LIVE at Piedmont Piano Company
Songs & Stories:
Sidney Chen
Vocalist, multi-faceted musician, and new music champion Sidney Chen shares his journey through the pandemic with his DIY hand-crank music boxes, as well as his perspective on ensemble music-making as essential practice for empathetic and compassionate living with others. Followed by audience Q & A. Hosted by vocalist Sharmila G. Lash.
$25 General Admission
We are offering a limited number of tickets to attend these performance in person. Advance purchase is recommended. Masking is encouraged but no longer required.
SIDNEY CHEN
Sidney Chen is a multi-faceted musician and performing arts producer, dedicated to dissolving boundaries and fostering personal connection through creative work.
With his “expressive and richly mellifluous” bass-baritone voice (SF Chronicle) he collaborates with artists across disciplines, including staged productions with Meredith Monk, KT Nelson and ODC/Dance, and Anne Hege and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, approaching the theater as a contemplative space. Additional highlights include premiering Monk’s Realm Variations in the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks Festival and performing in Carnegie Hall’s 45th-anniversary celebration of Terry Riley’s In C.
His love for small-ensemble music-making has led to a 25-year association with chamber choir Volti, co-founding The M6 sextet, and his work with the vocal ensemble Clerestory. His solo projects tend toward quietness and detail, and often include his DIY hand-crank music boxes and intricate, hand-punched scrolls, which were featured in a Chronicle Sunday Datebook cover story.
Behind the scenes, he draws on three decades of experience with forward-looking organizations like the Kronos Quartet, Nonesuch Records, NewMusicBox, and EIGHT/MOVES to help bring creative ideas into reality. This season he was the guest curator for SF Music Day 2024, a free, full-day festival on three stages in the SF War Memorial Performing Art Center. He serves on the Board of Trustees for the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Foundation. sidneychenarts.com
SHARMILA G. LASH
Sharmila G. Lash is sought after as a jazz and classical singer, as well as for her voice-over work. She is a regular chorister with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and has sung with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. She is a private voice instructor, works as a session singer for film and television, and has Teaching steadily since 2004, she incorporates her vast professional experience to help guide students to find their own voice. Sharmila began her music studies with piano lessons at age six and singing lessons at age eleven. She was a music student at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and continued on to study classical voice at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she discovered her passion for jazz. She has performed on the some of the biggest stages in California, led by Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Zubin Mehta, and others, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Kronos Quartet, Volti, Carmen Lundy, Don Shelton, Luciana Souza, as well as with many other top jazz and classical musicians in both Northern and Southern California. sharmilaguhalash.com