The Friends of Music has announced the schedule for its 2016-2017 performance season.
The season will run from November 2016 through June 2017. It will include two concerts by the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra and three concerts by small ensembles.
All of the concerts will be held in Shepherdstown’s historic Trinity Episcopal Church, which offers superb acoustics.
The first concert will be an all-Mozart program by the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, November 19 at 7:30 p.m. The program will include Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, the overtures to the “Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi Fan Tutte,” and arias from these and other Mozart operas sung by Washington DC-based soprano Jennifer Casey Cabot. The Orchestra’s Music Director, Jed Gaylin, will conduct.
Admission to all of the concerts will be free for Friends of Music members. The fee for annual memberships is $145 per person. Nonmembers will be able purchase Tickets for individual concerts; the price will be $25 per person for Orchestra concerts and $20 per person for small-ensemble concerts.
Friends’ memberships and tickets can be purchased on the Friends’ website at www.friendswv.org or by mail (FOM, PO Box 220, Shepherdstown, WV 25443) or, if space is available, at the church the evening of the performance. Visa and Master Card will be accepted.
The other concerts in the Friends of Music’s 2016-2017 performance season will be as follows:
• Saturday, January 14, 2017, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers String Quartet. A Martin Luther King Weekend concert with an all-American program that includes Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B-minor, Op. 11, and works by Duke Ellington, Quincy Porter, and Scott Joplin.
• Saturday, March 25, 2017, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra. The program, entitled “Songs and Dances of Love,” will feature Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Walzer,” arranged for strings; Elgar’s “Serenade;” and the Marimba Concerto No. 1 by Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro. The featured artist will be percussionist Michelle Humphreys.
• Saturday, April 29, 2017, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers Piano and Woodwind Ensemble. Works to be performed will include Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E, Op. 16.
• Sunday, June 25, 2017, 3:00 p.m. Two Rivers Brass Quintet. This special summertime concert will feature a collection of bright and lively works appropriate to the season.
In addition to on-street parking in the vicinity of the church for all the Friends concerts, free parking will be available at the Bavarian Inn’s upper parking lot for the Friends’ Orchestra concerts, with free shuttle bus service to and from those concerts. Shuttle buses will not be available for the small-ensemble concerts.
The Friends of Music is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1999 to support and promote musical excellence. It was originally associated with Shepherd University but now operates on its own. It is governed by a board of directors made up of local-area citizens.
The Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra is the only professional chamber orchestra in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia and one of only three in the state. It was established by the Friends of Music in 2007 and has been sustained by the Friends since its inception. Dr. Jed Gaylin was named Music Director in 2012. He also serves as the Music Director of Baltimore’s Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey, and Artist in Residence at New Jersey’s Stockton University.
