Hamilton College Performing Arts announces an exciting season of music, theater and dance for the 2017-18 season in Wellin Hall, Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts. All performances are at 7:30 p.m., unless otherwise noted.
The season opens with Jenny Scheinman’s Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait on Friday, Sept. 22.
Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait is a music and film project conceived by the award-winning composer, singer, and violinist Jenny Scheinman. It consists of a live score and sound design with re-edited footage from the films of H. Lee Waters (1902-1997), who documented over 118 towns in the southeast during the latter half of the Great Depression. Scheinman’s musical collaborators are guitarist, banjo player, and NC native Robbie Fulk and multi-instrumentalist Robbie Gjersoe.
The Baroque string ensemble ACRONYM performs Valley of Tears: Bass Cantatas and Instrumental Sonatas of Johann Rosenmüller on Friday, Sept. 29. ACRONYM is dedicated to giving modern premieres of the wild instrumental music of the seventeenth century. This program alternates large ensemble chamber sonatas published in Venice in 1670 with unpublished bass cantatas featuring Jesse Blumberg, baritone, which ACRONYM has transcribed from manuscripts recently rediscovered in Berlin.
Tim Miller
Internationally acclaimed solo performer Tim Miller returns to Hamilton College with Rooted on Saturday, Oct. 7. Rooted is about Central New York’s history, Miller’s family trees that grow there, and what happens when we achieve one kind of social change after long effort only to face huge new challenges in 2017. Miller’s new show is a funny and charged story of the times in which we live.
Philadelphia’s premier contemporary ballet company, BalletX, continues the fall series on Saturday, Oct. 28. BalletX, unites distinguished choreographers with an outstanding company of world-class dancers to forge new works of athleticism, emotion, and grace.
DIVA Big Band Orchestra performs on Friday, Nov. 3. Headed by swinging drummer Sherrie Maricle, DIVA is a 15-member all-female jazz orchestra that exudes the excitement and force found in the tradition of the historic big bands, but with an eye toward today’s progressive sound of originality and verve.
The spring semester begins with jazz vocalist Alicia Olatuja on Friday, Feb. 9. Praised by the New York Times as “a singer with a strong and luscious tone and an amiably regal presence on stage,” Alicia Olatuja has been astounding audiences with her exquisite vocals, artistic versatility, and captivating demeanor. She first came into the national spotlight in 2013, while performing as the featured soloist with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. Olatuja will sing a mix of jazz and R&B accompanied by her band.
Chicago-based Manual Cinema presents Ada/Ava on Saturday, Feb. 17. Manual Cinema uses classic overhead projectors, humans and silhouettes to create a one-of-a-kind theatre experience that feels like being at an animated movie, but you are seeing everything being constructed frame-by-frame. Set in a landscape of the New England gothic, Ada/Ava uses a story of the fantastic and supernatural to explore mourning and melancholy, self and other.
February continues with the classical music trio of David Finckel, Wu Han and Philip Setzer on Friday, Feb. 23, at 7:30 p.m. Called the “power couple of chamber music,” by the Wall Street Journal, David Finckel (cello) and Wu Han (piano) rank among the most dynamic of today’s classical artists. They are joined by Emerson String Quartet founder, Philip Setzer (violin), for an extraordinary evening of Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat major, op.97 (“Archduke”), and Schubert’s Trio in E-flat major, op.100.
Symphoria returns to Hamilton College on Tuesday, March 6, with a program that includes Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, op. 2, with Natasha Paremski, piano, and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
The series ends with Chicago-based Spektral Quartet on Saturday, April 21. Spektral Quartet actively pursues a vivid conversation between exhilarating works of the traditional string quartet repertoire and music just written. The program includes George Lewis’s String Quartet No.1.5, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet, and Johannes Brahms’s Quartet No.1 in C minor, op.51.
All concerts will take place in Wellin Hall, Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m. Seating in general admission. Individual ticket prices are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens and Hamilton employees, and $5 for students. Discounted series rates are available. For more information, call the box office at 859-4331 or visit www.hamilton.edu/performingarts.
