SmithArtsFest2012
SmithArtsFest2012
Event on 2012-03-01 00:00:00
Ticket Information: www.smith.edu/smitharts Tel. 413.585.ARTS (2787) Email: boxoffice@smith.edu or visit facebook.com/smithcollegeperforming arts
What: SmithArtsFest2012 When: March 1-11, 2012 Where: Smith College, Northampton, MA.
Tickets: Most events are Free and open to the public. See individual event listings.
“The second annual SmithArtsFest 2012 features fifteen exciting and diverse performances over eleven days, March 1-11, 2012 at Smith College, Northampton.”
Northampton, MA. This year's SmithArtsFest is a festival of festivals in which remarkable connections abound. The collaboration between the Smith College Museum of Art's Debussy's Paris: Art, Music and Sounds of the City and the Music Department's two-day exploration, The Music of Debussy is a festival in itself. Explorations of Irish culture are present in both the music of Donna Hébert's Mist Covered Mountains and in playwright Deirdre Kinahan's Moment. Gregory W. Brown's electro-acoustic music features several works that are based on poetry and language, including texts by Yeats and Beckett. The poetry and life of William Matthews were both deeply linked to music. In our composer-curator concert, Melinda Wagner presents her own music along with the Ravel Piano Trio, another connection to Paris. We connect the past to the present and the future — from Debussy's Paris to Ravel to Ms. Wagner and on to our presentation of Kivie Cahn-Lipman's cello recital of young composer's works.
• Joel Pitchon, Festival Coordinator
Associate Professor of Violin and Chamber Music, Smith College Music Dept.
• Gregory Brown, Assistant Coordinator, Online Publicity Materials
Assistant Director of Choral Activities and Lecturer, Smith College Music Dept.
• Heather Kuhn, Festival Administrator, Printed Publicity Materials
Events Coordinator, Smith College Music Dept.
For more info on SmithArtsFest 2012: http://www.smith.edu/music/artsfest/
Listing of events:
March 1- 3, 8:00 pm
Moment by Deirdre Kinahan
Hallie Flanagan Studio Theater, Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts
Directed by Ellen W. Kaplan. Smith College presents a workshop production of Deirdre Kinahan’s Moment.
Nial murdered his little sister’s friend. He went to prison, went through rehab, and now he’s back. When he drops by his Ma’s house no one can cope with his arrival. The family lives in a fog of denial but they can’t escape the explosive “trauma in a teacup” that tears them apart. The play is lightning fast and frighteningly funny; it’s clear-eyed and compassionate, and – like Nial – the play pulls no punches. Moment, written by astonishing Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan, was a major hit in London last year. Tickets: adult, students and seniors, Smith students – with Smith ID at box office only. Thursday, March 1 is dollar night for Smith students.
March 3, 4:00 pm
Mist Covered Mountains: A concert of traditional Celtic and French Canadian music with Donna Hebert, fiddler extraordinaire, and friends
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
SmithArtsFest 2012 event. Mist Covered Mountains draws from Celtic and French-Canadian vocal and instrumental folk traditions. Donna Hébert’s fierce fiddle rhythms and Max Cohen’s impeccable groove guitar link to create an orchestra of sound from a simple fiddle-guitar duet. Their amazing musical chemistry catches fire when Donna’s daughter, singer Molly Hebert-Wilson joins them. Jay Ungar said they were ”Really a treat – fabulous musicians with a wonderful way of playing together.” Free and open to the public.
March 4, 4:00 pm
Smith Chamber Music Society Presents: A Solo Cello Recital by Kivie Cahn-Lipman of works by composers under 40
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Smith College faculty and the founding cellist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), has been actively commissioning new works for cello for more than a decade. This concert will feature eight pieces for cello and electronics, all written in the last few years by young composers at the start of important careers. Composers Du Yun, Vincent Calianno, Ashley Fure, Mario Diaz de Leon, Phyllis Chen, Greg Brown, Eric Wubbels, and Edgar Guzmàn will all be present to discuss their works and their compositional processes with the audience in a post-concert talk. Free and open to the public.
March 4, 7:00 pm
A Celebration of William Matthews’ Poems on Music
Neilson Library Browsing Room
Poetry Center faculty Ellen Doré Watson & Kevin Quashie read selections by William Matthews (1942-1997), who wrote most notably about jazz greats, but also about opera, reggae, the blues, and learning to play the clarinet.
William Matthews lived intensely, exuberantly, fearlessly. Of all his passions, music was foremost. His oeuvre features dozens of poems about music: jazz, blues, opera, and reggae. Even as a twelve-year-old, not-very-strong clarinet student, he “knew the way music can fill a room, / even with loneliness, which is of course a kind / of company.” Obsessed with music, particularly jazz, by age 17 he was a regular at the Showplace during the six months that Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop was in residence. Free and open to the public.
March 5, 12:30 pm
Music in the Noon Hour: Debussy
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Music in Debussy’s Paris and SmithArtsFest 2012 event. Violin and Piano Sonata and Syrinx for solo flute with Ellen Redman, flute Joel Pitchon, violin and Judith Gordon, piano. Free and open to the public.
March 8, 5:00 pm
Engel Lecture: “Berlioz, Delacroix, and La Mort d’Ophélie”
Seelye Hall, Room 201
Peter Bloom, Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities offers a look at the intersection of the two celebrated nineteenth-century French artists and at their reactions to the death of Ophelia.” Free and open to the public.
March 8, 8:00 pm
New Play Reading Series: When The Soul Speaks by Darren Harned
Earle Recital Hall, lower level of Sage Hall
Maggie and Katherine Fox can speak to the dead, and their older sister Leah wants the entire country to know about it. Set in the tumultuous 1850’s, this is an entirely true take of science, Spiritualism, and the creation of the world’s first international celebrities. Free and open to the public.
March 8, 9:00 pm
Festival of Sound and Space Continues: Greg Brown
Helen Hills Chapel
An interaction of poetry and electronics. The program will include a work for electromagnetically prepared piano (The Lily in a Crystal); a work for dancer with video-actuated electronic sounds featuring Smith dance faculty member Chris Aiken (The Jeweled Prize); a video of a Samuel Beckett play (not i) that has been aurally and visually manipulated by Greg Brown (The Buzzing); a new work for Kivie Cahn-Lipman (Arabesque) utilizing cello and laptop; a cymatic work after a Yeats poem; and a new work exploring emergent behaviors within communities of automata. Free and open to the public.
March 9, 8:00 pm
The Smith Chamber Music Society: Melinda Wagner – A Composer’s Perspective
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Melinda Wagner, the Pulitzer Prize winning composer, presents a concert of her works and works that are important to her. The concert will be preceded and followed by comments and discussion with the composer.
Free and open to the public.
Events related to Music in Debussy’s Paris:
Debussy's Paris
Art, Music and Sounds of the City
February 2–June 10
Smith College Museum of Art
In honor of the 150th anniversary of composer and musician Claude Debussy's birth, the exhibition— drawing largely from the Museum's permanent collection—explores the relationship between his music and the artistic developments that revolutionized the world of painting in his time, particularly the French Impressionist movement.
Music in Debussy's Paris
The year 2012 marks the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy (1862–1918). To honor the celebrated and influential French composer, the Smith College Music Department, in collaboration with the Smith College Museum of Art, will present a series of events during the spring semester. The principal musical events will take place during the weekend of March 10–11, 2012, with a song recital, a lecture and a lecture demonstration, a concert of chamber music, and a vocal master class.
Three Noon Hour Concerts and the Smith College Orchestra will also focus on the music of Debussy. From February 3rd through June 10th the Museum of Art will present "Debussy's Paris: Art, Music, and Sounds of the City," a major exhibition, with gallery talks and musical listening stations.
March 10, 10:00 am
Lecture by Denis Herlin: “Distinguishing Debussy: Debussy as Man and Artist”
Earle Recital Hall, Sage Hall
Introductory remarks by Professor Peter Bloom, Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. Denis Herlin, former President of the French Musicological Society, is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Editor-in-Chief of the Complete Musical Works of Claude Debussy (published in Paris by Durand), and co-editor of Debussy’s Complete Correspondence (published in Paris by Gallimard).
Free and open to the public.
March 10, 11:30 am
Gallery Talk: “Discovering Debussy and His World”
Smith College Museum of Art
An introduction to the exhibit "Debussy’s Paris–Art Music and Sounds of the City" by Laura Kalba, Assistant Professor of Art, Smith College. Free and open to the public.
March 10, 4:00 pm
Lecture – Performance by Roy Howat: “Debussy at the Piano”
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Roy Howat, Scottish concert pianist and scholar, is a founding editor of the new edition of Complete Musical Works of Claude Debussy and editor of the several volumes devoted to the music for piano. Mr. Howat is the author of Debussy in Proportion (1983) and The Art of French Piano Music (2009), the latter named 2009 “book of the year” by International Piano. Free and open to the public.
March 10, 8:00 pm
Recital: “Debussy: His Friends, His Foes, His Aphorisms”
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Mezzo Soprano Kate Lindsay of the Metropolitan Opera; Craig Terry, piano. The program will include works of Debussy, Paul Vidal, Paul Dukas, Gustave Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, and Erik Satie. Free and open to the public.
March 11, 10:30 am
Masterclass: “Declaiming Debussy” with Kate Lindsey, Mezzo Soprano, of the Metropolitan Opera
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Kate Lindsey coaches Smith College voice students in French repertoire. Introductory remarks by Jane Bryden, Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music. Free and open to the public.
March 11, 4:00 pm
The Smith Chamber Music Society: Chamber Music of Debussy
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall
Smith College Faculty and guest artists present an all-Debussy program: Debussy: Préludes for piano; Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1915); En blanc et noir for two pianos (1915); String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 (1893), among other works. Free and open to the public.
at Smith College
Elm St
Northampton, United States
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