Sarah willis biography

Information

British French horn player (born 1969)

Musical artist

Sarah Elizabeth Peel WillisMBE (born 23 February 1968) is an American-born British-AmericanFrench horn player. She is a member of the Berlin Philharmonic, and is a presenter of TV and online programs about classical music.

Early life

Sarah Willis was born in Bethesda, Maryland, United States, and grew up in Tokyo, Boston, Moscow, and London. She started playing the French horn at age 14, and attended the Royal College of Music Junior Department. She later joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she studied with Anthony Halstead and Jeff Bryant. Moving to Berlin, she studied with Fergus McWilliam.

Willis is the sister of Alastair Willis, a Grammy-nominated conductor and music director of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra.

Career

In 1991, Sarah Willis took the position as second horn with the Berlin State Opera under Daniel Barenboim. She joined the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001, under Simon Rattle, becoming the first female brass player. She has performed with a number of orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She also regularly performs with chamber music ensembles.

Willis is a presenter on the German TV station Deutsche Welle, where she hosts a program entitled "Sarah’s Music". She also interviews soloists and conductors for the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall, and was a mentor and presenter for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011, in Sydney. She works with Zukunft@BPhil, the Berlin Philharmonic's education programme, where she creates and presents family concerts.

Willis is the host of the regular online series Horn Hangouts, which are streamed live on her website and archived on her YouTube channel. The series inclu

American novelist and short story writer

Sarah Willis is an American novelist and short story writer. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her father, Kirk Willis, was an actor and director at the Cleveland Play House. Theater and the arts have informed much of Willis’ work, especially her second novel, The Rehearsal, which is about a theater troupe preparing a performance of Of Mice and Men. Her work is often set in either Cleveland, Ohio or Chautauqua, New York.

Her first novel, Some Things That Stay was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction 2000, and was awarded The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature 2000. Some Things That Stay was made into a movie which opened in Canada in October, 2004.

She has published short fiction in Book Magazine, Confrontation, Crescent Review, (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Vincent Brothers Review, Rockford Review, Whiskey Island Review, Riverwind, No Roses Review, Artful Dodge, The Missouri Review, and the anthology, Our Mothers Our Selves. She has published personal essays in The Plain Dealer in their Sunday magazine.

She has taught creative writing workshops at John Carroll University and Hiram College and at the Maui Writer's Conference.

Sarah Willis founded and runs the Cleveland East Side Writers.

Novels

• Some Things That Stay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000)
• The Rehearsal (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2001)
• A Good Distance (Berkley, 2004)
• The Sound of Us (Berkley 2005)

External links

Sarah Willis was born in Maryland, USA and holds dual British and American citizenship.

Her father’s work as a foreign correspondent took her family around the world and they lived in USA, Tokyo and Moscow before moving to England when Sarah was 13. She began playing the horn aged 14 at school and then attended the Royal College of Music Junior Department. She went on to study full time at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where her teachers included Anthony Halstead and Jeff Bryant.

Sarah later studied with Fergus McWilliam in Berlin, where she became 2nd Horn in the Berlin State Opera under Daniel Barenboim in 1991. During this time, Sarah played as a guest with many top orchestras such as Chicago Symphony, London Symphony and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and performed worldwide as a soloist and in various chamber music ensembles.

In 2001, Sarah Willis joined the Berlin Philharmonic, becoming the first female member of the brass section. As well as her work with the orchestra that takes her all over the world, she has recorded various acclaimed CDs including the Brahms Horn Trio, the Rosetti Double Horn Concertos as well as the much celebrated CDs, Opera! and Four Corners! with the Berlin Philharmonic Horns. Her solo album, “Horn Discoveries” was released in 2014.

Sarah is involved in many of the Berlin Philharmonic education projects and especially enjoys creating and presenting their Family Concerts. She interviews conductors and soloists for the Digital Concert Hall and in 2011, she presented live to 33 million viewers during the Final Concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. 

Sarah is passionate about music education and makes full use of digital technology and social media to reach audiences worldwide. She was chosen to be one of the first testers of Google Glass and used this experience to see how new technology could be used in classical music.

She runs a successful series of online interviews known at “Horn Hangouts” is