Harpists Represent Peabody at World Harp Congress
Peabody students Erin Baker, Olivia Castor, GPD candidate Peggy Houng (BM '14, Harp; KSAS BA '14, Cognitive Science), Melody Leung, Jessica Sudarta; and alumnae Tianyang Chen (BM '15, MM '17, Harp/Pedagogy), Olivia Kim (BM '15, MM '17, Harp), and faculty artist Jasmine Hogan (BM '11, AD '16, Harp; MM '14, Harp Pedagogy) will play two full programs at the World Harp Congress in Hong Kong, July 7-13. On July 8, they will perform a 90-minute presentation of new music in the USA International Harp Competition Composition Forum, a competition created and chaired by faculty artist Ruth Inglefield. The top selections to be performed include a composition by Nathan Cornelius, doctoral candidate in guitar and master's candidate in theory pedagogy. The second program is a 50-minute multimedia program titled Baltimore DIMENSIONS. Follow their updates, pictures, and video on their blog.
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FROM THE DEAN
It's summer but there is much happening at Peabody as we prepare for the 2017-18 academic year. Our faculty form the true core of the experience for our Conservatory students, and over the last several months we have announced an unprecedented series of new faculty appointments. These include three renowned singers joining Peabody's faculty: Elizabeth Futral, Tony Arnold, and William Burden. We also will welcome Alexander Fiterstein, clarinet, to chair the Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, and Harp Department, which also welcomes new faculty members Velvet Brown, tuba, and National Symphony musicians Nicholas Stovall, oboe, and David Murray, trombone. Our Organ Department welcomes Daniel Aune to the faculty. We are thrilled to add to our renowned composition program with the appointments of Felipe Lara and Du Yun, who very recently won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, adding a second Pulitzer winner to our very distinguished composition faculty. And speaking of composition, we will be building on two core strengths of Peabody - the composition area and the Recording Arts program - with the launch of our Music for New Media degree program, to be directed by the technical innovator Thomas Dolby. We also note the appointment of Joseph Young, assistant conductor at the Atlanta Symphony, as Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Peabody Ensembles, who will oversee our reimagined ensembles program, as well as Samuel Mungo who will direct Peabody's opera program. Finally, we look forward to Anicia Timberlake and David Gutkin joining our musicology area, and Derrick Wang coming on board in professional studies. We are excited about these appointments and know that they each will play a key role at Peabody for years to come.
Fred Bronstein, Dean |
ON STAGE / OFF CAMPUS
Michael Maliakel (BM '13, Voice) and Sorab Wadia (BM '93, MM '95, Piano) are both in the world-premiere of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding - a musical based on Nair's 2001 film of the same name. Maliakel has a lead role as Hemant, and Wadia has a supporting role as CL Chawla. The performances are at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and have been extended through July 16.
Thursday, July 13, at 8:00 pm
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's inaugural New Music Festival opens with a chamber performance in Peabody's Leith Symington Griswold Hall. A chamber group with faculty artist Alexander Fiterstein, clarinet, will perform two BSO premieres by Peabody faculty composers including Kevin Puts' Quintet "The Red Snapper" and Distinguished Composer-in-Residence Christopher Rouse's Rotae Passionis (Passion Wheels). Director of Peabody's Graduate Conducting Program Marin Alsop will lead the BSO in Puts' The City at the Meyerhoff on Saturday, July 15.
Saturday, July 15-Friday, August 18
Tim Mix (BM '01, Voice) will appear as Tsar Dodon in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel at the Santa Fe Opera. Mix studied Russian music with Vera Danchenko Stern and was in the studio of John Shirley-Quirk.
Friday, July 21-Sunday, July 23
Several organizations led by Peabody alumni will perform at America's largest free arts festival
Artscape in Baltimore, including the Baltimore Concert Opera, BSO OrchKids, Lyric Opera Baltimore, and Symphony No. 1. To see a larger list of Peabody artists participating in Artscape, or to let us know of your involvement, please visit Peabody's
Artscape page.
Monday, July 17- Thursday, July 20
The Peabody Preparatory will present its first Piano Week, an intensive week-long festival for piano students from junior high through college age. Program faculty members Chad R. Bowles, chair of the Peabody Preparatory Piano Department; Conservatory faculty artists Alexander Shtarkman and Marian Hahn; and Timothy Hoft (MM '06, Music Theory, Piano; DMA '11, Piano) will present recitals throughout the week.
Peabody Events highlights select off-campus or live-streamed performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody Institute Concerts Facebook page. For the complete weekly list of concerts at Peabody, subscribe to Events at Peabody at peabody.jhu.edu/news.
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ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENTS
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Director of Peabody's Graduate Conducting Program Marin Alsop has won a Johns Hopkins University Discovery Award with Arts & Sciences professor Bernadette Wegenstein, director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies. The interdisciplinary faculty team will film the first documentary about women conductors titled We Conduct.
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Composition faculty member Oscar Bettison won a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award to write a violin concerto for faculty artist Courtney Orlando and her group Alarm Will Sound! The award will cover Bettison's commission and the group's residency at Peabody, where they will premiere the work and also perform a concert of new student composer works with Peabody's contemporary student ensemble Now Hear This.
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Sam Hong (
GPD '15, MM '17, Piano) received second prize in the International Beethoven Competition Vienna 2017 in Vienna, Austria. The competition took place at the Vienna Musikverein where Hong had the privilege of performing in the Goldener Saal and Brahms-Saal.
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Faculty member Wendel Patrick won a $25,000 NEA award to support the WYPR Radio program "
Out of the Blocks." Dedicated to documenting the stories of Baltimore residents through audio interviews and photography of one neighborhood block at a time, the project will expand this documentary model to as many as six cities across the United States.
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Melissa Wertheimer (
MM '10, Piccolo) has been appointed the archivist of the Music Library Association, the U.S. branch of the International Association of Music Libraries. The MLA Archives are housed at Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland, College Park. Wertheimer's five-year service appointment will include scholarly writing, collection advocacy, and digitization projects of the collection which contains invaluable documents related to 20th-century music.
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RECENT RECORDINGS
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Soprano Elaine Lachica (BM '97, Voice) is a featured soloist in a new CD by Montreal Baroque, led by Eric Milnes and released on ATMA Classique. The program was presented at the Tage Alter Musik Regensburg, Germany, and at the Montreal Baroque Festival and broadcast throughout Europe via the European Broadcasting Union and in Canada on CBC Radio 2.
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Beauty Slap - a group with Hakeem Bilal (BM '10, Bass Trombone), Gabriel Colby (BM '10, GPD '12, Trombone), and Scott Nadelson (BM '11, Trumpet) - released a new project called Thunderfunk Machine. Beauty Slap, who appeared on CBS's Pittsburgh Today Live, is the sister group to the classical-based C Street Brass (formed at Peabody) and mixes modern dance electronic music with funk.
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Sergio Cervetti (BM '67, Composition) released a new CD featuring his Concerto for Trumpet, Strings and Timpani from 1973, a new piano quintet Toward the Abyss, and The Hay Wain, an electronic tone poem from 1987.
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