Jonathan Golove

The UB Music Department is presenting a Faculty Showcase Gala concert in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the Amherst Campus on Wednesday, September 26 at 8pm.

The program is very much a potpourri, reminiscent of the “Heard on Wednesdays” concerts offered by the department the previous two years. Concertgoers will enjoy a sampling of the talents of both familiar distinguished performance faculty members as well as being introduced to the four newest faculty members: James Avery, Catarina Domenici, David Leung and Rin Ozaki.

James Avery, who has had a long, distinguished teaching and performance career in both Europe and the US, plays the Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and pre-recorded tape by Argentinean-born composer Mario Davidovsky. Eric Chasalow has recently written of this work that won Davidovsky the 1971 Pulitzer that one of the achievements of the piece is “the invention of a new pianism­—a new and distinct approach to the instrument. The piano “has been reinvented based on its relationship to the other resources in the piece—be they electronic or instrumental.”

In a complete change of pace, Brazilian-born pianist Catarina Domenici will next team up with long-time faculty member and former BPO flautist Cheryl Gobbetti-Hoffman for a performance of the early 19th-century Variations on Nel Cor Piu, after an aria by Paisello, by the father of modern flute design, Theobald Boehm.

Tony Arnold

Pianist Alison d’Amato will accompany vocal offerings by Tony Arnold and Alexander Hurd. Hurd brings his finely modulated baritone voice to the 1987 lyrical Canzonettas: Three songs on anonymous poems, by American composer John Musto.

Soprano Tony Arnold will sing two selections from French composer Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Harawi. It seems that it was only yesterday that local audiences first heard Arnold in a remarkable June in Buffalo performance of Bernard Rand’s Canti Lunatici. Besides being a dedicated advocate of the most challenging recent and new works for soprano voice—case in point, last year’s performance of Gyorgy Kurtag’s elusive Kafka Fragments with violin virtuoso Movses Pogossian—Arnold has demonstrated a natural affinity for the more traditional lieder repertory, in her infrequent ventures in the genre. A recital last season by Arnold and Hurd, along with a visiting fortepiano expert, found the small audience seated entirely on stage at Lippes Concert Hall, along with the artists, enjoying one of those rare, intimate concert-going experiences that can genuinely be described as unforgettable.

Alison d’Amato will perform as a soloist in the 1984 work Prelude No.3 by Ellen Ruehr, who is currently composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. D’Amato will also accompany violinist and new faculty member David Leung in Shostakovich’s brief but charming and elegant Three Fantastic Dances, Op. 5, one of the few works written before the composer’s significant First Symphony to remain in circulation during his lifetime.

Violinist David Leung will later join with Janz Castelo, viola, and Jonathan Golove, cello, for Erno Dohnanyi’s Serenade in C Major for string trio (1902). Heavily influenced by Brahms and the folk music of Dohnányi’s homeland of Hungary, the evocative five-movement work features a haunting fourth movement set of five variations on a chorale-like theme with an almost Schubertian lyricism. The Serenade is a very engaging composition, generally winning listeners over on first hearing.

Rin Ozaki

New faculty member Rin Ozaki, a marimbist and percussionist from Tokyo, Japan, is no stranger to Buffalo audiences, having performed on a live WBFO radio broadcast, at June in Buffalo and also with the Slee Sinfonietta Chamber Ensemble. A finalist in the Second World Marimba Competition in Okaya, Japan, Ozaki will perform Yasuo Sueyoshi’s 1971 work Mirage for Marimba.

Cellist Jonathan Golove will play three movements of J.S. Bach’s Suite in G Major for solo cello in conjunction with a performance by dancers Jane Taylor and Lauren Fischer, who are members of the group Configuration Dance. The movements of the Bach solo cello suites are, after all, based on baroque dances, and choreographer Michael Shannon recognizes the music’s origins in the dance by offering his modern interpretation of the various baroque idioms. Audience members who had the good fortune to be present on Sunday afternoon at last month’s Elmwood Festival of the Arts were treated to a mesmerizing performance of the Bach suite by three female dancers, with haircuts (or wigs) very much in the pageboy style of the legendary silent screen actress Louise Brooks. Wearing outfits that even Brooks, as the character of LuLu in the film Pandoras’s Box, a femme fatale whose innocent sexuality destroys the men around her, might have raised an eyebrow at, Golove and Configuration Dance demonstrated that classical music is a very much a living art form.

Admission to the event is only $5 (free to UB students with a valid ID). For further information, visit slee.buffalo.edu.