Students in SFCM’s Orchestra (and the audience) could have been forgiven for forgetting it was 2025 at their Feb.15 concert. After all, they were playing a 1993 work by Kurt Weill with world-class cabaret singer Meow Meow and Adam Larson’s images of the singer were projected at enormous size in the at-capacity Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall.

"I always want to overwhelm people. I like the anarchy that is possible in cabaret, and the engagement with the live audience. As a form, in the broad sense, I love the fact that you're not stuck to a narrative. You can sing a frou-frou silly song that's playing with language, and then tear into something that's absolutely heartbreaking. Then you can do the splits slowly while doing a political song.”

That spirit was what drew SFCM Music Director Edwin Outwater to bring Meow Meow in to perform Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. “This was our yearly adventure concert,” he says. “I'm always going to throw the students at least one curveball a season, plus Adam Larson, Meow Meow and I all collaborated on a SoundBox show with the San Francisco Symphony a few years ago, so it was nice to reunite.” Outwater adds that he was also drawn to the countercultural side of Weill: “Music can be acerbic and critical of society, and I think we don't play a lot of music like that. So it adds another dimension of music for the students to experience that they might not normally.”

When she saw the performance cycle over the summer, violist Zoe Yost was attracted to another piece in the program, Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. "I had looked ahead at the orchestra cycle in the summer and I knew that I wanted to play on Symphonic Metamorphosis. I saw the Kurt Veill piece and I was interested, but Hindemith initially drew me in. I didn't know who was going to be singing Weill until maybe the end of last semester. I looked up Meow Meow, and that was when I thought, 'Wow, this is going to be different.'" 

Zoe Yost (Credit: Michele Stapleton).

Yost agrees that rehearsals with Meow Meow were as much of a curveball as Outwater intended. “The most challenging thing about the week of rehearsals with Meow Meow was that there was so much more stimulation than we're used to, especially during the dress rehearsal. We're used to just focusing on the music and the conductor, but with the lights down and all the projections and how she acts so dramatically it was more about trying not to look around and lose my place." SFCM’s Hume Hall is more than a year into using its new and evolving image projection technology.

Yost had done her research on Meow Meow, and was happy to see the performance lived up to the hype. "I had read on her website about her causing 'pin-drop silences' in the hall, and there was one of those during the concert that really stood out. It was around the middle, with this very dramatic loud passage, and then silence ... and there was no noise from the crowd, not a rustle. The charisma that she brought to it was incredible, and she's engaging in a way that a lot of performers are not. That also extends to how she was in rehearsals, and the class of Dr. Hohmann's she visited. She brings this energy of always trying to connect with whomever's in the room."

The experience made a lasting impact on Yost, who though principally a violist, found another aspect of Meow Meow’s artistry that impacted her. “One thing I took from her performance was that engaging style, something I'm interested in cultivating in my own performances as an instrumentalist, but also as a singer. She said at one point, 'I have a weird voice,' and I do too. Singing is a pretty new thing for me; mostly I've done choral work, but lately I've been trying solo pieces. So that week, I would listen to her sing, then I would go back to Bowes at night and try some of the things that she'd done with her voice, and it brought out good things in my voice, too. So I'm excited to keep trying that. This moment of vocal inspiration was definitely not something I knew I was signing up for when I asked to play the Hindemith."

Edwin Outwater and Meow Meow in rehearsal with the SFCM Orchestra.

Yost’s experience was exactly what Outwater hoped to impart. “There's a certain thing that our students can learn about stage presence from someone like Meow Meow,” he says. “About pushing things farther in a performance, how to hold the stage like she does.”

Meow Meow offered a bit of advice for students hoping to do just that, emphasizing that any performer’s stage presence depends on how they use their body. “Being at ease in one's own body is the first thing, being connected with your breath,” she says. “If you get frightened and you cut off your breath and everything is closed, how can you bring an audience in? It's the same in any discipline. If you go on looking anxious, the audience feels anxious. If you walk on stiffly, the audience naturally mirrors that.” She adds, “What I’ve learned is that if I don't believe what I'm singing, my voice is tiny. If I get out of my way and stop worrying—after I've done the work, of course—if I commit to what I’m singing, my voice is enormous.”

Meow Meow was certainly committed to her time at SFCM, tearing up as she recalls the moment she arrived. “During a time in the world that feels so uncertain and frightening, walking in a jet-lagged state and hearing music pouring out of every little nook and cranny of the building, I felt that I was with my people. That was incredibly moving and I thought, ‘Music does save.’”

“SFCM is lovely. The facilities and the views… It's to be treasured because an institution that can nurture something as essential as music the way this place does is too rare. I felt that being here was a gift because the orchestra sounds fantastic, I love this material, and it was just thrilling. I watched Edwin rehearsing the Hindemith and Weber and he was out of his seat, yelling ‘Urgency! Beauty!’ and I just burst into tears, because what else do we want?” 

Learn more about studying Voice, Opera, and Musical Theatre at SFCM.