Join our FIRST fundraising concert!
Listen to great music and help support unSUNg
March 21, 2021
4pm, PDT
Concert link: https://youtu.be/laSdu5BbBrs
Click the donate button to support unSUNg!
Featured Performers
L.A. Camerata strives to tell the stories of women and "others" silenced throughout history. Our performances highlight works by early modern women from across the world. Inspired by the original renaissance camerati—philosophical societies that debated aesthetics in the arts and society—we seek to blur the boundaries between music and drama, resurrecting lost or underrepresented voices live on stage.
AMY ENGELHARDT loves words, music, cats, cheese and garlic. From 1998-2011, Amy was the sole female writer/arranger/vocalist in Grammy-nominated, genre-busting vocal band The Bobs. A bridge-and-tunnel theatre kid from New Jersey, she made her Off-Broadway debut in 2017 as composer/lyricist of BASTARD JONES, an Off-Broadway Alliance Best New Musical and Richard Rodgers Award nominee (“Smartly plotted and irrepressible, with hummable pop music to match” – TimeOutNY). As a session/concert singer of everything from Bach to rock, Amy’s credits include the films Jurassic World, Real Steel and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. She joins Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, Spinal Tap) and Judith Owen in their annual CHRISTMAS WITHOUT TEARS show and is thrilled to be the only “sub-lebrity” on their EP. And as Mother Superior of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl in Amazon Prime’s GOOD OMENS promo campaign, Amy led a of a cappella, rock-belting nuns through the premieres in London, New York, LA and Austin’s by Southwest, and produced their EP Unholy Night for Amazon Music. She is the only honorary female member of the Vienna Boys Choir. www.amyengelhardt.com
Jenni Brandon is a composer and conductor, creating music in collaboration with other musicians and artists. She has written over 50 works, telling stories through memorable musical lines influenced by nature and poetry. Commissioned to write music from solo to orchestral works, her music appears on over 20 albums. Her music has been awarded the Sorel Medallion, American Prize, Paderewski Cycle, Women Composers Festival of Hartford International Competition, and Bassoon Chamber Music Composition Competition among others. Her works are published and distributed by Boosey & Hawkes, Santa Barbara Music, Graphite, TrevCo, Imagine, J.W. Pepper, June Emerson, and her own publishing company Jenni Brandon Music. As a conductor she conducted her one-act opera 3 PADEREWSKIS in the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center in 2019. She also presents workshops on collaboration and the business of music, striving to create a supportive environment where collaboration leads to an exploration of ideas. Visit www.jennibrandon.com
Maura Janton Cock, soprano, is Adjunct Professor of Voice at Valparaiso University. She earned her bachelor of music education at the University of Arizona (Tucson) and her master of arts at Minnesota State University-Moorhead. She previously taught on the music faculty at Concordia College (Moorhead). She has appeared as soloist with the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, the Tucson Symphony, the Southwest Michigan Symphony, and the Northwest Indiana Symphony. Ms. Cock worked extensively with Robert Shaw and the Robert Shaw Festival Singers as both soloist and chorus member, and Helmuth Rilling of the Oregon Bach Festival. Recent engagements include performances with the Michigan Bach Collegium, Bach Chamber Choir and Orchestra of Rockford (Ill.), Miami Bach Society, the Dayton Bach Society (Ohio) and the Cuesta Master Chorale and Orchestra (Calif.). In 2005, Ms. Cock was privileged to give the Midwest premiere of J.S. Bach’s lost aria, Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn’ ihn.
Jennet Ingle has been Principal Oboist of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra since 2006, and also holds that position with the Northwest Indiana Symphony. Jennet is a soloist at heart, joyfully taking over any stage that will have her. Her first CD, Music That SHOULD Have Been Written for the Oboe, was released in December of 2016. It is available everywhere. As the owner and operator of Jennet Ingle Reeds, she makes and sells over two hundred handmade reeds every month to oboists all over the world and has helped hundreds of people with their own reed-making through her video series, The Five Minute Reedmaker, her weekly online Reed Club and beginner's course Zero to Reedmaker. She has recently been pouring her energy into a new group program, The Invincible Oboist. Jennet is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Richard Killmer. She can be found on the web at www.jennetingle.com.
Juhi Bansal, composer, weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music. Current projects include Waves of Change, a digital experience on womanhood, identity and clash of cultures inspired by the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club; and Edge of a Dream, an opera about Ada Lovelace, daughter of infamous poet Lord Byron and a 19th Century pioneer in computing commissioned by Los Angeles Opera.
David A. Castillo is a versatile performer, producer, and educator. His upbringing in the beautiful city of New Orleans heavily influences his eclectic style. David’s solo career brought him to Paris, The Vatican, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Severance Hall with The Cleveland Orchestra, Off-Broadway on 42nd Street, and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. His performance career focuses mainly in groundbreaking works of the 20th and 21st century. A majority of this work specialized as a soloist in world premieres: LA Philharmonic (Annie Gosfield and Yuval Sharon’s War of the Worlds with Sigourney Weaver & Louis Andriessen’s Theatre of The World), LA Master Chorale (Eric Whitacre’s The Gift of Magi & Shawn Kirchner’s Songs of Ascent), The Industry (Hopscotch, Nimbus, Bonnie and Clyde), the LA Opera (¡Figaro! (90210), Another Perfect Day, Moses), and Long Beach Opera (Theresa Wong’s “As We Breathe”). In the dance world, he collaborated as a vocal soloist with the American Contemporary Ballet, Luminario Ballet, Mojacar Flamenco, and in residency with choreographer Jay Carlon as co-producer and narrator at LA Dance Project. He is an inaugural company member of The Industry.
A versatile vocalist, Alina Roitstein is known for her “beautiful voice and equally beautiful presence” (El Nuevo Herald). Her career spanning chamber music and contemporary works, opera and art song, jazz and Latin music, and choral music has taken her to venues all over the world, including Disney Hall in Los Angeles, London’s Wigmore Hall, Japan’s Symphony Hall in Osaka, South Korea’s Seoul Arts Centre Concert Hall, Scotland’s Royal Conservatoire, Carnegie Hall’s Neighborhood Concert Series, Chicago’s Poetry Foundation, and Los Angeles’ REDCAT. One of Alina’s passions is performing new works, and she has premiered pieces by Jordan Nelson, Thomas Kotcheff, Juhi Bansal, Gregory Uhlmann, Allen Menton, David Rentz, Trevor Anderies, David Roitstein, and others. She also premiered the role of Emily in The Discord Altar, the first of OperaWorks’ Arts for Social Awareness Project, a groundbreaking musically improvised opera created to bring awareness to current social issues.
Lisa Sylvester, coach/pianist/conductor, is Chair of Vocal Arts and Opera at the Thornton School of Music at USC.An advocate for new vocal music, Sylvester has been on the creative teams for several new works. She conducted scenes from Julia Adolphe’s So Donia Speaks on Chamber Music Palisades, and was Music Director/ Conductor for Teresa Levelle’s aLtered sTates on the RealNewArts Foundation series. She served as assistant conductor for two world premieres produced by First Look Sonoma: Caliban Dreams by Clark Syprynowicz and Daughter of the Red Tsar by Lisa Scola Prosek. She is a frequent performer at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena CA, on the Music @ the Court series, curated by Mark Saltzman, where she has premiered several works for voice and piano.
David Avshalomov is a distinguished third-generation American classical composer and conductor, and an accomplished vocalist. He was born in New York City in 1946, grew up in Oregon, and has long lived in Santa Monica, California. He represents a musical lineage (on his father’s side) whose story stretches from the Caucasus to Siberia, through China, to the US. As a young student, David studied piano, music theory, and percussion. He learned the joys of madrigal singing at home, sang in school and professional choruses, and played timpani in school and professional orchestras (soloing in the Milhaud concerto with the Harvard Orchestra). He began composing (self-taught) in middle school, and wrote and conducted his first choral compositions for his high school choir. He earned degrees in music from Harvard (B.A., Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and in orchestral conducting from the University of Washington (where he wrote a noted Doctoral dissertation on the Five Pieces for Orchestra of Arnold Schoenberg), with further conducting studies at Peabody, Aspen, and Tanglewood.
He volunteers, planting trees in local forest burn zones and serving at a local food bank and homeless shelter, and organizes for social justice.
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C3LA has no artistic or executive director—rather, it is collectively run by its members: highly-trained new-music singers who also perform with L.A. Master Chorale, L.A. Opera Chorus, De angelis Vocal Ensemble, and other professional ensembles. Many of the singers are also conductors and/or composers. 40-50% of each concert is written by members of the ensemble and each piece is conducted by a different ensemble member.
Modeled after the highly-successful C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective of New York City (and including multiple alumni of the group), C3LA is a unique ensemble dedicated to performing outstanding new choral music; providing a venue for multi-talented singer-composers and singer-conductors to collaborate; and challenging the traditional hierarchical model of our choruses and orchestras.