Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers to Release World Premiere Recording of UP

Bay Area-based pianists Sarah Cahill and Regina Myers have recorded composer D. Riley Nicholson’s UP for two pianos, a work that they commissioned in 2020. The new recording of the 30-minute piece will be released digitally worldwide on April 25, 2025. Cahill and Myers gave the world premiere performance of the piece at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in September 2022, before recording UP there in 2024.

Composer and pianist D. Riley Nicholson has composed and performed for a wide range of ensembles and mediums. Notable projects include One, for large string orchestra, which headlined Hot Air Music Festival in 2016. Nicholson composed, produced, and performed Shimmer, for piano, visuals, and electronics which toured nationally in 2018. Later that year, he was honored as the CAPMT Distinguished Composer of the Year. In 2019, his performance of the music of Julius Eastman was described as a “powerful, ingeniously wrought rendition” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

That same year, Nicholson wrote a new work for Amaranth String Quartet. In 2021, Nicholson created original music for the Walking Distance Dance Festival (ODC Dance). In 2022, he wrote a full-length electroacoustic piece for David Herrera Performance Company. Currently, Nicholson is writing a new work for HARJO. He is also serving as the Executive Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the longest running and preeminent festival dedicated to new music for orchestra, based in Santa Cruz, CA.

Hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, Sarah Cahill 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, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, 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, an investigation and reframing of the piano literature featuring more than seventy compositions by women around the globe, from the Baroque to the present day, including new commissioned works.

Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include concerts at The Barbican, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carolina Performing Arts, National Gallery of Art, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, North Dakota Museum of Art, Gretna Arts, WoCo Festival, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Music Festival. Cahill also performed music from The Future is Female for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert series. Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Her three-album series, The Future is Female, was released on First Hand Records between March 2022 and April 2023. These albums encompass thirty compositions by women from around the globe, from the 17th century to the present day, and include many world premiere recordings. Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  

Regina Myers performs as a solo artist and with ensembles around the Bay Area. She received a Bachelor's degree in Piano Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a Master's in Piano Performance and Literature from Mills College, where she focused on new and experimental music under the guidance of pianist Marc Shapiro, ensemble leader and composer Steed Cowart and percussion master William Winant. In 2004 she founded the concert series, and now ensemble, New Keys: New Keys' mission is to surface and promote the newest and most innovative music for the piano. We challenge composers to explore the vast untapped potential of the piano and strive to craft the experience of a piano recital as both captivating and approachable for our audience. Before going on hiatus to rapidly and accidentally expand her family, Regina proudly taught piano to beloved students for 17 years.

She has participated in the Hot Air, Switchboard, Garden of Memory Summer Solstice and SF Friends of Chamber Music SF Music Day music festivals and has had the honor of playing many concerts with the William Winant Percussion Group as well as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. She can be heard on Luciano Chessa's album Petrolio, Danny Clay/Joseph Colombo LP (with New Keys) and on Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley on which she plays four-hand music by Terry Riley with her duo partner Sarah Cahill. Regina prides herself on expanding the reach of new music for piano by commissioning new works and organizing concerts for their premieres and recording. She relishes working with young and emerging composers as well as keeping seminal new music masterpieces alive.