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?
This concert features provocative choreography by first- and second-year Master of Fine Arts students in Dance, focusing on new works in development.
As the first opportunity for them to put material onstage and see what develops, it often contains the seeds of movement ideas that will be featured in their MFA Thesis programs — an unguarded exploration of their talents and interests.
The Shanghai Quartet melds the delicacy of Eastern music with the emotional breadth of Western repertoire, allowing it to traverse musical genres from masterpieces of Western music to cutting-edge contemporary works.
Their program at the Center will include Schubert’s Quartettsatz, Bartok’s Quartet #4, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132 and selections from ChinaSong, a suite of Chinese folk songs arranged for string quartet by the Shanghai Quartet’s violinist Yi-Wen Jiang.
In the world of science, the moment of discovery is usually very inauspicious. That discovery can be shared when meaning is attached to it and it is contextualized with evidence.
What happens in the world of artistic creation? Is the process different or more similar than we might imagine?
Our panelists represent innovative thinking in both science and the arts, and all of them have explored the multiple ways in which the two worlds intersect.
Café Variations weaves longing, lust, lost love, found love and budding romantic adventure through dance, music and theatre within the social arena where anything can happen: a café.
This new theatre piece based on short plays by Charles Mee features Gershwin songs from The Great American Songbook — familiar tunes that evoke a time, place and way of life.
