The Baltimore Classical Guitar Society presents Gabriel Bianco, who has earned first prize in multiple international competitions in Austria (Vienna), Germany (Koblenz), France (Ile de Ré and Barbezieux), Poland (Tychy) and Portugal (Sernancelhe). His most recent win at the 2008 Guitar Foundation of America Competition has earned him the coveted 50-concert tour in the United States, Mexico, and Canada with additional concerts in China, Colombia, and Brazil. Bianco has already performed in over 30 music festivals across the world, in France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Portugal, Slovakia, and Thaïland. 

The Department of Music presents Maryland Winds, a professional concert band based in Howard County that exists to bring world-class wind band music to the residents of Maryland. Their program, entitled Dances Around the World, will be guest conducted by Michael Votta, Jr., and will feature a cornucopia of dance music by Julie Giroux, Jodi Blackshaw, Philip Sparke, Jim Colonna, Kevin Day, Michael Gandolfi, a work by Vincent Youmans arranged by Dmitri Shostakovich, and a work by Basemeny Jaxx arranged by Brian Sadler.

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 By the time of her death, Dlugoszewski’s music was largely unpublished and unrecorded, and her invented instruments in disrepair.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 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 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.