Southampton - The Southampton Cultural Center announces a benefit concert with Stony Brook University faculty member Christina Dahl, piano and the Southampton Cultural Center Chamber Players on Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m. as part of the Southampton Cultural Center Chamber Music Series. Tickets will be sold online and at the door for $60. Credit cards will be accepted online and credit cards, cash and checks will be accepted at the door. Primary Contact: Southampton Cultural Center at 631-287-4377. For series details contact Marc Levine at 646 279-2799; mhlevine@gmail.com.

To support the SCC Chamber Series benefit concert Stony Brook University faculty member Christina Dahl, piano joins the SCC Chamber Players for a performance of the monumental Brahms piano quintet in F Minor, Op. 34. Also on the program is the Brahms piano trio in C Major, Op. 87. With Omar Guey and Marc Levine, violin; Thomas Rosenthal, viola; Aron Zelkowicz, cello.

Born in Los Angeles in 1965, pianist Dahl has had a multi-faceted career as a chamber player, soloist and teacher. Despite a busy concert life, her last 10 years have been focused primarily on teaching. She has been on the piano faculty at SUNY Stony Brook for nine years, and was previously at Lawrence University. She has spent a year teaching at, respectively, both Ithaca College and the Peabody Conservatory. Since 2000, she has also been Director of Chamber Music at Stony Brook.

Dahl has spent summers at the Aspen Music Festival, and participated in winter chamber music with faculty and alumni there. She has been a collaborating artist at the Ravinia Festival, and held fellowships at Tanglewood and the Banff Centre. For eight years she was on the faculty at the Eastern Music Festival, for the last three as chairman of the piano department.

She has twice been a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department, once as a solo recitalist and once as the member of a violin/piano duo. Her solo tour included concerts in the capitol cities of Argentina, Columbia, Paraguay and Uruguay. The duo tour included eight countries in Africa, and was designed to promote American music and culture through recitals and master classes, exploring traditions in American art music as well as serving as missions of goodwill and culture.

She has frequently appeared at Columbia University and NYU in premieres of new works for various ensembles, and has played with the Washington Square Chamber Players. She has performed at Carnegie Weill Hall, Merkin Hall, and the National Gallery in Washington, DC. For 1998-2001 she was the pianist and co-founder of a non-profit chamber group, the Atelier Ensemble, in Jacksonville, Florida. Spring 2002 marked her first performance at the prestigious Gilmore International Piano Festival in a duo concert with Gil Kalish. In fall 2003, she presented a series of concerts at the Cleveland Institute, performing multiple sonatas of Paul Hindemith with members of the Cleveland Orchestra.

She is a frequent recitalist on university artist series, and has been featured several times on Performance Today. Other radio broadcasts include KUSC in Los Angeles, Wisconsin Public Radio, WQXR and WNYC in New York. She has bachelors and masters degrees from the Peabody Conservatory where she was a student of Ann Schein, and has done doctoral work at SUNY Stony Brook with Gilbert Kalish. In 2000, she moved with her husband to Ohio when he became a member of the Cleveland Orchestra.

The Southampton Cultural Center Chamber Players is a group of extraordinary musicians who are members of or have performed with such prestigious ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera and Montreal Symphony and, between then, have been seen in virtually every major venue on the East Coast.