TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR MAY 18 ORCHESTRA CONCERT IN SHEPHERDSTOWN

TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR MAY 18 ORCHESTRA CONCERT IN SHEPHERDSTOWN

The Friends of Music will present a Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra concert in Shepherdstown on Saturday, May 18.
The concert will be held at Trinity Episcopal Church at 7:30 p.m.
Entitled “Nonsense and Sensibility,” it will feature two works: Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat major, and “Façade: An Entertainment,” by the 20th Century English composer William Walton.
The Orchestra’s music director, Jed Gaylin, will conduct.
The Beethoven Septet was one of the composer’s most popular works during his lifetime, and it remains of great interest today.
Walton’s Façade offers audiences a very different kind of concert experience. First performed publicly in 1923, it was considered by many at the time to be outrageous. In this work, Walton combined recitations of Dame Edith Sitwell’s poetry, which is sometimes called absurdist and sometimes surrealistic, with modernist, jazz-inspired music. The net effect reflects the exuberant, mischievous spirit of the 1920s.
For this performance, the poetry readers will be Monica Reinagel and Gran Wilson.
Reinagel, who lives in Baltimore, is a classically trained singer who also happens to be a nationally known nutritionist.
Wilson is an operatic tenor who has sung, and continues to sing, with companies throughout the US and Europe, and who also teaches at the University of Maryland’s School of Music.
Admission to the concert will be free for Friends of Music members. The ticket price for others will be $30 per person ($27.50 before May 5). 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 a non-profit organization that was founded in 1999 to support and promote musical excellence. The Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra was established by the Friends in 2007 and held its first concert in the fall of 2008. Gaylin has been music director since 2012. He also serves as the music director of Baltimore’s Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Atlantic Symphony in New Jersey, and is an Artist in Residence at New Jersey’s Stockton University.
This year’s Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra Concerts are being 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.