Music News

Master Class with Dover String Quartet on Thursday, April 27

Posted on by

The Dover Quartet will be giving a master class on Thursday, April 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, Chamber Stage.

Considered one of the most remarkably talented string quartets ever to emerge at such a young age, the Dover Quartet catapulted to international stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, winning the Grand Prize as well as all three Special Prizes. They won the Grand Prize at the 2010 Fischoff Competitioin, and are now the first ever Quartet-in-Residence for the venerated Curtis Institute of Music.

“The young American String Quartet of the moment.” – The New Yorker

The master class program is as follows:

Mendelssohn Quartet No.2 in A minor Op.13
Presto-Adagio non lento

Beethoven Quartet in F Major Op.59
Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando

Osiris String Quartet
Brian Roach, violin
Peter Nowak, violin
Brandon Kaplan, viola
Bronwyn Reeve, cello

Mendelssohn Quartet in E flat Major Op.12
Molto allegro e vivace

Meraki Quartet
Priscilla Back, violin
James Lee, violin
Mai Vestergaard, viola
Andrew Frascarelli, cello

The Dover Quartet will be performing at Jorgensen Center on April 25 and April 27 at 7:30 PM.

http://jorgensen.uconn.edu/events/view.php?id=531

The master class is made possible in collaboration with Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts.

Dr. Ed Large Presentation on March 31st

Posted on by

On Friday, March 31st, Dr. Ed Large, Professor of Psychology will present a paper entitled “A Neuro-Dynamic Model of Rhythm Perception” in von der Mehden Recital Hall.  The presentation will begin at 1:25 pm.

Professor Large directs the Music Dynamics Laboratory at University of Connecticut, where he is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and Professor of Physics. He is President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, has published over 70 articles, and been awarded 5 patents. We are pleased and honored to welcome him to our department and hear his talk.

For those interested in preparing for his talk, please follow this link to read one of his papers.

 

Master Class with Violinist Theodore Arm on April 5th

Posted on by

University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts Department of Music welcomes back  an Emeritus Professor  and a 2010 recipient of the prestigious Lifetime Achievement award from the School of Fine Arts, violinist Theodore Arm.

He will be giving a Master Class in von der Mehden Recital Hall at 11 am on April 5, 2017.  The Master Class is made possible in collaboration with the UConn Foundation and a generous contribution by John and Jean Lenard.

Theodore “Teddy” Arm has delighted audiences throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia with his artistry. He has appeared as soloist, recitalist and guest artist with such well-known organizations as The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Group for Contemporary Music, New York’s Festival Chamber Players and the Boston Chamber Music Society. In 2011 Arm conducted Master classes in Seoul and performed as a guest artist at the opening of the Chamber Music Hall at the Seoul Arts Center.

He has been a member of the highly acclaimed chamber group TASHI since 1976 and has performed with Lukas Foss, Chick Corea and Gary Burton throughout Europe and Asia. He has had several works written for him, including a violin chamber suite by Gabriela Frank that he performed at Carnegie Hall in November of 2004. He has recorded for RCA, Delos, Koch, Musical Heritage Society and ECM.

In 2014, Theodore Arm was appointed Adjunct Professor of Violin at Connecticut College. He holds a Doctorate in Performance from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Christine Dethier and Joseph Fuchs.

Dover Quartet Master Class, March 1st

Posted on by

The Dover Quartet will be giving a master class on Wednesday, March 1st at 10:30 am in the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, Chamber Stage.

Considered one of the most remarkably talented string quartets ever to emerge at such a young age, the Dover Quartet catapulted to international stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, winning the Grand Prize as well as all three Special Prizes. They won the Grand Prize at the 2010 Fischoff Competitioin, and are now the first ever Quartet-in-Residence for the venerated Curtis Institute of Music.

Following the master class, the Dover Quartet is performing at Jorgensen Center on March 2, 2017.

http://jorgensen.uconn.edu/events/view.php?id=494

Violin Master Class with Wendy Sharp on February 24th

Posted on by

On February 24th, award-winning violinist Wendy Sharp will be giving a master class in von der Mehden Recital Hall, from 1:25-2:15 pm.

Wendy Sharp performs frequently as a recitalist and a chamber musician. In demand as a teacher and chamber music coach, she is on the faculties of the Yale School of Music and California Summer Music, and maintains a private studio.  For nearly a decade, Ms. Sharp was the first violinist of the Franciscan String Quartet. As a member of the Quartet, she toured the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan, and was honored with many awards including first prize in the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Press and City of Evian Prizes at the Evian International String Quartet Competition. A native of the San Francisco Bay area, she attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude with Distinction in Music and received her Master of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Ms. Sharp has served on the faculties of Mannes College, Dartmouth College, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Choate Rosemary Hall, and has participated in the Aspen, Tanglewood, Chamber Music West, Norfolk, and Music Academy of the West festivals.

Hansel & Gretel Opera a Very Modern Fairy Tale

Posted on by

Staging a centuries-old Germany fairy tale about the journey of a brother and sister through the woods to a house made of candy inhabited by a fearsome witch, requires as much imagination from the performers on stage as it does from a 21st-century audience.

The UConn Opera Theater production of “Hansel & Gretel” on Saturday, Jan. 30 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. at Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts is a modern interpretation of the Brothers Grimm story that in recent years has been used as the basis for films such as the 2013 horror tale “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” and M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 film “The Visit.”

“The Harry Potter films showed a generation that witches can look like they stepped out of a Renaissance fair, off a rugby field, or from behind an office desk,” says Michelle Hendrick, stage producer for the opera. “The pointy-hat, broom-riding, cackling crone is a Halloween costume and not the witch of this story. We wanted to make choices that were true to our place and time.”

Read full article

UConn Music Mourns the Death of Joseph Silverstein

Posted on by

By Jeremy Eichler GLOBE STAFF | NOVEMBER 24, 2015
When Joseph Silverstein first auditioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s violin section, someone had to call the librarian for help. More music was needed in order to find something for Mr. Silverstein to sight-read. While he was only 30 at the time, he had already played everything in the audition file. He got the job.

About a year later, when he was sitting as last-chair violinist, the formidable music director Charles Munch summoned Mr. Silverstein to a private meeting. “ ‘You must play with the orchestra,’ [Munch] said in his gruff way,” Mr. Silverstein recounted in an oral history project about his life.

“Yes, I agreed. I did play with the orchestra.”

“No, no. You must be a soloist.”

A Chinese concertmaster, BSO music director Seiji Ozawa, and Mr. Silverstein in Beijing in 1979.

Mr. Silverstein accepted the conductor’s invitation. It would be the first of many.

Renowned for his warm honeyed tone, his impeccably urbane style of playing, and his sophisticated sense of musical culture, Mr. Silverstein served as the BSO concertmaster for 22 years, as its assistant conductor from 1971 to 1984, and generally as one of the very brightest stars in the city’s musical firmament. The conductor Andre Previn succinctly summarized a verdict shared by many when he told The New Yorker magazine: “Joseph Silverstein is the greatest concertmaster in the world. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact.”

Mr. Silverstein, who was also the music director of the Utah Symphony from 1983 to 1998 and a committed teacher, died of a heart attack Saturday night in Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. He was 83.

Read full article

Ryan Burns, MM ’12, to sing at Jorgensen

Posted on by

Baritone Ryan Burns ’12 MM likens the preparation for his performance with the Jessica Lang Dance Co. presentation of “The Wanderer” at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Nov. 19 to having the lead role in an opera.

“It’s not something you can put together in a couple of weeks,” Burns says of singing Franz Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” (The Lovely Maid of the Mill), a song cycle of 20 songs sung over an hour. “It’s been a unique challenge to prepare this body of music in such a way that you can maintain all that good technique and language and stay focused. It’s been a challenge, but a really great one.”

A doctoral candidate in music who has performed with the Connecticut Lyric Opera and the Opera Theater of Connecticut, Burns was selected by the contemporary ballet choreographer for the unique joining of dance and classical music that has been described as “a true work of art” by the Boston Globe and “a work of high craftsmanship” by The New York Times.

The innovative Jessica Lang Dance has become one of the most talked about new companies in the dance world. “The Wanderer” is a romantic contemporary tale of jealousy and obsessive desire, performed by nine dancers with sweeping choreography and imaginative set design. “Die schöne Müllerin” is based on poems written around 1820 by Wilhelm Müller and is one of the composer’s most important song cycles written in 1823 in the tradition of setting Romantic German poems to classical music.

Burns says combining the two artistic fields is “a really unique way to take something that’s almost 200 years old now and make it fresh and new. What’s unique about this particular pairing is taking two mediums that you wouldn’t necessarily think to put together. It’s a way to connect different audiences that maybe have never heard Schubert’s music or seen contemporary dance. I’ve approached it as if it were an opera, because it has so many of the same elements.”

Burns grew up in a home surrounded by music, singing, playing trumpet, and performing in musicals. As an undergraduate at St. Anselm College, he majored in criminal justice, played football, and once performed the National Anthem while in pads and uniform before a game. After completing his degree, Burns worked in the development office of his alma mater while taking voice lessons and started performing.

“The opera bug bit me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to go back to music and would have regretted it had I not done it.”

He decided to pursue a master’s degree in music and looked at several programs, deciding on UConn because of the opportunities to perform within the School of Fine Arts. In addition to his work with the Connecticut Lyric Opera and the Opera Theater of Connecticut, he has performed with the UConn Opera Theater and was a member of the ensemble for Opera Boston’s “Beatrice et Benedict.”

Read full article