Here are some select recent clippings showing the variety of hits/mentions identifying musicians and scholars as Eastman School of Music alumni, faculty or students. (Note: Some links may have expired.)
(Nelson [New Zealand] Mail 01/29/2015)
They are flying in from New York and Auckland – and that’s just the cellos. These large and valuable instruments need their own seats, which is just one of the logistics faced in organising the Adam Chamber Music Festival. New Zealand’s only truly international festival starts tonight with a sold out Gala Dinner at Woollaston Estates.
For example, there is a rare opportunity to hear Pergolesi’s beautiful Stabat Mater with performers from both the New Zealand String Quartet and the Ying Quartet from New York, as well as the Song Company from Australia. Members of the two quartets also perform together in various permutations in the Beethoven and Bruckner quintets and in the Schoenberg and Brahms sextets.
The Ying Quartet is now the resident quartet with the Eastman School of Music in New York, and has performed in many of the world’s most important concert halls, from Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House. But they first came to professional prominence in the early 1990s during their years as resident quartet of Jesup, Iowa, a farm town of 2000 people. Playing before audiences of six to 600 in homes, schools, churches, and banks, the quartet considers its time in Jesup the foundation of its present musical life and goals
Sergio Monteiro from Armstrong Auditorium on Performance Oklahoma
(Public Radio Tulsa 01/26/2015)
Born in Niteroi, Brazil, Sergio Monteiro won first prize in the second Martha Argerich International Piano Competition and was selected to take part in the International Piano Academy in Como, Italy. He received degrees from the National Music School of Rio de Janeiro and has performed in Moscow and across Europe and South America. Awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Culture to study at the Eastman School of Music, he earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts, studying with Nelita True.
Actors’ Playhouse goes big with a relevant ‘Ragtime’
(Miami Herald 01/26/2015)
Don Juan Seward II, who toured nationally in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, is the musician Coalhouse Walker Jr., and opera-trained Sarah Nicole Batts plays Coalhouse’s beloved Sarah. Nick Duckart plays Willie Conklin, whose confrontations with Coalhouse lead to tragedy.
Batts, who went to high school at Miami’s New World School of the Arts before getting her vocal training at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan, is making her musical theater debut at Actors’. She describes the music in Ragtime as “breathtaking” and wants audiences to connect with it deeply.
Drumming up, sorting out the stuff of a lifetime
(Rochester Democrat & Chronicle © 01/28/2015)
History is made up of stuff. Letters, books, pictures, snare drums, stuff.
“For some reason, I never threw anything away,” says John H. Beck as he looks at his history, his stuff.
In 1951, he arrived at the Eastman School, with the ultimate goal of being a drummer in a band, a younger Gene Krupa. “Once I got to Eastman, I realized there were guys out there named Beethoven, Bach. I got hooked on classics,” he says.
In 1959, Beck came back to Eastman, this time as a teacher of percussion, something he would do for 49 years. Never resting, he also was a percussionist and timpanist for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra for 44 years.
Katie Ernst finds jazz in Dorothy Parker’s poems
(Chicago Tribune © 01/29/2015)
Anyone who has attended Chicago jazz performances during the past couple of years probably has noticed her: a versatile young bassist who plays in far-flung bands and sings with uncommon delicacy and authenticity.
Last May, she played the world premiere of MacArthur Fellowship winner Jason Moran’s evening-length opus at Symphony Center, Looks of a Lot, singing a haunting solo inspired by Schubert’s Der Doppelganger.
And now Katie Ernst, 26, is about to release the most ambitious work of her young career, Little Words, an original song cycle based on poetry of Dorothy Parker. Ernst and her band will celebrate the release of the Little Words album by playing the Chicago premiere of this ethereal, oft-haunting suite in full, Monday night at Martyrs’.
It all started with one song I had written as an instrumental in college, recalls Ernst of her years studying jazz and contemporary media at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. (Subscription required)
The Four Loves Performance at the Byron Colby Barn 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 8
(Chicago Tribune 01/27/2-15)
Celebrate the enduring and diverse aspects of love with Ensemble SDG’s “The Four Loves” performance at 4 p.m. Sun., Feb. 8 at the Byron Colby Barn in Grayslake.
John Chappell Stowe is Professor of Organ and Harpsichord at University of Wisconsin-Madison where he also co-directs the Collegium Musicum. Dr. Stowe holds degrees from Southern Methodist University and from Eastman School of Music. In his appearances throughout the United States as a solo organist, Dr. Stowe’s recital repertoire includes a wide variety of literature extending from 1550 to the present day.
Cypress Symphony features ‘A String Potpourri’ Jan. 24
(Houston Chronicle 01/22/2015)
Jerry Hou, who was recently appointed associate conductor for the Shepherd School of Music at Rice, is the evening’s guest conductor.
Born in Taiwan, he received his early musical training in Chicago and Minneapolis. Hou began his formal conducting studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in England, continuing his studies in Germany and Sweden. He’s completing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.
Eastman Opera Theatre presents 20th century works
(Democrat & Chronicle 01/25/2015)
For opera lovers more familiar with extravagant dramas with large casts and elaborate sets, Eastman Opera Theatre will provide a notable change of pace this week when it presents a distinctive double bill of 20th-century works in the Eastman School Annex A804.
The Annex, an intimate studio performance space that accommodates only about 60 audience members, will be the site of fully staged productions of Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine (The human voice) and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief. Both are one-act works featuring two alternating casts, all under the stage direction of second-year master’s student Spencer Reese and the musical direction of pianist Ksenia Leletkina, who also serves as Eastman’s opera coach. The performances will run for four nights, beginning Thursday, January 29.
Pianist to perform Chopin in Scranton
(Pocono Record 01/29/2015)
Performance Music at The University of Scranton will present “In Recital: An Evening of Chopin Mazurkas, Preludes, Nocturnes and Waltzes” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, in the university’s Houlihan-McLean Center, Mulberry Street and Jefferson Avenue, Scranton.
Pianist Donald R. Boomgaarden, Ph.D., who serves as the university’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, will perform. An historian of opera, music aesthetics and harmonic theory, Boomgaarden’s writings include a book on the philosophy and aesthetics of music, “Musical Thought in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Germany,” as well as articles and reviews in dictionaries, scholarly journals ,and popular journals and magazines.
He attended the Eastman School of Music and the University of Vienna, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.
‘National Treasure’ Ragtime pianist performs Sunday
(Lansing State Journal 01/20/2015)
Bob Milne – considered by many to be the best Ragtime and Boogie-Woogie pianist in the world –returns to the Grand Ledge Opera House Sunday at 3 p.m.
Milne specializes in a music style developed in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Milne comes from a classical background, having excelled as a French horn virtuoso at the Eastman School of Music, but he is also a self-taught pianist who plays by ear.
Brockport professors will take to stage
(Rochester Democrat & Chronicle © 01/27/2015)
Since being renamed the Department of Theatre and Music Studies in 2012, the number of faculty members teaching music on campus at the College at Brockort has increased tremendously. The concert takes place at 7:30 pm in the Tower Fine Arts Center Mainstage, 180 Holley Street, on the Brockport campus.
Eastman School of Music graduate and adjunct lecturer, Karl Stabnau will bring jazz to the proceedings with a saxophone rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom” as well as Jerome Kern’s standard “The Way You Look Tonight,” during which he will be joined by fellow adjunct lecturer and fellow saxophonist Casey MacFarlane. Robert Laird, adjunct lecturer, will be playing a contemporary work, Frederic Rzewski’s “Piano Piece IV.”