Meet the Director

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
SARAH ROTHENBERG

Committed to creating new audiences for classical music and jazz, and a firm believer in the accessibility of great music of all genres, Sarah Rothenberg is recognized internationally as a pianist of “power and introspection” (The New York Times) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (The Wall Street Journal). A “trailblazer” in innovative programming, Sarah Rothenberg has a unique career as pianist, writer, producer, and creator of interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature, visual art and ideas.

A pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare) and “power and introspection” (The New York Times), she has performed at Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Gilmore Piano Festival, 92nd Street Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Library of Congress, Van Cliburn Foundation, The Getty Museum, Ojai Festival and concert series across the United States. Recent world premieres include Vijay Iyer’s solo piano work, For My Father, written for Rothenberg; and Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at Rothko Chapel, which was named by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top ten classical performances of 2022, and was followed by eleven performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in a staging by director Peter Sellars with art of Julie Mehretu. Highlights in 2024-2025 include performances in Lisbon, Brussels and Paris with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton of D’est en musique, created with filmmaker Chantal Akerman; Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas performed at Rothko Chapel; and performances in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Houston and the Big Ears Festival of a major new piano work composed for Rothenberg by 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyshawn Sorey.

Original productions conceived, directed and performed by Sarah Rothenberg include A Proust Sonata, which received its New York premiere to critical acclaim in 2018; In the Garden of Dreams, fin-de-siècle Vienna in music, art, ideas; The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, originally commissioned and produced by Works & Process at The Guggenheim and Columbia University’s Miller Theater; and Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven; University Musical Society, Ann Arbor; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Champaign-Urbana). Her film, The Departing Landscape, a COVID-era memorial featuring Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, received national attention in its 2020-21 streaming premiere (“entrancing”- Alex Ross of The New Yorker). Sarah Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination series, created for DACAMERA and inspired by the writings of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Anna Akhmatova was presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center for five consecutive seasons. Moondrunk, a staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in 1999. She appeared as soloist in over 75 performances of choreographer/director Martha Clarke’s Cheri at New York’s off-Broadway Signature Theatre, Ravenna Festival, Kennedy Center, and London’s Royal Opera House. Her lectures and performances on art and music include The Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Houston and The Menil Collection.

Sarah Rothenberg’s scholarly research has resulted in her U.S. premiere performances and recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr  (Independent Record Companies Award for Best Solo Classical Recording 1996); Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz (GM); and Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg. Additional acclaimed recordings include Messiaen Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken), and DACAMERA’s Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage and Feldman on ECM, as well as works of Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Shulamit Ran, George Perle, Tobias Picker, Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, in collaboration with the composers. This season will see the release of works of Iyer, Sorey, Feldman and Beethoven.

Under her leadership, DACAMERA has been a three-time winner of Chamber Music America-ASCAP’s Adventurous Programming Award, was awarded the CMAcclaim Award, and received a Special Commendation for Outstanding Programming Concepts from Chamber Music America in 1999. Formerly chair of the music department at Bard College, Sarah Rothenberg has taught at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and visiting artist-in-residence at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston and Banff Centre for the Arts. She currently teaches in Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts.

Sarah Rothenberg’s writings appear in literary, art and musical publications, including The Musical Quarterly, Brick, Nexus, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, The Threepenny Review, PN Review (UK), Perspectives in New Music; and the books The Crisis of Criticism (ed. Berger/New Press); Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings (London/Parrish Art Museum 2010); Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (White/Menil Collection) and the Moody Center’s recent Artists and the Rothko Chapel.

Sarah Rothenberg is currently on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Writing. Formerly chair of the music department at Bard College, Sarah Rothenberg has taught at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and visiting artist-in-residence at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston and Banff Centre for the Arts.

Sarah Rothenberg’s early training was at The Juilliard School with Herbert Stessin. After graduating from The Curtis Institute of Music, where her teachers were Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski, she studied the music of Olivier Messiaen in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod. Sarah Rothenberg is a recipient of the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.