Allegra Chapman
San Francisco-based pianist Allegra Chapman is an omnivorous soloist and chamber musician, adventurous curator, and passionate educator. Her performances have been described as “fervid but impeccably controlled” and “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “inspired” by the Bay Area Reporter. She is the pianist of the award-winning Delphi Trio, co-founder of the voice and piano duo Chordless, and founding co-artistic director and executive director of Bard Music West, a San Francisco-based music festival. Allegra has performed at prestigious international venues including Alice Tully Hall, San Francisco Jazz Center, and Xi’an Concert Hall, and festivals including the Aspen, Bard, and Kneisel Hall music festivals. She plays regularly with leading Bay Area ensembles including San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Left Coast Ensemble, and Earplay. Her music video with Chordless, The Night in Silence, won the Best Music Video award at the Tokyo International Short Film Festival. Allegra is on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Pre-College division and a board member of the Ross McKee Foundation. Allegra studied with Jeremy Denk and Peter Serkin at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and with Seymour Lipkin and Julian Martin at The Juilliard School.
Monica Chew
Monica Chew is an Oakland pianist. In 2017 she released her first solo album, Tender and Strange, featuring works by Bartók, Janáček, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Scriabin. A “gifted player with an affinity for deeply sensitive expression” (Whole Note, June/July/August 2018), her playing is “wonderfully delicate, like tissue” (International Pianist, July/August 2018). She started composing in 2017 and couldn’t be happier about it. She premiered her first songs for soprano and piano in 2018 and completed her first commission for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection 2019 workshop. She loves playing chamber music and received a Zellerbach Family Foundation award for her work with Minsky Duo, which she co-founded in 2016. Prior to 2015, she neglected piano for nearly a decade to work as a principal software engineer on security and privacy at Mozilla and Google after receiving her Master of Music from SF Conservatory of Music and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. She lives in Oakland with her husband, an 1899 Steinway B, a clavichord, and a disused violin.
Monica Chew website
Performance Sample Piano Break performance
Elizabeth Dorman
Praised by Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle for her “elegance and verve,” pianist Elizabeth Dorman enjoys performing music both new and old as a soloist and chamber musician. A finalist of the 2018 Leipzig International Bach Competition, Elizabeth has been widely recognized as a leading performer for her inquisitive interpretations of Bach’s music on the modern piano. Elizabeth has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Louisville Orchestra, the Leipzig Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Symphony Parnassus, as a soloist for interdisciplinary projects at New World Symphony, and will appear as a soloist with the Santa Rosa Symphony later this season. She has been presented as a soloist and chamber musician at venues including the Kennedy Center, Davies Symphony Hall, Herbst Theater, Merkin Hall, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik, and her live solo performances have been nationally broadcast on NPR and public radio. She has appeared at festivals including Tanglewood, Britt, Sarasota, Aspen, Toronto Summer Music, Icicle Creek, and Banff Centre. Working with the Bridge Arts Ensemble, Stony Brook University, and the Ross McKee Foundation, Elizabeth has produced concerts, lectures, and workshops for music students and was honored with the Father Merlet Award from Pro Musicis for her work training high school music students in community engagement.
Elizabeth Dorman website
Performance Sample Bach French Suite #5 in G Major, BWV 816
Post:Ballet
Post:ballet was founded in 2009 by Artistic Director Robert Dekkers, named “25 to Watch” by DANCE Magazine after the company’s inaugural season, with a vision to experiment with eclectic artists, using dance as a means for creative expression that takes chances, pushes boundaries, and challenges social norms. The company was recently named one of “10 Contemporary Ballet Companies You Should Be Obsessed With” by Dance Spirit, and Post:ballet’s dancers were recognized by the San Francisco Chronicle for being “among the finest on the West Coast.”
Post Ballet website
Performance Sample Lyra: Surface Down
Robert Dekkers
Choreographer and Artistic Director of Post:Ballet
Robert Dekkers is dedicated to inspiring artists and audiences with his passion for movement, curiosity, imagination, and commitment to the craft of ballet. Named “25 To Watch” by DANCE Magazine and celebrated for his direction of multi-disciplinary collaborations that are “inventive, focused, sophisticated, and anything but risk averse” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert is also Artistic Director of Berkeley Ballet Theater, the official school of Post:Ballet. Robert’s choreography has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Tanzsommer Festival, and WestWave Dance Festival. Robert is Director of Choreography for Art Haus, a Playa performance group whose first production featured a reimagined Rite of Spring with full orchestra and over 40 performers at Burning Man 2017. Last year, Art Haus presented his contemporary work We, Human set to Reich’s Eight Lines and this summer, performed his interpretation of Firebird on Playa with a full orchestra playing the original Stravinsky score.
Sarah Cahill
Sarah Cahill, recently called “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Yoko Ono, Annea Lockwood, Mary Watkins, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Cahill’s latest project is The Future is Female, featuring more than sixty compositions by women around the globe, ranging from the 18th century to the present day, including new commissioned works. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include the Barbican Centre, University of Iowa, the Huddersfield Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Her weekly radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, is on KALW San Francisco.
Website
Performance Sample
Sarah Cahill’s recital for Piano Break
Robert Fleitz
Robert Fleitz performs, commissions, and writes music to curate evocative, multi-disciplinary experiences for audiences. To this end, he has personally commissioned 120 solo, chamber and performance art pieces, and has given the world premiere to hundreds more, notably including composers Tan Dun and Paola Prestini. Praised for “mesmerizing” and “commanding” playing (The New York Times), and for musicality with “a delightful ease and lightness” (I Care If You Listen), his prolific career in performing both classical and new music has led to appearances in 24 US states and 13 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He was the winner of the André Boucourechliev Prize in the 2020 International Piano Competition of Orléans. As a composer, Robert’s music has been described as “dreamy, flowing,” and having a “surreal glow” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Robert has been recently performed or commissioned by a diverse array of artists, including the Metropolis Ensemble (NYC), Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), Jumblies Theatre (Toronto), the Druskomanija Festival (Lithuania), the Off-Broadway theatre piece Babel, and Hilary Easton Dance Company. Robert Fleitz holds degrees from The Juilliard School (B.M. & M.M.), where he was one of ten graduates to receive the Career Advancement Grant. He studies composition with Eric Wubbels, and has also worked with Martijn Padding, Simon Frisch, and Molly Joyce. He is based in New York City, where he lives with his partner, the composer Krists Auznieks.
Website
Performance Sample
Dylan Mattingly - "Achilles Dreams of Ebbets Field"
Tammy Hall
A native of Dallas, Hall began her life with the piano at age four, honing her skills in the church and later in studies at Oakland’s Mills College before setting out on a professional career that would find her warm and intuitive mix of jazz, classical, and gospel approaches in great demand. An intensive period of club performances and band building while living in Belgium for two years helped prepare Hall for her life as a collaborator and leader, and upon her return, she built a career in collaboration with a roster of major artists including Mary Wilson, Kim Nalley, Marcus Shelby, Houston Person, David “Fathead” Newman, Pamela Rose, Queen Esther Marrow, Ernestine Anderson, and Regina Carter, among dozens of others. She was a featured guest on NPR’s Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland, and is a dedicated educator, working extensively with SFJAZZ’s education department as well as the SFUSD, Stanford Jazz Workshop, the Musically Minded Academy, and more. She has led or co-led a number of albums under her name including her latest, Blue Soul.
MYRA MELFORD
The pianist, composer, bandleader and educator Myra Melfordb whom the New Yorker called "a stalwart of the new-jazz movement has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Culling inspiration from a wide range of sources including Cecil Taylor, the blues and boogie-woogie of her native Chicago, the poetry of Rumi, the AACM and yoga, she has explored an array of formats, among them ruminative solo piano recitals, deeply interactive combos and ambitious multidisciplinary programs. Melford's most recent release, The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12), by her quintet Snowy Egret, is an extraordinary document of her unique creative language's seamless, shifting blend of composition and improvisation, and a probing of the space shared between dynamic small-group jazz and contemporary chamber music. Since debuting on record as a bandleader in 1990, she's built a discography of more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader, and has collaborated with such luminaries as Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Liberty Ellman, Erik Friedlander, Ben Goldberg, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Ron Miles, Nicole Mitchell, Tyshawn Sorey, Chris Speed, Stomu Takeishi, Cuong Vu and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
Melford's teachers and mentors include Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, Jaki Byard, Don Pullen and other icons of jazz postmodernism, and she has received some of the most prestigious honors available to an improvising musician: numerous DownBeat poll placings, a 2000 Fulbright scholarship, a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music and, in 2013, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and the Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. After having been an influential presence in New York since the mid-80s, Melford relocated to the Bay Area in 2004, to join the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices. She continues to bring cutting-edge jazz and new music to the campus community via her teaching and as a guest curator for the Cal Performances organization.
Myra Melford website
Performance Sample Snowy Egret - Small Thoughts
Marcos Silva
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and educator Marcos Silva performs worldwide. Nominated for a Grammy, he has toured with many world-renowned artists, including Paquito D’Rivera, Bud Shank, Dori Caymmi, and many others. He was musical director for Flora Purim and Airto Moreira for 23 years. Marcos has written arrangements for Dizzy Gillespie’s band and replaced Gil Evans as arranger-composer of Airto’s Spiritual Mass in Germany. He is sought after as a producer of CDs, including two of his own. Marcos heads the Brazilian Music Department at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.
Marcos Sliva website
Performance Sample
Marcos Silva Group - Brazilian People
Artist Bios IN Development
