Noted for her “power and introspection” (The New York Times) and “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare), pianist Sarah Rothenberg has served as artistic director of  Da Camera of  Houston since 1994. Ms. Rothenberg has one of the most distinguished and creative careers of her generation. She has received international acclaim as solo recitalist and chamber musician, and her innovative programs have been enthusiastically received by audiences across America and in Europe. She has been a frequent performer on Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series in New York, as well as appearing at London’s Barbican Centre, The Aldeburgh Festival (England), The Cervantino Festival (Mexico), Teatro Municipale (Santiago, Chile) and the Library of Congress. Solo recital appearances include The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Washington’s Kennedy Center, The Music Academy of Cracow, The Getty Museum in Los Angeles and New York’s 92nd Street Y and Miller Theater. Ms. Rothenberg received the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2000.

Ms. Rothenberg has conceived and directed numerous original performance works, including the celebrated Music and the Literary Imagination series linking music to the works of Proust, Kafka, Mann, Akhmatova, Baudelaire and others. Following their premieres on Da Camera of Houston’s subscription series, these programs have been presented across the United States and in Europe, and have been the subject of feature articles in the national press and arts publications, establishing Da Camera as one of the nation’s leaders in innovative programming. In addition, she has created and performed concerts linking music to the visual arts for exhibits at The Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Jewish Museum of New York and The Guggenheim Museum.  Ms. Rothenberg also conceived and performed in the Da Camera production Moondrunk, a chamber music/dance theatre piece with performance artist John Kelly, featuring Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, that inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Vision series in January 1999 and was hailed by American Theatre magazine as “the birth of a new genre.” In 2006, Ms. Rothenberg made her debut at the Gilmore Piano Festival and performed her latest project, Epigraph for a Condemned Book,a solo recital interweaving the music of Chopin with poetry, video, and recorded voices, at La Jolla Music Society, the Hancher Auditorium series at University of Iowa and Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

Prior to coming to Houston, Ms. Rothenberg was co-founding artistic director of the Bard Music Festival in New York. She was member pianist of the Da Capo Chamber Players from 1985-94, with whom she made numerous recordings, including the “New York Times’ Choice CD” of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (Bridge), and she has premiered over 75 new works. As chamber musician she has collaborated with members of the American, Brentano, Emerson, Schoenberg, St. Lawrence and Juilliard string quartets, among others. A popular public speaker on musical, literary and cultural issues, Ms. Rothenberg’s writings have appeared in The Musical Quarterly, Chamber Music, The Crisis of Criticism (New Press), Keyboard Magazine, World Policy Journal, Nexus (The Netherlands) and the literary journal Conjunctions. She studied at The Curtis Institute of Music with Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski, and in Paris with Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen. Other important coaches were Artur Balsam, Felix Galimir and Leon Fleisher.