Music

Our annual tribute to Italian American Heritage Month, HitWeek presents a selection of current Italian music to US audiences.

Enjoy the world premiere of the wind ensemble version of Disquiet by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, “a potentially significant voice on the American music landscape” (Philadelphia Enquirer). The piece was transcribed by Frost’s Doctoral in Musical Arts conducting student Jeffrey Summers. The concert also features Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments.

RAM is a mizik rasin band based in the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The band derives its name from the initials of its founder, songwriter, and lead male vocalist, Richard A. Morse.

The 3rd annual holiday concert returns with new arrangements of holiday classics, including a sing-along for the first time! Selections showcase music representing Christmas traditions from around the world.

Join the Frost Symphony Orchestra as it performs Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.7, hailed as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. In it, his innovative instrumentation and demanding writing nearly reinvents the sound of the orchestra. Igor Stravinsky’s opera suite from Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale, follows. The program concludes with a new work by the winner of the Frost student composition competition.

NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan is a one-of-a-kind singer and songwriter. She studied with Lennie Tristano and Charles Mingus; called Charlie Parker her “big brother” and teacher; has performed and recorded as a leader as well as with top artists and groups; and then nearly invented a performing setting featuring just voice and acoustic bass. Jordan is a true original with an unmatched talent for reimagining standards and inventing lyrics on the fly.

Alan Hovhaness was one of the most prolific and spiritual 20th Century American composers. His Symphony No.2, Mysterious Mountain, anticipated the work of “Holy Minimalists,” such as Arvo Pärt and John Taverner. Frost faculty artists Charles Castleman and Ross Harbaugh join the orchestra for Brahms’s Double Concerto in A Minor. The closing piece is Dmitri Shostakovich’s powerful Symphony No.10 in E Minor, often described as his depiction of Joseph Stalin and the Stalin years.

Jennifer Grim, Frost’s new flute professor, performs a program of new music including Come Sunday, a piece co-commissioned by the Frost Wind Ensemble. Written by visiting composer Omar Thomas, the two-movement piece is a tribute to the Hammond organ’s central role in black worship services. The other highlight of the program, Lontano, was once introduced by composer Michael Martin as signifying “the journey of grief, what that is, and how familiar that is to all of us.”

In his debut as Frost’s new conductor of the Frost Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz offers a varied and demanding program. It includes the suite from the ballet Estancia by Alberto Ginastera, one of the greatest 20th century composers of the Americas; Samuel Jones’s Tuba Concerto, which Schwarz has called “the finest solo work for that instrument ever produced,” featuring Frost faculty tubist Aaron Tindall; and the evening closes with Brahms’s magnificent and melodic Symphony No. 2.

In her concert debut as Assistant Professor of Performance, Chamber Music and Entrepreneurship, Grammy-nominated flutist and composer Valerie Coleman is showcased in an evening of poetry, visual art, and her own original chamber music. Tonight’s performance includes poetry by Margaret Danner, Maya Angelou, and Langston Hughes as well as visual artwork by Sonya Clark. Musicology Professor Melvin Butler leads a 30-minute pre-concert discussion.