Australian percussionist Rebecca Lloyd-Jones and UMBC percussion faculty Dustin Donahue present the enigmatic work of Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000). A renowned composer for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Dlugoszewski spent a lifetime searching for radical new ways of making sound, inventing hundreds of percussion instruments designed to create delicate and color textures of sound. By the time of her death, Dlugoszewski’s music was largely unpublished and unrecorded, and her invented instruments in disrepair. Lloyd-Jones and Donahue have undertaken a reconstruction process, working through her archives and in collaboration with performers of her music, to bring this historic and evocative music to life again.

The Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio, featuring pianist Audrey Andrist, violinist James Stern, and cellist Steven Honigberg, will present a program of works by Rebecca Clarke, Kent Holliday, and Robert Schumann. The trio was described as “a remarkably successful meeting of musical talent ... It’s a performance that is both elegant and emotionally searching” by Fanfare magazine in a review of their 2022 debut recording of Dvorák and Fauré.

The Department of Music presents Rachel Beetz, Julie Herndon, and Berglind María Tómasdóttir, in a program entitled Pareidolia Memories: Imagined faces in noises of sounds remembered. This collection of works and improvisations shared between the three musicians explores memory, recognition, time, places, people, and relationships between humans and non-humans. The works are intertwined with videos and sound interludes by Berglind Tómasdóttir reflecting on the theme in various ways.

The Department of Music presents the second UMBC Create Music Festival, an event that reimagines music education festivals for equity and 21st century music learning, with the collaboration of the BSO OrchKids program, Sister Cities Voices, and two Baltimore area public school large ensembles. Students will work with teaching artists, including Emmy-nominated composer and genre-bending violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, Chicago-based vocal theater ensemble Artemisia Trio, composer Alysia Lee, and UMBC music faculty and alumnus James Dorsey ’05.

The Baltimore Classical Guitar Society presents Made in Baltimore, featuring new works for classical guitar written by local composers commissioned by BCGS. For the 2024–2025 season, the awardees are Zhishu Chang, Zac Fick-Cambria, Antonio Sanz Escallón, and UMBC student Jack McGrath, who will write ensemble works inspired by Charm City.

The Department of Music presents Pianorama, a keyboard spectacular featuring pianists Audrey Andrist, Teodora Adzharova, Hui-Chuan Chen, and Hsiao-Ying Lin, who will perform works by Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky.

The Department of Music presents renowned percussionist Aiyun Huang in a solo recital utilizing video and live electronics. Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer, and has been globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition. 

The Shriver Hall Concert Series presents charismatic rising stars the Ivalas Quartet in a program of three works traversing the musical heavens. Osvaldo Golijov took inspiration for his poignant Tenebrae from a planetarium visit with his son. Sparked by a lecture on physics, Eleanor Alberga’s rich and spellbinding quartet explores the ideas of swirling particles and stargazing from outer space. Finally, the group infuses one of Beethoven’s final works with “tremendous heart and beauty” (The Strad).

The Baltimore Classical Guitar Society presents classical guitarist David Russell, who is world renowned for his superb musicianship and inspired artistry, having earned the highest praise from audiences and critics alike. Russell appears regularly at prestigious halls in main cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Madrid, Toronto, and Rome. Russell received a Grammy award for his CD “Aire Latino” in the category of best instrumental soloist in classical music.

Pianist Joel Sachs performs masterworks by Charles Ives, one of America’s greatest composers and one of the greatest modernists of the early 20th century. His rarely heard Piano Sonata No. 1 will be preceded by “The Alcotts” and “Thoreau,” the third and fourth movements of his more famous second Sonata, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” a tribute to the literary giants of that little town. Taken together, these composition offer an unforgettable view of Ives’s unique vision of music that is both universal and deeply American.

The Department of Music presents the UMBC Collegium Musicum under the direction of Lindsay Johnson. The Collegium Musicum explores and performs vocal and instrumental music from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, sampling musical repertoires created between 800 and 1750.

Cellist Juan Sebastián Delgado teams up with pianist Kristhyan Benitez in a program of original music for cello and piano from Latin America, featuring works by Astor Piazzolla, Mario Lavista, Francisco Mignone, Carlos Guastavino, and Manuel Ponce. First-prize winner at the 2008 Latin-American Cello Festival, Delgado is active in the creation and dissemination of new works that explore the cello in innovative ways. Grammy award winning pianist Kristhyan Benitez is exciting audiences worldwide with his vivid and passionate concerts, presenting both Classical and Latin American repertoire with depth, passion and charisma.