Sarah Bob
Biography Sarah Bob
Sarah Bob
Hailed as “sumptuous and eloquent” by the Boston Globe, pianist Sarah Bob is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her charismatic performances, colorful playing and diverse programming. A strong advocate for new music and considered a “trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process…” (Northeast Performer), she is also the founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series devoted to commissioning and uniting new music and contemporary visual art with their creators. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive, and intoxicating way. She is an original member of many ensembles including what the Boston Music Intelligencer calls the “knockout” piano/percussion group Primary Duo, Firebird Ensemble, considered “ambitious and eclectic” by the New York Times, and Radius Ensemble, a fresh and creative chamber music collective that focuses on both the traditional and cutting edge.
Sarah’s work has been celebrated nationwide as well as overseas with performances in a variety of venues including New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, the Tenri Cultural Institute, the Apollo Theater, and Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Boston’s own Jordan Hall, Goethe Institute, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, St. Botolph Club, Institute of Contemporary Art, Tsai Center, Boston Esplanade Hatch Shell, as well as the Kerrytown Concert House (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Stone Mountain Arts Center (Brownfield, Maine), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Pianoforte Studios (Chicago), Pritzger Auditorium at at the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library, VMA Arts and Cultural Center and the Music Mansion (Providence, R.I.), The Music Hall (Portsmouth, N.H.), The Chan Centre (Vancouver, B.C.), De Doelen (Rotterdam, Holland), Music Center Boris Hristov (Sofia, Bulgaria), UnerhörteMusik Concert Series (Berlin, Germany) and the Dampfzentrale (Bern, Switzerland.) Thanks to her drive, Sarah is also cited in Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music by Angela Myles Beeching and she was featured as one of Boston’s Most Inspiring Stories in the Boston Voyager.
Recognized as a risk taker and cited for an “ideal combination of all-stops-out abandon and sure-footed technical control” by 21st Century Music, Sarah is top prizewinner of the International Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition 2001 and grant recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. She is the recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s 2005 Grant-in-Aid Award which recognizes the quality of her work and artistic merit and, in 2007, received the first annual John Kleshinski Award in honor of her daring, exciting and high quality New Gallery Concert Series presentations. In 2009, only ten years after graduation, Sarah received the prestigious Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory. On behalf of the New Gallery Concert Series, she has also consistently earned the Aaron Copland Fund along with the New England Foundation for the Arts/Meet the Composer, and the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, support from the Boston Cultural Council, the Amphion Foundation, and also the Trust for Mutual Understanding which brought her to Eastern Europe to bring American contemporary music to Sofia, Bulgaria.
Sarah wears many hats and finds that her collaborations go beyond chamber music, orchestral playing, working with visual artists, and composers. As Director of the New Gallery Concert Series, Sarah helps to produce the week long Young Composers Festival every winter with the Community Music Center of Boston and, in years past, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble as well. As a fan of kids and the arts and on behalf of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra “Once Upon A Time” Solo and Chamber Music Series, Sarah has also organized and performed new music concerts for young children. As for older youth, Sarah has been a guest artist with the Sarasa Ensemble and participated in multiple outreach programs performing for and working with incarcerated teens. In 2008, Sarah was flown to Switzerland specifically to perform as piano soloist with the Swiss dance troupe inFlux under choreographer Lucía Baumgartner. Sarah served as Classical Music Director of the Stone Mountain Arts Center to program, perform and bring in the highest quality of musicians. She also served as the 2019 Artist in Residence at The Music Mansion in Providence that won the 2019 Dorry Award for best “Performing Art Series” during her time as curator. Past roles also include contributor to SONUS: A Journal of Investigation into Global Musical Possibilities and as a three year appointed Fellow at the St. Botolph Club. She has had the pleasure of working with poets and mime and, with permission from the composer, arranging My Life on the Plains by Lee Hyla for solo piano to great acclaim. “To its everlasting credit, this rendition [of My Life on the Plains] does not sound like excerpts: Hyla/Bob makes a compelling argument of its own, calling forth a variety of touches and techniques.” (Boston Music Intelligencer September 2014.) It will be available through Carl Fischer Publishing this fall 2019 and is also featured on her album, …nobody move…Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series on Avie Records.
Inspired by current events and a strong conviction for justice, Sarah is the creator of “The Nasty Cooperative:” numerous dialogue driven artistic events created to build community, help raise funds for organizations in need, and encourage others to do the same. The Nasty Cooperative is a completely volunteer initiative and ALL proceeds are donated.
A strong advocate for new music, Sarah has worked with and premiered countless works by both established and emerging composers from Gunther Schuller and Lee Hyla to Curtis K. Hughes and Jonathan Bailey Holland. By special request, she has also performed for artists John Zorn (sponsored by New England Conservatory’s Jazz Studies and Contemporary Improvisation Department), Kaija Saariaho (sponsored by the Boston Symphony Orchestra/New England Conservatory), Franco Donatoni (through the New England Conservatory/Harvard Callithumpian Consort Series), Lee Hyla, John Harbison, Donald Martino, John Heiss, Michael Gandolfi, Jon Deak, Vanessa Lann, Louis Goldstein, Lukas Foss, Lior Navok, Steffen Schleirmacher and more. Her special attention to music of today includes performances with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Dinosaur Annex, Callithumpian Consort, Boston’s Microtonal Society: NotaRiotous, Beat City Art Ensemble, Alea III, Lumen Contemporary Music Ensemble, Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Kadence Arts, HERENOW new music festival (Bulgaria), the Composers Out Front series sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra, as both soloist and panelist, New Music Gathering (2018) again as both soloist and panelist, and, with the highest acclaim given by Pozzi Escot, composer of Piano Concerto, the Soria Chamber Players. Sarah has multiple times been the featured soloist with Boston Musica Viva on the Fleet Boston Celebrity Series and has also shared the concert stage with performers that include sopranos Lucy Shelton, Lisa Saffer and Diana Hoagland, the Borromeo String Quartet, saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky, violinists James Buswell and Irina Muresanu, Ann Arbor’s Phoenix Ensemble, Maestros Frank Batisti, Robert Kapilow, and Robert Page, clarinetist Richard Stolzman, cellist Lawrence Lesser, flutists Fenwick Smith and Bonita Boyd and the Stone Mountain Boys. Sarah also performs on the First Monday Concert Series, Composers’ Series, Enchanted Circle Contemporary Ensemble, Brandeis New Music, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano and Percussion, BMOP’s Club Cafe solo/chamber music series, the Craftsbury Chamber Players and New Music Gathering. Radio appearances, both live and prerecorded, include Boston’s WGBH, Columbus, Ohio’s WBCE ,VPRO-Dutch radio, Italy’s Radio Gamma Gioiosa, Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk, Dublin’s RTE lyric fm and more including stations in Israel, New Zealand, Canada and Hungary.
Sarah’s most recent album on Avie Records, …nobody move… Commissions and Premieres for the New Gallery Concert Series, earned a place on the Boston Globe’s best of classical recordings list and ALBUM OF THE WEEK in National Sawdust among other accolades. According to AllMusic, …nobody move… also exemplifies Sarah as “…pianist as curator, which is a different thing from simply selecting a program for a recording… the program, despite its variety, has a unique coherence forged by Bob’s mixture of technical control and a certain verve and humor…One finishes the album interested in what Bob and other pianists may do with this concept in the future.” Along with visual art by past NGCS participants, Sarah’s compilation of solo piano pieces is “a striking album that ranges from in-your-face to contemplative moods, entertaining the ears of contemporary music lovers and novices alike” and “as arresting as its title suggests!” She can also be heard playing the music of Lee Hyla on the Tzadik label, Curtis K. Hughes on Cauchemar Records, solo piano by Lior Navok on NLM Records, solo and chamber music by Elena Ruehr on Albany Records and Avie Records (one of which was recognized as one of the best classical recordings of 2016 by WBUR’s The ARTery), Armand Qualliotine on Neptune Music Co., Claude Vivier with violinist Biliana Voutchkova on her CD faces, Cordis on its debut pop album Here On Out by Richard Grimes, solo piano by Lisa Bielawa on the BMOP/sound label, music by Donald Crockett with the Firebird Ensemble on New World Records, chamber music by Eric Moe on BMOP/sound label, collaborations with BMOP on New World and Oxingale Records, Mischa Salkind-Pearl’s I Might Be Wrong, Radius Ensemble’s first album Fresh Paint, and David Rakowski’s Stolen Moments, as featured performer on the title work. More albums in the works and coming out soon.
Sarah graduated with honors from the University of Michigan School of Music and soon after received her masters from the New England Conservatory (NEC.) Her principal teachers include Steven Masi at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, Dr. Louis Nagel (UM), Stephen Drury (NEC), and mad props to her very first piano teacher ever, Marilyn Arons. She worked extensively with both pianist Patricia Zander and violinist Malcolm Lowe, former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as a member of the 1998-1999 NEC Honors Piano Trio. Sarah, originally from Teaneck, New Jersey, has served as adjunct faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Music, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, PhoenxPhest! in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Community Music Center of Boston. Presently, Sarah resides in Boston with her family, maintains her own private studio, and teaches “The Power of Art” as faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She loves dark chocolate, flowers, good books, deep massage, Zumba, her percussionist/composer husband, Aaron Trant, and their sweet, adorable children and dog.
