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Orpheus clarinetist Alan Kay will appear as a guest artist
Nationally acclaimed piano trio Trio Solisti will perform at the Williams Center for the Arts at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 12.
Ticket are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $18 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
Remaining performances for this year’s Chamber Music Series are Orpheus with Dame Felicity Lott on March 12 and the Emerson String Quartet on April 9.
Trio Solisti is comprised of Maria Bachman on violin, Alexis Pia Gerlach on cello, and Jon Klibonoff on piano. For the March 12 performance, they will be joined by Orpheus clarinetist Alan Kay as a guest artist.
The program will include Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio, Opus 11, Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio. The Moravec work, scored for violin, cello, piano, and clarinet, was commissioned by Trio Solisti and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for the best music composition of the year.
In an interview with National Public Radio following the announcement of his Pulitzer prize award, Moravec said, “Tempest Fantasy is a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest. Rather than trying to depict these elements in programmatic terms, the music simply uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy. The first three movements spring from the nature and selected speeches of the three eponymous individuals. The fourth movement begins from Caliban’s uncharacteristically elegant speech from Act III, scene 2: ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.’ The fifth movement is the most ‘fantastic’ flight of all, elaborating on the numerous musical strands of the previous movements and drawing them all together into a convivial finale.”
Trio Solisti has been called “consistently brilliant � compelling,” by the New York Times. The group has performed at numerous venues throughout the world.
In fall 2007, Trio Solisti released its third CD, Pictures at an Exhibition. A documentary video, “Trio Solisti Explores Beethoven” was released by Videos for Arts and Humanities (www.films.com) in 2003. Directed by Academy Award nominee Josh Aronson, the documentary traces Trio Solisti’s interpretive decision making in rehearsals and performances of Beethoven’s “Ghost” and “Archduke” trios.
Trio Solisti has appeared on the nationally broadcast radio show “St. Paul Sunday” and has been featured on NPR’s “Performance Today” in numerous live performances from around the U.S. They have been presented in a multi-concert series by New York’s famed Morgan Library and by the St. Louis Museum of Art. 2007-08 marks Trio Solisti’s sixth year in residence at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York.
The 2007-2008 Performance Series at Lafayette College is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.