This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Considered by some to be the world’s greatest bassist, Edgar Meyer will join with pianist Amy Dorfman in a performance at the Lafayette College’s Williams Center for the Arts 8 p.m. Saturday, February 12.
Tickets cost $15 and may be purchased by calling 610-330-5509.
The concert is presented as a special community partnership between Lafayette’s Performance Series and the Lehigh Valley NPR affiliate, WDIY-FM. WDIY’s development director, Sharon Ettinger, and several station programmers will be present to greet audience members and chat about the programming growth of this station, whose eclectic blend of classical music, folk, and “morning mix” alternative perfectly reflects the musical interests of Meyer himself. WDIY members, as always, are entitled to a $2 discount on all of Lafayette’s “Sound Alternatives” and “Jazz Masters” concerts.
Meyer exploded musical categories of classics and folk in previous Williams Center performances with the Emerson String Quartet in 1996 and Bela Fleck in 1997. This year, his program will open with “Sonata in
A Minor” by English Renaissance composer John Eccles, followed by J.S. Bach’s “Cello Suite #1” (arranged by Meyer for Double Bass), Ernest Bloch’s “Suite Hebraique,” and Bela Bartok’s lively and boisterous “Rumanian Dances.” After intermission, the audience will hear original music by Meyer himself.
The first bassist to receive the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1994, Meyer can be heard on more than 100 recordings, ranging from James Taylor, the Chieftains, Lyle Lovett, and the Indigo Girls to Pamela Frank and Emanuel Ax. A recording with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor, Appalachia Waltz, topped the Billboard classical music chart for 16 weeks in 1997, and his best-selling collaboration with Fleck and Mike Marshall, Uncommon Ritual, broke similar ground in sales and acclaim. His most recent release, Short Journey Home, explored similar collaborations with violinist Joshua Bell.
Meyer’s taste for the eclectic was developed in a childhood where the turntable at home alternated Beethoven symphonies with John Coltrane and Miles Davis. At the age of four, his family moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Oakridge, Tennessee, near the heart of country music. His father is a bass player who started Meyer on the instrument at age five. In 1981, Meyer won first place in 1981 Zimmerman-Mingus Bass Competition. Following two years of studying math at Georgia Tech, Meyer transferred to Indiana University in 1984, where he studied with every member of the school’s string faculty. Meyer became a regular at the Aspen and Sante Fe festivals in the mid-1980s. In 1985, the album Unfolding marked the beginning of a popular solo career.
The 1999-2000 Performance Series at Lafayette College is sponsored, in part, by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Foundation for the Arts.