Music, theater, and art: a season of celebration

It seems entirely appropriate that the publication
date of City‘s Fall Guide this year
is September 11. In this annual issue, our writers preview the season in music,
theater, art, performances, exhibitions, and literature. This year, in lieu of
standard previews, we’ve invited the directors of local companies to tell us in
their own words about the seasons they’ve prepared.

            For many of
us, it’s the arts that sustain us through difficult times. It’s through the
arts that people express their greatest joy, intelligence, and creativity.

            We’ve
compiled a seasonal calendar that’s as comprehensive as possible. And we offer
a sampling here of just some of the voices of our cultural community. Read on
for some of the highlights of Rochester’s fall arts season, beginning, most
appropriately, with the Rochester Oratorio Society’s participation in a
worldwide staging of the Mozart Requiem on the morning of September 11. (Reporting by Chris Busby, Jack Bradigan Spula,
Tim Goodwin, Susan Herman, and Ron Netsky.)

Subheadline: Rochester Oratorio Society

Text: The Rochester Oratorio Society will open its season
with a highly unusual performance.

            “The
Oratorio Society is beginning the season with the ‘Rolling Requiem,'” says
Roger Wilhelm, the society’s conductor and music director. “The Seattle
Symphony Chorus came up with the idea. Choruses around the world will, at 8:46
a.m. on September 11, perform the Mozart Requiem.
Over 24 hours you will have the Mozart Requiem continuously sung around the world. They’ve got over 100 choruses from almost
every time zone participating in the project.”

            The Requiem performance will take place at
the Hochstein School of Music, 50 North Plymouth Avenue. The Oratorio Society
is inviting any singer who has sung the work before to participate. (Those
interested should call 473-2234, leave their names, and indicate what part they
sing.)

            The rest of the season includes a
concert featuring the Bach Magnificat on November 16, and the society’s annual performance of Handel’s Messiah December 13 and 14. On March 8,
the society will be joined by the Bach Children’s Choir in a program featuring
music for brass, organ, tympany and chorus. (RN)

Subheadline: Madrigalia

Text: Madrigalia gets started on December 15 with a major
Christmas concert, titled “Here We Come a Caroling” at the Methodist Church in
Canandaigua. The concert will be repeated December 21 at St. Anne’s Church,
1600 Mt. Hope Avenue.

            Next comes
a joint concert with Musica Spei, an early music group, in March. The concert,
dealing with English Music, includes a major piece by Ralph Vaughn Williams,
the “Mass in G Minor for Double Chorus.” The season concludes May 31 with a
program titled “Rochester Treasures.”

            “We will be
performing music by a variety of Rochester composers including Howard Hanson,
Cary Ratcliff and Nathanial Dett, an early 20th-century composer who wrote
mostly spirituals,” says Roger Wilhelm, the society’s conductor and music
director. (RN)

Subheadline: Salman Rushdie

Text: “We’re lucky to be bringing in Salman Rushdie,” says
Joanna Scott, assosiate professor of English at the University of Rochester.
“We’ve wanted to bring him in for years.”

            Rushdie is
the author of The
Moor’s Last Sigh,The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
and the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children.
But he’s certainly most famous for his Whitbread Prize-winning
comic novel, The Satanic Verses; the
Ayatollah Khomeni found that book so blasphemous that he issued a death
sentence for Rushdie, sending the author into hiding until 1998. (Since the
fatwa was lifted, Rushdie has been traveling freely.)

            Now, thanks
to new endowment funds, the UR’s Plutzik Series has been able to invite Rushdie
to the campus.

            “He’s one
of the most important writers, politically and stylistically, working in
English now,” says Scott. “He’s a great mimic; he moves between different
voices with great agility. He mixes words in unexpected ways, and he has great
insight.”

            Scott, the
acclaimed author of Make Believe, Various Antidotes, and The Manikin, (a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in 1997), teaches Rushdie’s work to her students. Her favorite
of his books is Shame, which she
first discovered while working in the publishing industry in the early 1980s,
when a copy of it came across her desk in manuscript form.

            “I took
this manuscript home, and it changed my life,” says Scott. “It was bold, it was
ambitious. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.”

            Rushdie
will read from his work and take audience questions at 3:15 p.m. on Saturday,
October 12 in the University of Rochester’s Strong Auditorium. Admission is
free. (SH)

Subheadline: Nazareth College Arts Center

Text: The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s new show is a joke:
literally. The self-described “bad boys of abridgement” will tackle some of the
world’s best-loved books in their new production, The Reducers. In true Reduced Shakespearean style, The Reducers offers hilariously
foreshortened versions of works by Thoreau, Swift, Confucius, and others.

            The RSC’s
earlier productions (The Complete Works
of William Shakespeare, Abridged, and The
Complete History of America, Abridged) are officially London’s
longest-running comedies; they’ve been performed continually since 1996 at the
West End’s Criterion Theatre. The company was also featured in a PBS special
last year.

            RSC members
will present the new 98-minute crash course in the classics at the Nazareth
College Arts Center on November 1.

            “Bringing
laughter to an audience of literally dozens is a pretty good gig,” says RSC
performer, writer, and managing partner Reed
Martin. Prepare to laugh yourself silly. (CB)

Subheadline: Memorial Art Gallery

Text: The Memorial Art Gallery is gearing up for what
director Grant Holcomb calls “the most significant exhibition in the gallery’s
history.”

            “Degas:
Figures in Motion,” on view from October 13 to January 5, will be the first
major exhibition of the master sculptor’s work in western New York, and the
traveling exhibit’s only East Coast stop.

            “This is one
of the rare opportunities to see all the extant sculpture of Degas,” Holcomb
says. “There are only four complete sets in the world, and this is one.” Among
bronze figures of bathers and horses on display will be Little Dancer, Age Fourteen. Holcomb says Degas “showed Little Dancer once and the criticism was
so scathing, he never showed it again.” (It’s now an artistic icon.)

            In the
context of today’s racy culture, it’s odd to consider Degas an edgy artist. But
in late 19th-century France, his realistic renderings of everyday Parisians
were considered avant-garde by a public accustomed to Romantic depictions of
idealized figures.

            In addition
to the exhibit’s 73 sculptures, the gallery will display a variety of his paintings, pastels and prints. These works reveal the
impact that Japanese landscape prints (one of many genres Degas and his
contemporaries absorbed) and photography were beginning to make on the Western
art world.

            There’ll
also be a series of lectures and special events to coincide with the exhibit.
All told, Holcomb estimates the exhibition will bring $2.5 million in economic
activity to the county. Now there’s an avant-garde concept. (CB)

Subheadline: Opera Rochester

Text: Opera Rochester will kick off its season with an Opera
Gala in January followed by three opera productions, all of which will be
staged at the Eastman Theatre. The first will be Puccini’s Tosca, performed by a Russian troupe on its first United States
tour.

            “I’m
titling this season “From Russia Con Amore,” because there’s a major Russian
connection here,” says Glenn West, general director of Opera Rochester. The
first production is the premiere tour of the Russian State Opera of
Yekaterinburg.

            “It’s a
city in Siberia which, till the Iron Curtain fell, was one of those secret
cities which Westerners were never allowed to go to because it had military
sites in it,” he says. “It was named after Katherine the Great and has had a
long opera tradition. In fact, the opera house there is considered to be one of
the top three, along with the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theatre
in St. Petersburg. They’re just now getting exposure outside of Russia. This is
their first tour in the Western Hemisphere. They’re going to come with a fairly
sizable troupe of people with, from what I’ve heard, magnificent singers. I
think we’re in for a treat with that one.”

            The other
two operas will be performed by a group that has visitied Rochester before: the
Teatro Lirico d’Europa.

            “They
originated in Bulgaria but they are based in Paris now,” says West. “This past
season they did a wonderful production of Rigoletto.
They bring a lot of singers from all over the world, including Eastern Europe.”

            This coming
season, the troupe will be performing Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Mussorgski’s Boris
Godunov.

            “To my
knowledge, this is the first time Boris
Godunov has actually been fully staged in Rochester, which is remarkable
for a major work.

            “There are
no low points this season,” says West. (RN)

Subheadline: Shipping Dock Theatre

Text: Shipping Dock Theatre director Barbara Biddy
acknowledges that audiences are sometimes more comfortable attending the
well-known plays they’ve seen before. But that doesn’t mean that she shares a
taste for the same old chestnuts.

            “That stuff
bores the hell out of me,” says Biddy.

            As Shipping
Dock enters its 23rd season, Biddy says the professional non-equity company is
“still the best kept secret in town.” She thinks that’s partly because Shipping
Dock typically presents recently written works with bite.

            “We tend to
do more social-, political-type plays, and then some things that are absolutely
stupid,” she says. (Surely she’s joking about that.)

            This
season’s offerings include two full-length plays and several installments of
“Come See Our Shorts” — a series of brief, often experimental works presented
in a small space down the hall from Shipping Dock’s main stage at 151 St. Paul
Street.

            Playwright
Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter (October 4 through 27) is about “the latent racism that can lurk in liberal
hearts,” Biddy says. When an African-American professor at a small liberal arts
college starts getting hate mail, “the campus erupts with shock and
recrimination and the faculty and students try to prove their own tolerance by
condemning one another,” she says.

            The next
full-length offering, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers (December 6 through 31), emphasizes the silly over the
social, though Biddy says its lampooning of self-help books does have a point.
According to Biddy’s description, the play’s characters include a “foul-mouthed
thug with a hand puppet that talks too much,” a “claustrophobic lady cop,” and
a “limping, lisping, half-blind, half-deaf man in a ski mask.” Who needs TV?
(CB)

Subheadline: Visual Studies Workshop

Text: This fall, the Visual Studies Workshop on Prince
Street will present several exhibits of innovative artwork, none of which match
your couch. However, if you saw your couch into several sections, you’ll have a
work much like one the VSW plans to present.

            The current
exhibition, “Are You Alone …” (on display through October 26), is a group show
by nine artists exploring a theme that can be appreciated by anyone who walks
around downtown Rochester: the desolate urban environment.

            In contrast
to the tradition of “sublime” landscape painting and photography, the
photographs in the VSW show focus on “the scary part, the terrifying apect, and
the loneliness that our landscape has become today,” says gallery director
Scott Laird.

            For
example, the shopping carts in an empty parking lot photographed by Dennis
Witmer seem “ominous,” Laird says. “They look like they might come after you.”

            An exhibit
of work by internationally known photographer Adam Fuss will open on September
20. Fuss creates images without a camera by exposing photographic paper to
light. His color prints incorporate primarily natural imagery.

            Later in
the season, the VSW will present a solo show by New York City installation
artist Joy Episalla. One work features the aforementioned severed sofa, coupled
with video monitors showing taped images from Episalla’s home. She also creates
what Laird describes as “extreme close-up” photos of household objects, like
pillows and curtains. Episalla’s work will be shown from November 9 to January
15. (CB)

Subheadline: Downstairs Cabaret Theatre

Text: The Downstairs Cabaret Theatre’s continuing production
of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change has become an immensely popular fixture on the local theater scene. Suds, the 1960s-style musical, is
continuing a popular run, and the company’s theater classes are growing.

            The most
exciting news from DCT this season, says Downstairs Cabaret’s director,
Christopher Kawolsky, is the national tour for the anniversary of Ain’t Misbehavin,’ the Fats Waller
vehicle. The DCT will be travelling to more than 60 cities with this tour.

            “It will
raise our profile,” says Kawolsky.The DCT has also opened its third location on
Main Street, and Kowalsky says that success represents a coup in Rochester.

            “Rochester
isn’t the friendliest town to small arts organizations,” he says. “We’re one of
the bright spots. Though [we’ve dealt with] huge obstacles, we’ve become more
economically viable.”

            The fall
will include some surprises, including the return of Broadway actor Will
Stutts. He will perform his own pieces, including a production based on Walt
Whitman, and Eye of the Storm. Eye is the story of Judge Frank Johnson,
a key player in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

            “We
continually keep surprising people and connecting with audiences,” says
Kowalsky. “It’s exciting.” (TG)

Subheadline: Blackfriars Theatre

Text: “I get so bored with plays I can get ahead
of,” says John Haldoupis, director of Blackfriars Theatre. “I look
for a variety of things that have a balance. I’m feeling the vibes of the
public, and they want to be entertained.”

            Blackfriars
will kick off its fall season with Jean Gordon Ryon directing Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. It’s the tale of novelist
Charles Condomine, who invites a medium into his house and gets more than he
bargained for.

            This is
“witty, light entertainment,” Haldoupis says. The play has had a
strong track record on Broadway and in London.

            Haldoupis
himself will direct Claudia Shear’s Dirty
Blonde, and says he couldn’t be happier about it.

            “I’ve
wanted to do Dirty Blonde since I saw
it on Broadway a few years ago,” he says. “It’s not a biography of Mae West,
but a love story between two unlikely people who meet at the grave site of Mae
West.”

            Although
Haldoupis generally tries to mix up a little darkness with his comedies, he’s
comfortable this year with a comedy-heavy fall.

            “Escape is
a strong aspect of theater, and it’s very appropriate,” he says. “Times are
tough. Both plays lean toward comedy, but they are completely different. Blithe Spirit is a classic comedy and Dirty Blonde is very cutting edge.” (TG)

Subheadline: Centerstage at JCC

Text: The Jewish Community Centerstage’s Artistic Director,
Herb Katz, sums up the first show of the fall lineup without missing a beat: “Shtik! is about an orthodox Jewish
lesbian juggler,” he says. “It’s a one-woman performance piece with Sarah
Felder, who’s been in the area before. She’s quite unique, but very
non-threatening.”

            “I’m
excited about Shtik! because it’s a
little edgy, and I like that,” Katz says.

            Shtik! features Felder’s dual talents:
acclaimed social satire and juggling. The show will run only two performances
at the JCC, on October 19 and 20.

            Centerstage
will also feature Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Simon, one
of America’s best-loved playwrights, is the author of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Lost
in Yonkers, The Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park.

            In Laughter, Simon recalls his tenure as
one of the writers for Sid Caesar’s popular 1950s television program, Your Show of Shows. As fans of the show
will remember, Simon shared the writing credits with fellow comic geniuses Mel
Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Larry Gelbart. The Philadelphia
Inquirer called Laughter “screamingly funny.”

            “We have to
be a bit more commercial here this season,” Katz says, “so we can’t just pick a
play that no one’s ever heard of.” (TG)

Subheadline: Genesee Early Music Society

Text: After almost two decades of devotion to centuries-old
music and historically accurate performance practices, the Genesee Early Music
Society has made a history of its own. Indeed, the Society has a long record of
performances at venues like the Eastman School of Music’s venerable Kilbourn
Hall and the Memorial Art Gallery. The tradition continues this fall.

            Two
examples: In late September, says spokesperson and French hornist Charles
Valenza, GEMS will host a program called “Love, Violence, and Psychosis,” with
appropriate Renaissance thrillers performed by soprano Laurie Heimes; and
another called “Sound the Trumpet,” with Baroque trumpeter Niklas Eklund, a
young Swede who already has an international following.

            Here’s some
other repertoire on GEMS’s fall schedule: a cantata, Médée, for strings and baroque flute by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault
— an offering “nigh on to unique for this area,” says Valenza — and a
selection of keyboard works performed by double-threat harpsichordist-organist
Michael Fuerst. (JBS)

Subheadline: SUNY Brockport Writers Forum

Text: “Eamon Grennan is an Irish poet who’s enormously
highly regarded,” says Stan Rubin, director of the SUNY Brockport Writers’
Forum. “He’s an Irish citizen who’s lived in the US for many years, he’s a
professsor at Villanova University, and he’s written many highly praised books.
We’re very excited to be bringing him in.” Grennan, the author of Relations, So It Goes, and As If It
Matters, will visit the Brockport campus on October 30, and is one of the
highlights of the Writers’ Forum fall series.

            “We have a
mission: to bring in diverse voices of literary quality, to enrich the cultural
life on campus, and also to project Brockport into the life of the greater
Rochester community,” says Rubin. Other guest artists include Asian American
fiction writer Don Lee on October 23, and environmental essayist John Elder on
November 13. (SH)

Subheadline: Geva Theatre

Text: Geva Theatre’s artistic director, Mark Cuddy, says he
gets lots of advice on picking plays. Friends, family, the paper boy: Everyone
offers their two cents.

            “It
gives me an inkling as to what the community is thinking,” Cuddy says.
“But ultimately, we do the plays that I really like.”

            David
Auburn’s play, Proof, will come to
Geva’s Mainstage this season. Winner of the 2001
Pulitzer Prize in drama, it’s a play that explores the mysteries
of science and of relationships.

            Catherine
is a woman both devoted to and resentful of her father: a mathematical genius
in his youth, he is dependent on her for his survival after a breakdown. She
has inherited both his brilliance and, sadly, his instability.The play’s title
comes from a mathematical proof which Catherine will claim, after his death, to
have authored herself.

            “The whole
play takes place on the back porch of a house. It’s a relationship play,” Cuddy
says.

            On the
Nextstage will be a revival of Billy
Bishop Goes to War, John Gray’s musical tribute to Canada’s famous World
War I flying ace. Gray’s play, which has been called a classic of the Canadian
theater, is a “delightful and cunningly wrought work of art,” according to the New Yorker. Also at Geva this fall: Cookin’ at the Cookery, the true story
of blues legend Alberta Hunter, who launched a successful comeback at age 82.

            “My job is
to create variety,” Cuddy says. “Someone’s probably going to like one play more
than the other, but that’s the nature of the art.” (TG)

Subheadline: Rochester Bach Festival

Text:  “I can hardly
wait to do the Bach Festival each year,” says Tom Folan, the festival’s music
director and conductor.

            “It’s the
complexity of the music, the sheer exuberance of the music and the message of
the music. And we’re the only act like it in town. You have to go far and wide
to hear another Bach Festival.”

            This year’s
festival is a prelude to performances of major works two years from now.

            “We are
building a crescendo toward the 50th anniversary of the Rochester Bach Festival
in the 2005/2006 season,” says Folan. “In order to prepare for that anniversary
when we’ll perform the big works, we’re going to have our programs in 2003 and
2004 in March, around Bach’s birthday. What I’m proposing for this year is a
program of some of Bach’s best Cantatas.”

            These
include, says Folan, the Cantatas BWV 75, Die
Elenden sollen essen; BWV 76, Die
Himmel erzaehlen die Ehre Gottes; BWV 147, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben; and BWV 80, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.

            “We’ll
involve a chamber orchestra, soloists and the Bach Festival Chorus, and we are
probably going to collaborate with my other ensemble, the Public Musik, a
period instrument orchestra,” he says. “We’re also planning another
instrumental concert, a return visit from a very exciting early music ensemble,
Pegasus.”

            Folan is
proud of the fact that the Rochester Bach Festival has not deviated from its
mission.

            “A lot of
Bach festivals don’t even concentrate on Bach anymore,” says Folan. “One of the
exciting things about this festival is we find enough substance and enough
exciting projects to do that Bach is still the focus.” (RN)

Subheadline: Nicholson Baker

Text:
Native son and author Nicholson Baker, now a resident of Maine, will return to
Rochester on November 7 for a public ceremony at the Rochester Academy of
Medicine, at which he will accept Writers & Books’ Sense of Place Award.

            “The award
is given to a writer whose work evokes a sense of a certain place or time, a
mood,” says W&B executive director Joe Flaherty. “Nicholson Baker has a
novel coming out in January that’s very much about a place, and when he’s here,
he’ll be talking about ‘place’ from a writer’s point of view.”

            Baker, the
author of Vox and The Mezzanine, is also the author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on
Paper, and an outspoken advocate of the preservation of original newspapers
and magazines in libraries.

            Previous
winners of the Sense of Place Award include William Least Heat-Moon and David
Schickler; awards will also be given to local writers and writing teachers in
recognition of their support of the literary arts. (SH)

Subheadline: Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra

Text: Since its first performance in 1923, the Rochester
Philharmonic Orchestra has been a local cultural anchor and the soul force of
its aesthetic home, the Eastman Theatre. And though the times (and the economy)
go through changes, the RPO keeps up a full schedule of regular and pops
concerts and special events.

            This fall,
the schedule includes some tried-and-true repertoire (warhorses?) and some
items a bit off the hoof-beaten path. In the first category: The season begins
October 3 (repeated October 5) with an all-Tchaikovsky program, and pianist
Olga Kern will perform Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. In the second
category: Trumpeter Douglas Prosser will give breath to the Hummel trumpet
concerto; this program will also feature African-American composer Adolphus
Hailstork’s first symphony.

            RPO music director Christopher
Seaman says he especially is looking forward to Kern’s appearance, as well as
to the November 21 and 23 performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto by
famed artist Misha Dichter.

            Seaman is
also proud of a local premiere he’ll conduct this fall. “I am particularly glad
to be bringing Elgar’s Second Symphony to Rochester, which, although not very familiar to many, will immediately
appeal, as it has all Elgar’s qualities of nobility, fire, tenderness, and
nostalgia,” says Seaman.

            On the pops
side, conductor Jeff Tyzik says he’s gearing up for a Halloweenish “music of
the macabre” program on November 1 and 2, titled “Phantoms of the Orchestra.”
He also points to the Gala Holiday Pops program (December 20, 21, and 22).

            “It’s
become one of Rochester’s favorites; we always do a family thing,” Tyzik says.
So it’s fitting that this year, a young operatic mezzo-soprano named Jami Tyzik
(Jeff’s daughter) will be on stage. (JBS)

Subheadline: George Eastman House

Text: Have you ever dreamed of exhibiting your photos at the
George Eastman House, but figured you didn’t have the artistic chops to get in
the door? Well, now’s your chance.

            This fall,
the Eastman House is presenting “Picturing What Matters,” an exhibition of
photographs submitted by the public representing the people, places and things
that matter most to them. Conceived as a way to commemorate the anniversary of
September 11, the museum will continue to solicit snapshots and add them to the
exhibit until it ends next January 20.

            Co-curator
Rick Hock had received over 500 submissions by mid-August and expected to have
at least 1,000 pictures by early September. Most of the photos are of families
and pets. (One shutterbug submitted a shot of the horse still “parading” on the
museum’s front lawn.)

            “It’s
amazing,” Hock says. “There are some very sophisticated images.”

            One room of
the museum will be dedicated to photos of the tragedy taken by professional
media photographers. There’ll also be a book on hand in which visitors can
write their accounts of where they were when the attacks took place and how the
tragedy has affected them.

            “Picturing
What Matters” is “really a portrait of the community and their concerns,” Hock
says. When the exhibit ends, the photos may be given to the county archives to
be preserved for future generations. (CB)

Subheadline: Rochester Museum & Science Center

Text: Coming this January to the Rochester Museum &
Science Center is “Cool Moves! Artistry of Motion.” It’s a joint exhibition
created by the RMSC and the Ithaca Sciencenter as part of a collaborative
effort funded by the National Science Foundation.

            “Cool
Moves!” will lead visitors to explore the beauty of motion through 14 hands-on
science exhibits, says Debra Jacobson, the RMSC’s director of marketing.
Visitors will learn by observing several kinds of motion: the chaotic motion of
a giant swinging pendulum, the motion of magnets, of light and water in a
ripple tank (as well as about reflection and refraction), of spinning rainbow
colors, and the movement of animals. “Cool Moves!” will continue at the RMSC
through June, 2003.

            In addition
to the RMSC’s exhibits, visitors can enjoy performances by the RMSC Players, a
group of actors presenting theatrical vignettes in character as historical
figures like Thomas Edison and Madame Curie. The original plays entertain
children while educating them, inviting audience participation, and maintaining
historical accuracy.

            “We try to
grab kids and get them excited in science,” says Tim Cawley, director of the
RMSC Players. “It’s improv, it’s interactive. If it isn’t exciting to the kids,
why bother doing it?”

            The
Players’ live performances and science demonstrations are free with museum
admission. (TG)

Subheadline: Eastman School of Music

Text: Originally part of Kodak founder George Eastman’s
personal contribution to Rochester, the Eastman School of Music has developed
its own identities: a conservatory; a laboratory for studies in music history,
theory, and composition; a proving ground for budding music educators; and a
world-renowned repository of musical documents.

            This fall’s
ESM schedule is characteristically packed with, for example, student recitals,
concerts by student orchestras, jazz ensembles, and so forth. Throughout the
schedules you’ll find treasures and surprises.

            How about
the Brentano String Quartet (September 14) with works by Josquin des Prez,
Stravinsky, Mozart, and Bartók? Or a guest recital (September 23) by the US
Army Field Band Clarinet Quartet? Or an October 1 concert by the unconventional
sextet “eighth blackbird,” with contemporary music by the likes of Frederic
Rzewski? Or an October 11 concert by the literal new music ensemble Musica
Nova, with music by George Crumb, et al.? Or a November 22 concert by another
new music group, Ossia, with music by Joji Yuasa?

            The ESM
will bring us back in time, too. Famed Eastman School lutenist Paul O’Dette
says the ensemble he directs, the Collegium Musicum, is now gearing up for
performances in-house and with the Rochester Early Music Festival. As with some
other school ensembles, it’s hard to know exactly what Collegium will present
until participants have registered for classes, says O’Dette.

            “I suspect
we’ll have a very strong string group,” he says. (That’s due in large part to
O’Dette’s partner and Collegium colleague, gamba player Christel Thielmann.)
(JBS)

This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2002.