Since 2006 the cello/piano duo martha & monica has consistently delighted Bay Area audiences with their imaginative programs pairing contemporary works with beloved masterpieces. The duo’s repertoire includes the great sonatas by Beethoven, Carter, and Debussy, significant twentieth-century works by Adès, Britten, Shostakovich and Schnittke, to shorter works by Nadia Boulanger, Leoš Janáček, and transcriptions of vocal music – Poulenc, Wagner – as well as an ever-increasing body of newly commissioned works.

martha & monica has been presented regularly throughout the Bay Area on Old First Concerts, Berkeley Chamber Performances, Trinity Chamber Concerts, OpenSoundWest at CNMAT (the Center for Contemporary Music and Audio Technologies,) sfSoundSeries, the El Dorado Community Music Series, as well as the annual showcase Music Day Live + Free, presented by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, performing to capacity crowds at the San Francisco Conservatory, Temple Emanu-El, the DeYoung Museum, and Herbst Theater. They have also enjoyed performing at ZBelow, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and in historic buildings and public spaces throughout the Bay Area, including the Falkirk Mansion, the Berkeley Piano Club, the Forest Hills Clubhouse, and the residence of the French Consul. The duo is dedicated to teaching and mentoring young artists, and have enjoyed participating as artist/coaches in the “Encounters” program at the Nueva School, through the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, as well as in the chamber music program at the Crowden School in Berkeley. They have received grants from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

martha & monica is strongly committed to performing and commissioning new work; Robert Greenberg’s “Lemurs are Afraid of Fossas,” was premiered as part of Composers’ Inc “Riffs and Refuge” program; three new works: Matt Ingalls’ “Duo, Op. 2/2,” Omid Zoufonoun’s “Sonata,” and New York-based composer Matthew Goodheart’s “for piano and cello(s)” were written especially for the duo.

The duo enjoys curating innovative festivals and themed concerts which focus on different periods in music and art. In “Turns of Centuries,” a year-long residency that featured three concerts at Old First Concerts, the duo explored music written for cello and piano just before and after the turn of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and explored the influences on composers from disparate countries and cultures (Poland, England, Germany, Russia, United States.) Each program featured a guest moderator (art historian John Zarobel, composers Erik Ulman and Thomas Adès, and author Sylvia Brownrigg) in onstage conversation through the lens of politics, art and culture.

“Out of the Box,” a three-day long festival presented over one weekend at ZBelow – the old home of A Traveling Jewish Theater, under ZSpace – featured three different programs of eleven works, some written specifically for the duo.(Morton Feldman’s “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” was a major contribution to the festival)

Over the 2018-19 season, martha & monica has enjoyed presenting “In Our Time,” three curated programs of music spanning the 20th and early 21st century, for seniors at The Sequoias in San Francisco, as well as concerts at Spring Lake Village in Santa Rosa and Berkeley Chamber Performances at the Berkeley City Club.

martha & monica’s premiere CD includes Elliott Carter’s masterpiece “Sonata” (1948), music of Beethoven, “Piece” by Nadia Boulanger, and the duo’s own transcription of three Poulenc songs.

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