Meadows School of the Arts

2013 Meadows Prize winner Nadia Sirota joins SYZYGY for this concert benefiting New Amsterdam Presents, a Brooklyn-based arts organization whose headquarters suffered severe damage after Hurricane Sandy. Sirota will play side by side with Meadows students in Ruben Naeff¹s Fill the Present Day with Joy, a song for soprano, viola, and piano taken from Facebook posts. The program will also feature world premieres by Meadows students Nathan Courtright and Michael Nesuda alongside recent works by Caleb Burhans and New Amsterdam Co-Director Judd Greenstein.

“Journey to the Hundred Acre Wood” will be a musical celebration of all things young, including Meadows composer Simon Sargon, who is celebrating his 75th birthday! The program will present Sargon’s The Town Musicians of Bremen, featuring Meadows Associate Dean and Professor of Theatre Kevin Hofeditz narrating the Brothers Grimm story of the adventures of a small band of animals traveling to Bremen to become the town’s musicians.

The first program of SYZYGY’s spring concert season takes its name from Roshanne Etezady’s Damaged Goods, a suite of pieces for sextet based on the composer’s reflections on her less-than-successful relationships of the past. Pieces by Andy Akiho, Jennifer Higdon, David Lang and Marc Mellits complement Etezady’s music with their own takes on lyricism, rhythmic drive and emotional yearning.

The Division of Music at SMU presents Alessio Bax’s latest project: Folk Tales.
Folk Tales is a series of three mixed concerts that explore the influence of folk music on the idiom of European classical composers — some who simply used folk tunes as inspiration, while others made it their life’s mission to study, classify and create brand new music that paid respect to the folk tradition.

The Rimers of Eldritch has been described as a play that prefigured David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. This early work is by the Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson, a member of the Theater Hall of Fame, who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist.

The Meadows Wind Ensemble presents a Black History Month celebration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, featuring a performance of the iconic speech with narration by distinguished Meadows alumnus and star of opera and oratorio Donnie Ray Albert. The program also includes a gospel collaboration with the incomparable Hamilton Park Baptist Church Men’s Chorus, conducted by John Sherow-Tatum, and a performance of Olly Wilson’s A City Called Heavent.

Meadows faculty artist Matt Albert and noted performer Adam Marks present a recital that explores music both groove-based and melodic for violin and piano. Playing works by John Adams, Maurice Ravel, Michael van der Sloot, Henryk Górecki and Sergei Prokofiev, Albert and Marks tour rhythmically driven music with high-octane emotion

By Benjamin Britten. With the Meadows Symphony Orchestra.

Graduate students in the conducting program at SMU Meadows lead the MSO in a concert featuring winners of the Meadows Undergraduate Concerto Competition as soloists. The program will include Mozart’s Alleluia and Magic Flute Overture, Rossini’s “Una voce poco fa,” Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Saint-Saëns’ Morceau de Concert and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2. Student conductors are Eldred Marshall, Jonathan Moore and Parisa Zaeri. Soloists will include Daniel Hawkins, horn, and Rebecca Roose, soprano.

Award-winning veteran journalist John McCaa is a familiar face to television viewers in North Texas. He has worked at WFAA-TV in Dallas since 1984, where he anchors the 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts and writes “Behind the News,” a weekly column for the station’s website. An “army brat” who grew up in Idaho, Nebraska and Spain, McCaa began his career at WOWT-TV in Omaha. In 1984, he joined WFAA as a reporter in the Fort Worth newsroom and was later promoted to bureau chief.