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 Department of Music presents the INTERFERENCE: new music collective (William Brent, computer, visiting artist and dancer Miřenka Čechová, and Nancy Jo Snider, cello). Their concert will feature a group of three new works in a lecture demonstration format that will describe the artistic processes involved in the technological interplay that exists between the performers in each of the selected works. The discussion will invite questions and input from the audience.
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 Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) presents artist Melissa Hyatt Foss, an instrument-maker, musician, composer-performer, researcher, and teaching artist who develops artistic and educational projects that explore pre-Colonial sound artifacts of the Americas and their applications in contemporary art and music. Foss is the Maryland Traditions Artist-in-Residence at UMBC where she shared her tradition and practice with Linehan Artist Scholars students and is guiding them to develop teaching materials that will enable public school teachers to introduce the practice, history, and cultural significance of clay instrument making to their students.
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.
Inscape, praised by The New York Times, as "brilliant," performs a program featuring works by Steven Stucky's Ad Parnassum, Joan Tower's Into the Night, and other works. Originally commissioned by the group Eighth Blackbird, Tower says Into the Night commemorates the treasured final months she and her late husband had together.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Wind Ensemble under the direction of Brian Kaufman.
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 compositions 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 Chavez, 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.
In a discussion presented by the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), composer and sound artist Sam Pluta, visual artist Brea Souders, and video artist and writer Eryk Salvaggio each use and interact with AI in their artistic practice. They will introduce us to their work, reflecting on their experiences, doubts, and breakthroughs creating works using these technologies. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by UMBC assistant professor of art Eric Millikin.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Chamber Players under the direction of Airi Yoshioka.
The Department of Music presents the UMBC Gamelan Ensemble under the direction of Michelle Purdy. The ensemble performs on a central Javanese gamelan (a gong-chime orchestra of Indonesia), and also on a Balinese gamelan angklung (one of many types of gong-chime orchestras from the island of Bali, Indonesia).
