Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company to Feature Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers on January 25

Award-winning San Francisco contemporary chamber music group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) will start the new year with the seventh edition of its popular annual series, a program of music by women and nonbinary composers, and the start of its second collaboration with Luna Composition Lab, as part of their 10th Anniversary Celebration.

Entitled After Sleepwalking: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers,the concert will feature the winning piece from the 2025 E4TT/Luna Composition Lab Call for Scores, as well as five other works by contemporary composers Anna Clyne, Joan Tower, Jungyoon Wie, S. A. Workman, and two-time Grammy winner Andrew Yee. This concert will be performed at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, 1728 San Pablo Avenue, on Sunday, January 25, 2026, at 5 pm. Located in the Uptown Arts and Entertainment District near the Fox Theater, the venue offers a beautiful, intimate setting for concerts amidst some of the world’s finest instruments. 

After Sleepwalking: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers

The program will feature “A Thousand Mornings” (2020) for piano trio by American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship awardee Clyne, “For the Sleepwalkers” (2023) for narrator and piano trio by G. Schirmer Prize winner Wie, “Cinq Petits Morceaux” (2015) for solo piano by SF Conservatory of Music graduate Workman, “The Light After” (2021) for solo cello by Yee,and “Tres Lent” (1994) and its companion piece “Wild Run” (2018) for cello and piano by Guggenheim fellow Tower.

E4TT (soprano/narrator Nanette McGuinness, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Margaret Halbig) will be joined by violinist Maya Victoria.

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. During the summer, she is Collaborative Piano Coordinator of Interlochen Arts Camp where she coordinates vocal, instrumental, and dance pianists, collaborates on faculty recitals, teaches piano, and plays piano with students. 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 also a member of Frequency 49, a wind and piano sextet, which performs all over the Bay Area. Halbig earned her DMA from the University of California Santa Barbara 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.

Violinist Maya Victoria (Charyyeva) began her musical education at the age of five, studying piano and violin at a specialized music school in Ashgabat where she graduated with honors and toured internationally. In 2016, she was awarded first prize in Turkmenistan’s national competition for music school graduates. She continued her education at the Mimar Sinan University State Conservatory in Istanbul, where she performed with Camerata Saygun and took part in numerous concerts, festivals, and competitions as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Turkey. She completed her bachelor’s degree with honors in 2021. Now based in California, she is an active member of MTAC, teaches violin and piano, and regularly performs as a soloist and with various ensembles, including the Pacific Chamber Orchestra.

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 recorded its sixth album, El Tiempo Latine, in summer 2025 for release in spring 2026 on the Aerocade label and launched the second season of its podcast of conversations with underrepresented creatives, For Good Measure, in 2024.

After Sleepwalking: Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers

Sunday, January 25, 2026, 5 pm
Piedmont Piano Company
1728 San Pablo Avenue, Oakland
Tickets Advance Purchase (recommended)
$25/$15/$5
At the Door
$30/$20/$10

Arts & Entertainment
Published on January 15, 2026