A Sedona cello concert will be held Sunday, Sept. 7, at 3 p.m. featuring works by Johann Sebastian Bach and new music.
“I am really passionate about what I do,” cellist Sarah Walder Amata said. “I’m a passionate player. I love playing and I really believe in many things, the connecting power of art, the connecting power of music, the community aspects, how you can get all sorts of different people together listening to music, feeling things together in a way that you can’t with any other art form.”
Amata, who is the final featured performer on Dave Len Scott’s Shout For Joy concert series in 2025, will perform at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 100 Arroyo Pinon Dr., in West Sedona. Admission is free and all are welcome.
Amata studied cello and historical performance practice on viola da gamba with Catharina Meints at Oberlin Conservatory, graduating in 1992. She continued education at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, earning a masters in Baroque cello and studying violone with Margaret Urquhart.
On the first half Sunday’s program, she will perform Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in Eb major, a contemplative, virtuosic work in seven movements, requiring triple stops, streaming 16ths and featuring two Bourree dances, unique to suite form. Amata will also perform a world premiere musical work by Arizona musician Glenn Stallcop, Emergency Exit. “Composers today deserve to be heard,” she said. “I’ve played with Glenn in the past and he has written a few pieces for me.”
On the second half of the program, Amata will perform with a looper, which is a piece of modern equipment that allows her to record herself and immediately “loop” her cello improvisations, creating sophisticated layers of sound and rhythm.
“How can I change the image of classical music of a stuffy black clad upper class, how can I change that attitude? How can I get people engaged and involved?” Amata asked. “I’ve been fortunate to tour South Africa, South America, South Korea, Europe and the United States with a variety of different groups, including Musica Temprana, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, mime dance ensemble Walking Faces and tango funk trio The Mental Chamber Orchestra, and to play in well-known venues, from Utrechts’s Vredenburg to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Seoul.”
“I like music-making that’s unfettered by learned limitations. My concerts are joyful, calm, swinging, fun, funky, sweet, scratchy, weird, bold and spacious, something for everybody,” she said.
“I love making great music. That’s what I love,” Amata said.
Visit the St. Andrew’s Church website at saint-andrews.org for more information
