Ensemble For These Times Announces Its 2025 East Coast Tour to Brooklyn And Boston

Award-winning San Francisco contemporary music group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) ihas just announced its first-ever tour to the East Coast of the U.S. from September 18-23, with performances in Brooklyn and Boston.

The group will perform "BK/In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices" on September 20, 2025 at the Brooklyn Art Haus, in a program featuring favorite works and commissions from their past two seasons by Madeline Clara Cheng, Jodi Goble, Ursula Kwong-Brown, inti figgis-vizueta, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh, with a video by filmmaker Pegah Pasalar.

In Boston, E4TT will appear on composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh's Faculty Recital at the Longy School of Music at Bard College on September 22, 2025, and will also take part in several classes on September 22-23. For both concerts, E4TT will be joined by accomplished new music specialist Mia Nardi Huffman, violin, who performed with the group in San Francisco in 2022/23. Both programs will be offered in person and online.

While Ensemble for These Times has toured extensively in Europe and California, September 18-23, 2025, will be the first time the group heads to the East Coast, for programs in Brooklyn and Boston. The centerpiece of the tour will be the East Coast Premiere of the group's 2024 commission, "Cavities"* by Iranian-American composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh (b. 1992, upper left, photo by Michael Yu), for piano trio and electronics, with a video by Iranian-American filmmaker Pegah Pasalar (upper middle). The first concert, BK/In Motion: New Music by Marginalized Voices, will take place on Saturday, September 20 at 7:30 p.m., with a pre-concert talk at 7:00 p.m., at the Brooklyn Art Haus in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to "Cavities," works to be performed will feature the East Coast Premieres of two additional commissions for piano trio that E4TT premiered in 2024, "And I Made My Own Way, Deciphering That Fire" (inspired by Pablo Neruda) by NYC native and Columbia graduate, Chinese-American composer Ursula Kwong-Brown (b. 1987, upper right) and "Ubi Lux Floret" by queer Brooklyn composer Darian Donovan Thomas (b. 1993, middle left). Three more works will round out the program: "the motion between three worlds" (2020) for cello by non-binary Quechua/Latinx Brooklyn composer inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993, middle right, photo by Ella Joklik); "Forget Your Scarf in My Life" (inspired by a Mikko Harvey poem) for piano trio by E4TT/ Luna Composition Lab alum Call for Scores winner, emerging Chinese-American composer Madeline Clara Cheng (b. 2004, lower left); and a song cycle for voice and piano by NATS Art Song Composition Competition winner Jodi Goble (b. 1974, lower right), "Twelve Chairs," setting US Poet Laureate Rita Dove's cycle of 13 short poems about personal identity and the U.S. judicial system. E4TT will also perform "Cavities" on Monday, September 22 as part of Niloufar Nourbakhsh's faculty recital at Longy School of Music at Bard College, along with two more of her works, "Veiled" for cello, electronics, and fixed media, and Cello Sonata for cello and piano. Members of the group will take part in several classes on September 22-23 as well. Both concerts are part of E4TT's two-year project exploring women's immigration, transitions, and identity, "Women Crossing/
Liminality," and will be offered in hybrid format for both in-person and livestream attendance. Performers on the tour will be Nanette McGuinness, soprano, Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman, violin, Megan Chartier, cello, and Margaret Halbig, piano.

*"Cavities" by Niloufar Nourbakhsh was made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided
by the Mellon Foundation.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Cellist MEGAN CHARTIER is "unafraid to display gutsy abandon" (South Florida Classical Review). She has performed internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral cellist. Her current positions include core cellist of the Astralis Chamber Ensemble and principal cellist of Opera San Luis Obispo. Past positions include principal cellist of the Miami Symphony and the Pacific Region International Summer Music Academy; she has also recently performed with the San Antonio Symphony One Found Sound, Nu Deco Ensemble, and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. A semi-finalist in the 2017 PRISMA Concerto Competition, she won 1st prize in the Ann Arbor Society of Musical Arts' 2015 Young Artist Competition and the 2015 Miami Music Festival Concerto
Competition, conducted by Grzegorz Nowak of the Royal Philharmonic.

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.