Windscape a highlight of 2012 Wind and Brass Festival

The Skidmore College Wind and Brass Festival will feature a performance by the Windscape at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 3, in the Arthur Zankel Music Center's Ladd Concert Hall. Admission is $7 for the general public, $5 for seniors, and free to the Skidmore community.  

The program includes Ligeti - Seven Bagatelles, Barber - Summer Music, Ravel (arranged by Frank Morelli), Mother Goose Suite, and Dvorak (arranged by David Jolley) - Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 51.

In addition to the Windscape performance, the March 3-4 Wind and Brass Festival includes master classes, coaching sessions, and concerts by festival student ensembles, Skidmore Festival Wind Symphony, and Skidmore music faculty. The festival is designed "to create a sense of community for wind and brass players, to encourage educational and performance interaction among students and teachers, and to reach out to young players who seek to continue their musical studies in a creative liberal arts environment," said Jan Vinci, senior artist-in-residence at Skidmore.

Created in 1994, Windscape has earned a reputation as a vibrant, ever-evolving group of musical individualists, an "unquintet" that has delighted audiences throughout North America. The group's innovative programs and accompanying presentations are created to take listeners on a musical and historical world tour?evoking through music and engaging commentary vivid cultural landscapes of distant times and places.

As artists-in-residence at the Manhattan School of Music, the members of Windscape are known for being master teachers, imparting the craft of instrumental virtuosity and presenting a distinctive concert series hailed for its creative energy and musical curiosity. The series offers the perfect setting for the ensemble to devise new, sometimes startling, programs and to experiment with new arrangements and repertoire combinations.

Band members are Tara Helen O'Connor, flute; Randall Ellis, oboe; Alan R. Kay, clarinet; Frank Morelli, bassoon; and David Jolley, horn.

For advance reservations click here or call the Zankel box office (518) 580-8381 for more information. The Zankel Music Center is wheelchair accessible and offers listening devices for the hearing impaired. For more information, please click here.

Background on musicians

O'Connoris a 2001 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient and two-time Grammy nominee who is professor of flute at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, Bard College Conservatory of Music, and Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Music Program. She teaches summer master classes at the Banff Centre in Canada.

Ellisis principal oboist of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra as well as principal oboist and faculty member of the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, N. C. He has performed with Winton Marsalis at Jazz at Lincoln Center and on Broadway in the orchestra for the musical Wicked. He is an instructor of oboe at Skidmore College.

Clarinetist Kay joined the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in 2002. He was a winner of the C.D. Jackson Award at Tanglewood, a 2002 Presidential Scholars Teachers Award, and the 1989 Young Concert Artists Award with the sextet Hexagon, featured in the film, Debut. A founding member of Windscape, Kay appears with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and with the Mendelssohn, Mir , and Shanghai string quartets.

Horn player Jolley recently gave the world premiere of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Concerto for Horn with the Rochester Philharmonic, and the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Jolley is Professor of Horn at Queens College-CUNY, Mannes College of Music, and the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Bassoonist Morelli is the first bassoonist awarded a doctorate by the Juilliard School. His more than 150 recordings include the Orpheus recording Shadow Dances, which won a 2000 Grammy award. He teaches at Juilliard, the Yale and Manhattan schools of music, and SUNY Stony Brook, and is principal bassoonist of the New York City Opera Orchestra, Orpheus, and the American Composers Orchestra.