You’re Invited!

Greetings!

I’m writing to invite you all to a handful of solo/chamber concerts I have coming up over the coming months. Usually I’m not one to get all self-promotey like this, but there are so many interesting projects that I’m excited about that I just couldn’t help myself this time. Take a look at the events below–I would love to see you at one, some, or all of them!

Warmest regards,
Sara

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“Beautiful Bach” on the “Musicians at Mayslake” Series

An all-Bach recital consisting of the 3 gamba sonatas as well as the D minor unaccompanied cello suite. Featuring yours truly on cello alongside the fabulous Stephen Alltop on harpsichord.

Thursday, November 20th
7:30pm
Mayslake Peabody Estate
1717 W. 31st Street
Oak Brook, IL 60523
$25 general admission, $23 seniors, $7 students

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“In Concert”: A Dance and Music Collaboration

A collaboration between many musicians and many dancers! Presented in part by the chamber music series that I have co-founded this year, Chamber Music on the Fox, as well as Elgin’s hippest arts organization, Side Street Studio Arts. The lineup will be a little different each night, but on Saturday you can catch me playing the D minor Bach Suite alongside the dancers of Core Project Chicago, and both nights will feature a mega-collaboration between the dancers of Core Project Chicago, me, and a bunch of my contemporary-classical cronies, with live original choreography set to the music of Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang.

Friday and Saturday, November 21st and 22nd
8:00pm
Elgin Art Showcase
164 Division Street (8th floor)
Elgin, IL 60120
$12 online, $15 at the door

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Bluebeard’s Castle

As far as operas go, Bela Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” is definitely one of my faves, and I’m pumped to be playing it with the New Millennium Orchestra. I know, I know, I told you I was only going to tell you about the solo and chamber concerts I have coming up, but this one was too irresistible to leave out. How could you pass up a creepy one-act opera about a sketchy new husband in a sketchy old castle?

Thursday, December 4th
8:30pm
Thalia Hall
1807 S Allport
Chicago, IL 60608
$10/$25/$40

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Chicago Q Ensemble’s Birthday Brunch!

My beloved string trio is having a birthday party! We’re turning 5 years old, and we figured the best way to celebrate would be with a fundraiser brunch (we give you mimosas, you give us donations). Join us! It’s going to be a blast, and might just feature a special premiere and even…..PARTY FAVORS.

Sunday, December 7th
1:00pm
Dixon Stein
410 S Michigan Ave, Suite 801
Chicago, IL 60605
$20 friends, $50 superfans (or a donation of any amount if you can only be there “in spirit”)

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Caroline Shaw Portrait concert

My good friend Anne Lanzilotti (aka new music violist extraordinaire) and I had been scheming recently, and all of a sudden our schemes have turned into an actual plan. She’s going to be flying in from NYC to play a concert with me, along with some of my other favorite people (including the Chicago Q ladies), on the Frequency Series at Constellation! We’ll play a recital of pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning composer (and old camp friend!) Caroline Shaw, including a piece for solo viola, a duo for viola and cello, another duo for cello and flowerpots (yes, you read that right), and several string quartets. Caroline’s music is beautiful, and it should be a pretty fun time for all involved–especially me, since I just convinced Anne to come visit me.

Sunday, January 25th
8:30pm
Constellation
3111 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL 60618
Ticket info not available yet, but check Constellation’s website in a month or so!

The Interdisciplinary Feedback Loop

If you’ve been checking the Chicago Q Ensemble facebook page in the last week, you may have noticed some odd pictures. Ellen, standing on a giant box, violin under her chin, with crazy pink lights behind her. Aimee, playing while kneeling on the floor with her music stand pushed down as far as it will go. You’ve probably been thinking to yourself, “Those Q ladies have really gone off the deep end. Can’t they just have a normal rehearsal?” Well yes, we’ve been doing that too—matching bowstrokes, working with the metronome, yadda yadda yadda. But what we’re really excited about, the thing that has us sending emails back and forth with the subject line “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh”, the thing that has us free-writing about prayer, and the thing that has actually been shaping many of our musical decisions is our explorations into true interdisciplinary collaboration.

Before I get into what exactly that means and what exactly we’ve been up to in those cryptic pictures, allow me to deviate for a moment to describe a completely unrelated experience I had last week. For the second time this year, I had the pleasure of performing the complete D minor Bach Suite along with the dancers of Core Project Chicago. Some of the dance movements were choreographed, some were improvised (and by the way, I mean dance movements in both senses of the term: 1) the actual movements the dancers made, and 2) the 5 movements within the suite that refer to specific dances from Bach’s era). What was really exciting about collaborating with the Core Project artists was that their dancing actually influenced, inspired, and enhanced the way I played Bach. Suddenly, music that I’ve been playing decades took on new meaning. I found that I was playing phrases in ways I had never considered before and taking slightly different tempos that seemed to go better with the dancing. At times I even felt like I was somehow improvising, even though I was reading the same notes on the page that I’ve always read. And I couldn’t help but think that the dancers were having a similar experience—that maybe, probably, their movements were influenced by whatever nuances I was inserting into the Bach. Between what was coming out of my cello and the gestures of the dancers, we had established a feedback loop of imagination and inspiration. Together, we were feeding off of each other’s ideas and artistry in a beautiful new way. It doesn’t really get any better than that, right?

A few days after my Bach collaboration, I found myself back in a black box theater with Chicago Q and our staging collaborator, Deirdre. Still under the spell of inspiration from working with dancers, I realized that what Q has been doing as we’ve explored staging the music of Andrew Norman is exactly the same thing that I had done with Bach. Replace one art form for another—theater for dance—and between Deirdre and the three of us, we have created the same type of imagination-inspiration feedback loop. While the three of us approach the piece from a musical perspective, Deirdre approaches it from a theatrical perspective, and when those two very different forces come together, we end up with something much bigger, much richer than either of us could have imagined alone.

You know what? I’m not going to explain those pictures after all. I think I’ll just keep letting you wonder. And in order to fully grasp what we’ve been up to, you’ll just have to come to our November 24th show at Constellation. In the meantime, though, I can’t wait for our next session with Deirdre, when everything I think I know about our art form gets thrown upside down as we explore it through a crazy, collaborative, imaginative new lens.