W. A. Mozart:Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478

Mel Bonis: Piano Quartet No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 69

Ensemble SF Program 9-03-24 Program

ENSEMBLE SF

Founded in 2013, Ensemble SF is a malleable collective of musicians dedicated to inspiring a more inclusive world through art. Beyond the traditional concert hall setting, Ensemble SF is also committed to bringing world-class music to groups throughout the Bay Area including at schools, juvenile detention centers, community centers, hospitals, and nursing homes. In these outreach settings, ESF musicians generously donate their time to share their love of chamber music. Through new concert experiences and education of the next generation, ESF is vital in the cultural fabric of the Bay Area.

REBECCA JACKSON-PICHT

Violinist Rebecca Jackson-Picht’s foundational belief is that music possesses the power to heal and unite. This has propelled her career and professional outreach around the globe, having performed in marginalized communities across the US, Ukraine, Romania, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nepal, Costa Rica, and Lebanon. While maintaining a regular performance schedule with groups like the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, she contemporaneously produces projects that build community through music outside the concert hall.

Music in May, for which she serves as Artistic Director, is Rebecca Jackson-Picht’s largest project to date. Now in its 16th season, Music in May continues its dedication to engaging incarcerated youth. In 2013, she co-founded Sound Impact and Ensemble San Francisco, organizations with missions tied to many of her core values. In 2018, Rebecca Jackson-Picht received a KSBW Jefferson Award in recognition of her volunteerism and public service. The following year, she and her father co-authored the biography of her mentor David Arben, a Holocaust survivor and former associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She is a member of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.

JESSICA CHANG

Taiwanese-American violist Jessica Chang leads a versatile career as a chamber musician and educator. She is the founder and director of Chamber Music by the Bay, which brings concerts to pre K-12 schools, libraries, and communities in the San Francisco Bay Area each year. Her work as a teaching artist has led to concert residencies with Project 440, the Savannah Music Festival, and Music from Angel Fire. Festival appearances include Festival Mozaic, Bard Music West, the Perlman Workshop, Aspen, Verbier, Tanglewood, Taos, Prussia Cove, Juneau Jazz and Classics, Music from Angel Fire, and the Savannah Music Festival. She has performed as a chamber musician throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, and her performances have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today, WNYC, WHYY, and WQXR Public Radio. She has also served as violist of the Afiara Quartet, with whom she served as Quartet-in-Residence at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and visiting faculty at The Banff Centre. Jessica holds degrees from Yale, The Juilliard School, and the Curtis Institute of Music, and performs with ensembles throughout Northern California including Ensemble San Francisco, Chamber Music Silicon Valley, and the Ives Collective. She leads a dual career in information security and is an industry-recognized speaker and presenter globally on building and scaling security culture.

ANGELA LEE

A graduate of The Juilliard School and Yale School of Music, cellist Angela Lee is a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to study in London with William Pleeth, a grant from the Foundation for American Musicians in Europe, the Jury Prize in the Naumburg International Cello Competition, and a cello performance fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She is a founding member of The Lee Trio, which won top prizes in the Kuhmo International Chamber Music Competition in Finland and the Gaetano Zinetti International Chamber Music Competition in Italy. In its third decade, the Trio regularly gives master classes and performs worldwide and has commissioned and premiered works of numerous living composers and has recordings on Delos, Innova, and the Chelsea Music Festival Records labels.

Using music to foster peace and goodwill, Angela Lee has made humanitarian trips to the Republic of the Philippines and the former Yugoslavia. While on a U.N.-sanctioned tour of six war-torn cities throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, she performed for NATO troops and displaced civilians. As a member of Ensemble SF since 2022, she continues to delve into a vast array of chamber music, allowing this multi-faceted art form to inspire and connect with others in unconventional settings. She also devotes time to performing with Orquesta Tipica Domo, while exploring the richness of the “Golden Era” of Argentine Tango. Ms. Lee has been coaching chamber music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music since 2017 and serves on the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Alumni Association Leadership Council and on the Board of The Resonance Project, which promotes empathy through live music. She plays on a 1762 Nicolo Gagliano cello from Naples.

ELIZABETH SCHUMANN

Pianist Elizabeth Schumann has a diverse career portfolio of projects, recordings, and performances that have brought her all over the world as a recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist. The Washington Post Magazine noted her playing as “deft, relentless, and devastatingly good—the sort of performance you experience not so much with your ears as your solar plexus.” The first-place winner of both the Bösendorfer International Piano Competition and the Pacific International Piano Competition, Elizabeth has won over 25 prizes and awards in other major national and international competitions, including the Cleveland International Piano Competition and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. Elizabeth was honored with the prestigious Gilmore Young Artists Award and was highlighted in a PBS Television documentary on the Gilmore Festival.

She has performed in such venues as the Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Bösendorfer Saal, Toronto’s Koerner Hall, and Montreal’s Place des Arts. She was featured at the Cannes Film Festival, the Gilmore Festival, Australia’s Huntington Festival, the Ravinia “Rising Stars” Series, and National Public Radio’s “Performance Today”, and her recitals have been broadcast live on public radio and television in cities around the world, including Washington D.C., New York, Sydney, Cleveland, Montréal, Dallas, and Chicago. Elizabeth also gave the world premiere performance of Carl Vine’s Sonata No. 3, which the composer dedicated to her.

Elizabeth and her sister, Sonya Schumann, formed the Schumann Duo to engage diverse audiences with innovative combinations of piano music, theater, literature, art, and technology. The Schumann Duo’s tours of the US, Canada, and Australia were acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. In response to declining funding for arts education in the United States, Elizabeth devised and directed Piano Carnival, a Schumann Duo project to introduce free, high-quality classical concert music to children in areas without arts education. Over 20,000 copies of Piano Carnival have been distributed for free, and multimedia lesson plans and the Piano Carnival iPad and iPhone applications are available free online.

She currently serves as the Billie Bennett Achilles Director of Keyboard Studies and Assistant Professor of Piano at Stanford University.