The UMD Concert Choir and the UMD Symphony Orchestra perform a concert of music anchored by Verdi and Stravinsky, including Te Deum (Verdi) and The Firebird Suite (1945) (Stravinsky).
Also included in the program will be Ives’s Three Places in New England and General Booth Enters Heaven, as well as John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony.
Usually positioned at the back of the orchestra, the percussion section moves center stage to reveal the colorful, melodic potential of their instruments in this striking concert of contemporary music.
The UMD Women’s Chorus and the UMD Men’s Chorus explore repertoire spanning several eras, genres and styles, including a recent work by contemporary Norwegian-American choral composer Ola Gjeilo.
Students and faculty join together for a performance of Bach’s Magnificat, also known as the Song of Mary or Canticle of Mary. Bach first composed a version for Christmas in 1723 and then reworked that music ten years later for the Feast of the Visitation. The Latin text is the canticle of Mary, mother of Jesus, as told in the Gospel of Luke.
What many regard as the greatest and most challenging a cappella choral work of the last one hundred years, Francis Poulenc’s Figure Humaine, is the major work of this program, which also features music by Marcel Duruflé and Olivier Messiaen.
Swing with the UMD jazz combos as they play beloved standards and new tunes arranged by UMD jazz students.
Faculty artists David Salness, violin, Evelyn Elsing, cello, and Mayron Tsong, piano join to perform Beethoven’s lean and dramatic “Ghost Trio” (in D major, Op. 70, No. 1), Rachmaninoff’s sweetly melancholic Trio élégiaque (No. 1 in G minor) and Dvořák’s opulently ethnic Trio in E minor, the “Dumky.”
Michael Votta leads the U.S. Army Field Band and Soldiers’ Chorus, along with members of UMD Chamber Singers, in an all-Stravinsky program featuring L’Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier’s Tale).
A work the composer said should be “read, played, and danced,” A Soldier’s Tale uses three actors to tell the story of a soldier who trades his fiddle to the devil for a book that predicts the future of the economy.
What happens when you realize that your idol isn’t perfect? Or, when you recognize her flaws in yourself? Inspired by these questions, Shannon Dooling created Like a Unicorn in Captivity, a response to and an interpretation of the work of writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The piece incorporates multimedia, spoken word and movement in an exploration of celebrity, hero-worship, identity, relationship, ambition, creativity and duty.
In Graham Brown’s Apple Falling, the lives of seven individuals intersect as they each interact with their familial histories, musing over the stories and characters that have, over the generations, helped shape who they are and who they will become. Can we control how far the apple falls from the tree?
