influenced composers working today. She has explored these musical lineages in numerous concert programs, the most ambitious being a three-day festival celebrating the centennial of Henry Cowell in 1997. For the 2001 centennial of Ruth Crawford Seeger, she commissioned seven composers, all women, to write short homage pieces, which she has performed at Merkin Hall, Dartmouth College, the Cincinnati Conservatory, and at Hampshire College in Amherst. Her newest project, A Sweeter Music, features eighteen commissions on the theme of peace, and will premiere on January 25, 2009 at Hertz Hall in the Cal Performances series, with future performances at New Sounds Live at Merkin Hall and other venues across the country. She enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for performance.

She has performed at the Miller Theatre and Cooper Union in New York, the Other Minds Festival, Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo, at the Spoleto Festival USA, and at the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival in Rome. Cahill and pianist Joseph Kubera appear frequently as a duo; they premiered a set of four-hand pieces by Terry Riley at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and have performed them at the Triptych Festival in Scotland and at Roulette in New York.

Most of Cahill’s albums are on the New Albion label. She has also recorded for the Other Minds, Tzadik, CRI, New World, Albany, Cold Blue, and Artifact labels. Her radio show "Then & Now" can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW 91.7 FM.

Kate Stenberg, violin

Violinist Kate Stenberg's career as a soloist and chamber musician has spanned a broad spectrum of styles with particular emphasis on contemporary music. She has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe and currently is most active as first violinist of the Del Sol String Quartet whose recent accomplishments have won them two ASCAP first prizes for Adventurous Programming for Contemporary Music. She also plays on occasion with the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and was a founding member of Left Coast, a San Francisco-based contemporary music ensemble. As soloist, she has given world and U.S. premieres of works by Ronald Bruce Smith, Henning Christiansen, Josef Matthias Hauer, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and Charles Amirkhanian.

Stenberg is first violinist with Del Sol on the widely hailed world premiere recording of the complete string quartets of George Antheil, a compilation "Ring of Fire," with composers from around the Pacific Rim, and on a forthcoming CD of the unpublished string quartets of Marc Blitzstein, all for Other Minds Records. She also has recorded with Ali Akbar Khan, Stratos and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Stenberg's history with Other Minds dates to our first festival where she performed music by Julia Wolfe at Other Minds 1 (1993), and she has appeared subsequently at five other OM Festivals. In addition, her festival performances include Centre Acanthes, The Banff Centre, Sandpoint, the Music Academy of the West and Tanglewood. Stenberg trained with Gunther Schuller (Sandpoint Festival), Elliott Carter (Festival Acanthes, Avignon) and Leon Fleisher (Tanglewood). has performed chamber music with Bonnie Hampton and Joan Jeanrenaud, and played under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

A native of Northern California raised in a dynamic family of professional musicians, Stenberg is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and received her Master's Degree from the Eastman School of Music where she also served on the violin faculty. She also has taught at the University of San Francisco and continues to teach privately. In her spare time she enjoys Tai Chi Chuan and hiking.

Eva-Maria Zimmermann, piano

Swiss Pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann maintains a career on two continents through performances that are “breathtakingly intense” (Der Bund, Switzerland) and “brilliant and sensitive” (Berner Oberländer). Her solo appearances include recitals as well as concerto performances with major symphony orchestras such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Winner of the prestigious Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship, Zimmermann has appeared at international festivals in Israel, the US and Europe including the Festival Piano en Saintonge in France, the Sommerfestspiele Murten in Switzerland, the Yerba Buena International Music Festival and the Other Minds Festival of New Music in San Francisco. Zimmermann has studied with many distinguished musicians such as Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, Leonard Hokanson and Dominique Merlet. She graduated with highest honors from the Conservatory of Geneva.

Zimmermann is a musician of broad interests and in addition to her solo appearances devotes herself to chamber music, lieder recitals, and teaching. Her partnership in ChamberBridge with soprano Lara Bruckmann includes both concertizing and the production of an annual one-day festival celebrating the work and compositional lineage of a selected 20th/21st Century composer (2008 – ChamberBridge: Messiaen Illuminated). Other collaborations include projects with the Del Sol String Quartet (Del Sol – Del Seoul: premiers of Korean women composers in Seoul) and bass-baritone René Perler (Festival du Lied, Fribourg, Switzerland). Zimmermann was a founding member of the award winning Charmillon Piano Quartet. Many of her chamber music and lieder recitals have been broadcasted in Swiss Radio DRS2 and Radio de la Suisse Romande in such prestigious series as World Class on DRS2. As an educator, Zimmermann has been a faculty member of the University of San Francisco and currently teaches in the music program at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA, which was founded by Sir Yehudi Menuhin.  

Zimmermann spent her early childhood in Indonesia, where her parents were Peace Corps workers. Being exposed to different cultures and languages from very early on has greatly enhanced her understanding of diverse styles of music and art. Zimmermann currently lives in San Francisco where she pursues her career while raising a family.