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. 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. Recently, Sarah became Classical Music Director of the Stone Mountain Arts Center to program, perform and bring in the highest quality of musicians. The goal, her strong suit, is to introduce music in a loving, inclusive and intoxicating way.
Sarah’s work has been celebrated nationwide as well as overseas with performances in a variety of venues including Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, the Tenri Cultural Institute and Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Boston’s own Jordan Hall, Goethe Institute, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, St. Botolph Club, Institute of Contemporary Art and Tsai Center, Kerrytown Concert House (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Stone Mountain Arts Center (Brownfield, Maine), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), VMA Arts and Cultural Center (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.
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 annually since 2005 along with the New England Foundation for the Arts/Meet the Composer, the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund, the Boston Cultural Council and also the Trust for Mutual Understanding which brought her to Eastern Europe to bring American contemporary music to Sofia, Bulgaria. Most recently, Sarah completed her three year appointment as a Fellow at the prestigious St. Botolph Club.
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 January with the Community Music Center of Boston and, in years past, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble as well. As a fan of youth 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 children, 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. She has also 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)
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, HERENOW new music festival (Bulgaria), the Composers Out Front series sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra 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, and is a consistent performer on BMOP’s Club Cafe solo/chamber music series. 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 can 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, 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, and collaborations with BMOP on New World and Oxingale Records. Upcoming CD releases include David Rakowski’s Stolen Moments as featured performer on the title work and a solo piano CD in the works.
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) and Stephen Drury (NEC.) She worked extensively with both pianist Patricia Zander and 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 and PhoenxPhest! in Ann Arbor, Michigan and presently both teaches privately in the Boston area and is on faculty at the Community Music Center of Boston. Sarah loves dark chocolate, flowers, good books, deep massage, Zumba, her percussionist/composer husband, Aaron Trant, and their sweet and adorable children and dog. For more information, please go to www.sarahbob.net.
