Ensemble For These Times Reveals MUJERES AHORA
The performance is on Friday, May 9, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
By: Stephi Wild Mar. 17, 2025
Award-winning SF contemporary group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) will bring its successful 17th season to a close on May 9, 2025, with "Mujeres Ahora" (Women Now) in San Francisco, in collaboration with the San Francisco International Arts Festival. The program will feature works by seven award-winning 21st century Latina composers: inti figgis-vizueta, Gabriela Lena Frank, Tania León, Carla Lucero, Claudia Montero, Angélica Negrón, and Gabriela Ortiz. "Mujeres Ahora" will be livestreamed for free ($20 donation encouraged) and also performed for an in-person audience at the Community Music Center on Friday, May 9, 2024 at 7:30 p.m., preceded by a live pre-concert composer talk at 7:00 p.m.
E4TT will close its successful 17th season with yet another powerhouse concert celebrating works by modern Latina composers. The program will be the group's first appearance as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Entitled "Mujeres Ahora" ("Women Now"), the performance will feature: piano trios by Pulitzer Prize winner Tania León (b. 1987) ("Elegia a Paul Robeson," 1987), Opera America Discovery Grant composer Carla Lucero (b. 1964) ("La revelación" from Juana, 2019), and four-time Latin Grammy winner Claudia Montero (1962-2021) ("Buenos Aires en tres," 2016); vocal works by Lucero ("I Won't Give Up" from Touch, 2024) and Montero (Alfonsina Song Cycle, 2012-13, selections); a cello/piano duo by Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities Recipient Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) ("Manhattan Serenades, 1995); and solo works for cello by Lotos Foundation Prize winner inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993) ("the motion between three worlds," 2020) and piano by León ("Tumbao," 2005), Greenfield Hermitage Prize winner Angélica Negrón (b. 1981) (Sueño recurrente No. 1 - Veo carros fantasmas, 2002) and Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964) ("Su-muy-key," 2004 and selections from Estudios entre preludios, 2005).
Violinist Lylia Guion and cellist Vanessa Ruotolo will join E4TT soprano Nanette McGuinness and pianist Margaret Halbig. The concert can be viewed in person and online via livestream.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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, performing with the Berkeley, Oakland, California, Marin and Skywalker Symphonies, as well as Pacific Chamber Orchestra and Midsummer Mozart Festival. She served as concertmaster with Livermore and Pocket opera. As an avid educator, she has taught in various music schools, coached youth orchestras and organized community concerts. She became a Feldenkrais practitioner and now applies this method at her busy private violin studio in Alameda.
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 instrumentalists. During the summer, Halbig is Collaborative Piano Coordinator of Interlochen Arts Camp. An advocate of new and contemporary music, Halbig is the pianist for Ninth Planet, a San Francisco-based new music collective where she also serves on the board. She is a member of Frequency 49, a wind and piano sextet, which performs all over the Bay Area. Margaret earned her DMA from the University of California Santa Barbara under the tutelage of Robert Koenig and also holds performance degrees from the University of Missouri, Kansas City Conservatory and University of Evansville, Indiana.
Soprano and E4TT co-founder and Artistic Executive Director NANETTE MCGUINNESS has performed in 13 languages on two continents in over 25 roles with the Silesian State (Czech Republic), Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera, Trinity Lyric Opera, and Livermore Valley Opera, among others. Solo concert engagements include Mahler's Fourth Symphony, as well as Shéhérézade (Ravel), Nuits d'étés (Berlioz), Stabat Mater (Rossini), Requiem (Fauré), Gloria (Vivaldi), Lord Nelson Mass (Haydn), Vesperae Solennes (Mozart), and Handel's Messiah and Solomon. McGuinness has been featured on seven albums with Centaur and Yuggoth Records, and her CD of music by 19th and 20th century women composers, Fabulous Femmes (Centaur)-was called "perfect for the song recital lover" by Chamber Music Magazine. She earned her PhD in Music at UC Berkeley and her MM in Vocal Performance from Holy Names College.
VANESSA RUOTOLO is a cellist and educator based in San Francisco. She is a tenured member of the Santa Rosa Symphony, Pacific Chamber Orchestra and Midsummer Mozart Festival Orchestra. Vanessa plays with Skywalker Sound Orchestra as well as opera companies Opera Parallele, Opera On Tap and West Edge Opera. She has performed with several new music ensembles including Earplay, SFCMP, Eco Ensemble, Pacific Rim, April in Santa Cruz and Other Minds Festival. She has served as lecturer in music at UC Santa Cruz since 2009 where she teaches while also performing new music compositions of students and faculty alike, having recorded original works for New World and Other Minds Records.
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 Abigail Monroe, 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. The group launched the second season of its podcast of conversations with underrepresented creatives, "For Good Measure" in 2024.
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