Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Princeton University

Princeton Sound Kitchen & PLOrk Concerts

What’s new? Why, music from Princeton Sound Kitchen (PSK) and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), of course!

PSK will host This is How we Fly on Tuesday. The ensemble – made up of Irish fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Dublin jazzman Seán Mac Erlaine, Appalachian hard shoe dancer Nic Gareiss, and Swedish percussionist Petter Berdalen – will perform music by six Princeton composers, alongside some of its own material.

On Wednesday, PLOrk will present “Medi3val Dr3@ms,” revisiting music of composers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and lending it a distinctly 21st century spin. The orchestra will employ custom-designed electronic musical instruments, live performer brain-waves, and even audience participation, as attendees compose a percussion piece using their cell phones.

The concerts will take place at Princeton University’s Taplin Auditorium in Fine Hall. Both events have an 8 p.m. start time. Read all about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/04/classical_music_pu-affiliated.html

PHOTO: Flying their freak flag high: (left to right) Seán Mac Erlaine, Petter Berdalen, Nic Gareiss, and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

April 17, 2015
Shakespeare Inspires Princeton’s Music Scene

After 400 years, the Bard continues to provide some great shakes. Two Shakespeare-related works will be served up in the Princeton area over the course of the next week.

Tonight at 8 p.m., the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will unveil Darryl Kubian’s “O for a Muse of Fire” (which takes its title from the Prologue to “Henry V”), as part of a concert to be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium. Also on the program will be Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” with pianist Serhiy Savlov, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 “Pathètique.”

Though written two hundred years after Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Bellini’s opera, “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” (“The Capulets and the Monatgues”), had a kind of parallel genesis, bypassing the Bard to draw from the same Italian Renaissance sources. Westminster Opera Theatre will perform the work next Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., at the Bart Luedeke Center, Rider University, in Lawrenceville.

Find out more in my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/03/classical_music_shakespeare_in.html

“Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves, when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.”

Henry VIII, Act III, Scene 1

March 20, 2015
Opera’s Dark Elf and Bird Droppings at Princeton

Only opera can promise a malevolent elf and an old man blinded by bird droppings.

Gabriel Crouch will conduct Princeton University Opera Theater, along with members of the Princeton Girlchoir and The American Boychoir, in a double-bill of Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Jonathan Dove’s “Tobias and the Angel,” tonight and tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium.

To learn more, check out my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/01/classical_music_princeton_doub.html

You might not want to sit too close to the stage when the sparrows arrive.

(To see the boys in their bird costumes, click on “The American Boychoir,” above.)

January 9, 2015
Remembering William Scheide Bach Scholar

Princeton philanthropist, humanitarian and Bach scholar William H. Scheide died on November 14, 2014.

To mark what would have been Scheide’s 101st birthday today, WWFM commissioned me to put together a two-hour tribute, complete with interviews with those who knew him best, including oboist and recorder virtuoso John Burkhalter, conductor Mark Laycock, pianist and associate director of the Scheide Fund Mariam Nazarian, former Scheide librarian Wlliam Stoneman, WPRB radio personality (with a capital “P”) Teri Noel Towe, Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, and of course his wife, Judith Scheide.

The program will also feature rare recordings of the Bach Aria Group, an ensemble Scheide founded in 1946 and directed for over 30 years. The Bach Aria Group included as regulars or guests such musical luminaries as Eileen Farrell, Carol Smith, Jan Peerce, Maureen Forrester, Jennie Tourel, Norman Farrow, Marian Anderson, Mack Harrell, William Warfield, Julius Baker, Robert Bloom, Maurice Wilk, Oscar Shumsky, Bernard Greenhouse, Yehudi Wyner, and so many others. Robert Shaw even conducts one of the recordings.

There’s also an excerpt from a rare radio broadcast which originally aired in 1948, with Scheide explaining the mission of the group, and a private recording of Scheide at the piano, playing Chopin, at the age of 92.

In addition to his Bach research and rare book collecting, for which he is justly celebrated, Scheide aided not only Princeton University and Westminster Choir College of Rider University, but any number of charitable organizations, to promote education, health, civil rights, relief from poverty and hunger, and the general welfare of mankind.

The next Scheide benefit concert, with Laycock conducting the English Chamber Orchestra at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts on January 27, will benefit the music and education program, Musicopia.

The station has been promoting this tribute to an embarrassing degree, so it’s a good thing I finished editing it shortly before 8:00 this morning, after an all-nighter fueled by burritos and Dunkin’ Donuts tea.

It’s only seconds away. Tune in to http://www.wwfm.org at 12 ET for “William H. Scheide: A Job Well Done.” If you miss it, I’m told it will be posted on the station website. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if it is also rerun at some point. The title is stolen from the eminently quotable Towe.

The opening is brilliant, if I do say so myself. It may get less so as the two hours grind on. It remains to be heard.

Priceless photos of the Bach Aria Group here:

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/BAG-2.htm

January 6, 2015
Guitar Duo Concert at TCNJ & Princeton

If you’re in the area and you’d enjoy a musical serenade to go along with your peanut butter and banana sandwich, head on over to The College of New Jersey in Ewing for today’s “brown bag” concert.

Laura Oltman, who has taught guitar at Princeton University for over three decades, will join her husband, Michael Newman, who is new to the TCNJ faculty. Newman & Oltman will perform works for guitar duet by Ferdinando Carulli, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Astor Piazzolla.

In addition, flutist Jayn Rosenfeld will join Oltman for Mauro Giuliani’s Gran Duetto Concertante, Op. 52. The hour-long concert will be held at Mayo Concert Hall in the college’s music building, beginning at 12:30. Bagged lunches are welcome.

Oltman and Rosenfeld will repeat the Giuliani work on Sunday, as part of concert by Richardson Chamber Players, to be held at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium, beginning at 3. The predominantly wind program will also include works by Mozart and Francis Poulenc. Oltman will preface Poulenc’s Sextet with a late guitar work, the “Sarabande,” from 1960.

Newman also teaches at Mannes College of Music in New York, and Oltman at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. The Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo is ensemble-in-residence at Mannes.

Husband and wife will reunite for a Christmas concert at Villa Milagro Vineyards in Finesville, NJ, on Dec. 6 at 6:30 p.m.

To learn more about it – and them – check out my article in today’s Trenton Times:

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2014/11/classical_music_newman_oltman.html

PHOTO: Newman & Oltman: Zing! go the strings of their art

November 21, 2014

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