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

San Francisco, CA, 20 September 2005 — The intimate candlelit surroundings of Bernard Maybeck’s Swedenborgian Church, built in San Francisco in 1895, will be the scene of America’s first-ever New Music Séance, presented by Other Minds.  Noted pianist Sarah Cahill, and the violin-piano duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann, will perform a selection of hypnotic, spiritual and rarely-heard contemporary music in a meditative mode. The music spans the period from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 5 (1889), to Charles Ives’ Second Violin Sonata (1907), and through the 20th century to the present, including Self (2005) by Bay Area composer Daniel David Feinsmith.

The Other Minds New Music Séance marathon features three distinct concerts on Saturday, December 3, 2005, at 2pm, 5:30pm, and 8pm, at Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco. Tickets for individual concerts are $20, $35, or $50; a series pass for all three concerts is available for $50, $100, or $150. Seating in the intimate setting of Swedenborgian Church will be general admission, with proceeds to benefit Other Minds. Advance tickets are available online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/events/2301, or by phone at (415) 934-8134.

Produced by Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, the three concerts in the New Music Séance feature five hours of solo piano music performed by Sarah Cahill, with additional performances by Kate Stenberg, violin, and Swiss pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann. Audiences will be treated to performances of  Alexander Scriabin’s Vers la flamme (Toward the Flame, 1914) and the world premiere of Three Fantasy Pieces, dating from the early 1960s, by the Russian-born American composer Leo Ornstein (1892-2003). A further highlight will be the American premiere of Danish artist-composer Henning Christiansen’s Den Arkadiske for violin and piano, a Fluxus gloss on folk fiddling that is astonishing in its intensity. The concerts also feature works by John Adams, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Bunita Marcus, Ruth Crawford, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran, Lou Harrison, Johanna M. Beyer, and other composers. Works by Kyle Gann, Daniel David Feinsmith, and Conlon Nancarrow, played on Disklavier, will take on a particularly atavistic glow in this exalted context. 

MUSICIANS

Sarah Cahill, piano

Sarah Cahill was praised in the Village Voice for “her phenomenal technique, her instinctive command of recent aesthetics, and quite possibly the most interesting repertoire of any pianist around.”  She specializes in new American music as well as the American experimental tradition, and has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Annea Lockwood, and Evan Ziporyn, and she has premiered pieces by Lou Harrison, Julia Wolfe, Frederic Rzewski, 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 many 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, at Dartmouth College, at the Cincinnati Conservatory, and at Hampshire College in Amherst. For another project, entitled Playdate, she has commissioned composers including Lois V. Vierk and John Kennedy for a concert especially designed for children.  She enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for performance. 

She has performed at the Other Minds Festival, the Phillips Collection, Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo, and at the Spoleto Festival USA. Recent appearances include the Tokyo Summer Festival and the Nuovi Spazi Musicali festival in Rome. This coming season, Sarah will team up with pianist Joseph Kubera to premiere a set of four-hand pieces by Terry Riley in New York, and at Royce Hall at UCLA. She also has solo recitals scheduled in Santa Fe, New York, and Tokyo, as well as performances with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

Sarah’s albums of works by Ravel and Cowell are on the New Albion label, which also released her recording of Ruth Crawford’s Preludes and Piano Study in Mixed Accents and two suites by Johanna Beyer. She has also recorded for the Tzadik, CRI, New World, Albany, Artifact, and Cold Blue labels. She is currently preparing recordings of music by Leo Ornstein, Ingram Marshall, Evan Ziporyn, Kyle Gann, and Mamoru Fujieda. Her radio show, Then & Now, can be heard every Sunday evening from 8 to 10 pm on KALW (91.7 FM), and her website is www.sarahcahill.com.

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 a member of the Del Sol String Quartet whose recent accomplishments have won them an ASCAP award 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 and the Stenberg/Plude Duo (violin & piano). In addition she now performs with the Real Vocal String Quartet, a unique Bay Area group that focuses on arrangements and original works by its members who both sing and play their instruments.  Her premieres include Trois Regards (1988-89) for violin and piano by Canadian composer Ronald Bruce Smith, to be performed at the Other Minds New Music Séance.

Stenberg is first violinist on the widely hailed world premiere recording of the complete string quartets of George Antheil (with Del Sol on the Other Minds label) and recorded the popular album "Tear" with Del Sol with whom she just has returned from a concert tour to Seoul playing music of six Korean women composers.  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) with the Alyeska Quartet, by Frances White at OM 2 (1994) with the Left Coast, by Gavin Bryars at OM 7 (2001) with the Other Minds Ensemble by Michael Nyman and Daniel Bernard Roumain with Del Sol at OM 11 (2005).  Her other festival performances include Centre Acanthes, The Banff Centre, Sandpoint, the Music Academy of the West and Tanglewood. She has performed chamber music with Bonnie Hampton and Joan Jeanrenaud and played under the direction of Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.

A native of Northern California raised in a dynamic family of professional musicians, she 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, she has appeared at international festivals in Israel, the US and Europe including the Festival Piano en Saintonge in France, the Sommerfestspiele Murten in Switzerland, and the Yerba Buena International Music Festival in San Francisco. Eva-Maria 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.

Eva-Maria Zimmermann is a musician of broad interests and in addition to her solo appearances devotes herself to chamber music, lieder recitals, and teaching. She actively collaborates with the Del Sol String Quartet and bass-baritone René Perler, and was a founding member of the award-winning Charmillon Piano Quartet. Many of her chamber music and lieder recitals have been broadcast on Swiss Radio DRS2 and Radio de la Suisse Romande in such prestigious series as World Class on DRS2. As an educator, she has been a faculty member of the University of San Francisco, and currently teaches in the music program at Nueva School in Hillsborough, CA, which was founded by Sir Yehudi Menuhin. 

Eva-Maria 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. She currently lives in San Francisco.