Paul Phillips, Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University, is a conductor, composer, pianist, and author who has conducted more than 75 orchestras, opera companies, and ballet troupes worldwide, including the San Francisco Symphony, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Choir, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. He has performed with Itzhak Perlman, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, and many other great classical and jazz soloists, and won 11 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, working with Steve Reich, Philip Glass, William Bolcom, and many other leading composers. Phillips’s book "A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess”, a groundbreaking examination of the work of the famed British composer-novelist, has been hailed in the press as “prodigiously researched, elegantly written” and “seamlessly fascinating”.

Benjamin Gribble is a composer and music teacher living in San Francisco who studied composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is very active in the Bay Area music community participating in Sunset Piano and Flower Piano in the San Francisco Botanical Gardens each summer. His work with these groups has been featured in the documentary “Twelve Pianos.” He also performs regularly as part of St. Larsen Duo alongside Esther Aeschbach, where they test the boundaries of modern notation, improvisation, noise making, and soon, electronic synthesis.

Allison Lovejoy is an award-winning classical pianist, composer, educator and cabaret artist. Known for her technical ease, intelligence and passionate delivery, Allison performs works of Romantic and Contemporary composers both as concert soloist and collaborator. She has toured the United States and Europe with Iranian Classical artists Sohrab Pournazeri, and has been featured soloist in Festivals in Switzerland and Central America. Allison has produced and released 6 recordings, including Allison Lovejoy piano, Nocturnes, New Nocturnes, Cabaret Nouveau and a cast recording of her cabaret rock-opera The 7 Deadly Pleasures. She has also been guest artist on recordings of Ringo Starr and Stu Hamm. Her recordings are also heard in the films Twelve Pianos, This is Your Song, and It’ll be better tomorrow. She currently resides in San Francisco, where she is faculty at the Community Music Center and Foothill College. Member, ASCAP

Pianist Tin Yi Chelsea Wong’s international career spans a wide variety of performance spaces. Appearances include San Francisco Botanical Garden, Salzburg Wienersaal, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. An advocate of contemporary music, she premiered Lukas Janata’s Echi, Ilya Demutsky’s Skomoroshina, Ryan Brown’s Mortal Lessons, and many other new works. With a focus on extended techniques, Tin Yi Chelsea Wong invented the Harmonic Capo, currently advancing the prototype while commissioning composers to create new possibilities for the piano repertoire. Twice a year, she organizes a beach piano bonfire on San Francisco Ocean Beach. 

Dr. Chia-Lin Yang currently serves on piano faculty at UC Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College and Continuing Education Divisions. Passionately dedicated to both performing and teaching, Dr. Yang has toured across the United States as recitalist and chamber musician. She is a founding member of the award-winning Verve Trio and her students have been recognized worldwide with their excellence in virtuosity and artistry.

Elektra Schmidt performs as solo artist and in chamber groups in the United States, France, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Notable recent engagements include performing as soloist with the Santa Rosa Symphony, the Golden Gate Symphony and the Bay Area’s Awesöme Orchestra. She is the founder of Artist Migration, an organization dedicated to the integration and mobility of international artists. Elektra has collaborated with international festivals throughout the world including the San Francisco International Arts Festival, the Arundel Festival and Oxford Philomusica in the United Kingdom. 

Esther Aeschbach was born and raised in Switzerland, where she  graduated from the Conservatory of Music in Bern, Switzerland. She has been playing with Sunset Piano since its inception in 2013, and has been a featured performer at the San Francisco Flower Piano festival for the past 8 years. Since 2014 Esther has been collaborating as part of the St. Larson duo alongside San Francisco composer and pianist Benjamin Gribble. She currently lives with her family in Half Moon Bay California, where she teaches private piano lessons.

Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF). Sarah’s discography includes more than twenty albums, including Eighty Trips Around the Sun, a four-disc tribute to Terry Riley. Sarah’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory.

Susie Fong received her B.A. in Music from the University of California at Berkeley and has an M.M. in Harpsichord Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is an accomplished solo and chamber pianist, harpsichordist, and continuo player. Susie has performed with Liaison Baroque Ensemble, Handel Opera Project, Classical Revolution, the Pacific Chamber Symphony, Bay Area Classical Harmonies, and the San Francisco Bach Choir. She is an active music educator and is the owner of Plumrose Piano Studio in San Francisco.

Dr. Vivian Chen received her DMA (Doctor of Music Arts) degree in Piano Performance from Rutgers University and her Master’s degree from New England Conservatory in Boston.  As a recitalist and chamber musician, she has performed in numerous concerts, including performances in National Concert Hall in Taiwan, Sydney Opera House in Australia, Barletta Concert Hall in Italy, Jordan Hall in Boston, and Steinway Hall in New York City. Her performance of various Chopin works was previously broadcast on local Boston radio and TV. After relocating to San Francisco, Vivian taught at the Hamlin school for over 10 years until 2022, and now she is focused on professional performances and private piano instruction.

Mauro ffortissimo is an artist, musician, and poet. He grew up in Argentina, where interest in art and music lead him to study classical piano and visual arts. With Sunset Piano partner Dean Mermell, they have produced many unique Bay Area events for more than a decade, such as the annual Flower Piano in the San Francisco Botanical Garden. In Paul’s new work Sweet Thunder, Mauro will be playing the “piano liberado,” or liberated piano.

Dean Mermell is an artist, musician, filmmaker, and co-founder of Sunset Piano. Dean met Mauro through a mutual friend and realized they shared a vision of making life better with large, creative gestures. His documentary film Twelve Pianos tells the story of the birth and subsequent evolution of the Sunset Piano Project. While he is not playing the piano in these concerts at Grace Cathedral, he is instead working in his capacity as producer of these events.