FRIENDS OF MUSIC ANNOUNCE NEW CONCERT SEASON

The Friends of Music have announced the schedule for their 2018-2019 performance season.
The season will run from October 2018 through May 2019. It will include a total of five concerts: three by the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra, one by a small ensemble, and an organ recital.
All of the concerts will be held in Shepherdstown’s historic Trinity Episcopal Church, which offers superb acoustics.
The first concert will be a small ensemble concert on Saturday, October 6 at 7:30 p.m. It will feature the Two Rivers String Quartet. The program will include Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 1 in F major and Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2.

The other concerts will be as follows:

• Saturday, November 17, 2018, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra. The program, entitled “Nostalgia and Longing,” will include works by Elgar, Mozart, Joaquin Rodrigo, and Bizet. Mark McCoy, the former head of Shepherd University’s Music Department and founder of the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra, will guest conduct the Mozart work in this concert. Dr. McCoy is now the President of DePauw University in Indiana. Guitarist Max Zuckerman will be the featured artist for the Rodrigo work.

• Saturday, January 19, 2019 (snow date January 26), 7:30 p.m. Organ recital featuring organist Julie Vidrick Evans. She will perform a variety of works from the 17th through the 19th centuries, including works by Lubeck, Handel, Bach and Brahms

• Saturday, March 30, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra. The program, entitled “String Fling,” will feature the premiere of a new work by contemporary composer J. Kimo Williams, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 I n E-flat Major, and Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia No. 8 in D. Pianist Scott Beard will be the featured artist for the Mozart Concerto.

• Saturday, May 18, 2019, 7:30 p.m. Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra. The program, entitled “Nonsense and Sensibility,” will feature performances of Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major and William Walton’s “Façade,” which includes recitations of poetry by 20th Century English Poet Edith Sitwell.

Admission to all of the concerts will be free for Friends of Music members. The fee for annual memberships is $150 per person. Nonmembers will be able to purchase tickets for individual concerts; the price will be $30 per person for Orchestra concerts and $25 per person for the small-ensemble concert and organ recital.
Friends’ memberships and tickets can be purchased on the Friends’ website at www.friendswv.org or by mail (FOM, PO Box 220, Shepherdstown, WV 25443) or, if space is available, at the church the evening of the performance. Visa and Master Card will be accepted.
The Friends of Music is an independent, local non-profit organization that was founded in 1999 to support and promote musical excellence. It is governed by a board of directors made up of local-area citizens.
The Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra is the only professional chamber orchestra in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia and one of only three in the state. It was established by the Friends of Music in 2007 and has been sustained by the Friends since its inception. Jed Gaylin was named Music Director in 2012. He also serves as the Music Director of Baltimore’s Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey, and Artist in Residence at New Jersey’s Stockton University.
This year’s Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra concerts are supported by a grant from the WV Division of Culture and History and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the WV Commission on the Arts.