Arditti String Quartet, Opera and New Music Highlight Music Department's March Concert Schedule

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The prize-winning Arditti String Quartet, known internationally as celebrated interpreters of contemporary and 20th-century music, will perform at the University at Buffalo on March 20 as part of the March concert program presented by the Department of Music.

The concert schedule also will feature faculty recitals by pianists Stephen and Frieda Manes, and the Bugallo/Golove/Nelson Trio, whose members are strong proponents of new music, as well as a production by the UB Opera Workshop of Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas."

The performance by the Arditti String Quartet, the fourth concert in the Slee/Visiting Artist Series, will be held at 8 p.m. March 20 in Slee Concert Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

Tickets will be $12 for the general public, $9 for UB faculty, staff, alumni and senior citizens, and $5 for students.

Founded in 1974 by first violinist Irvine Arditti, the quartet members believe that close collaboration with composers is essential to the interpretation of modern music, and they attempt to work with every composer whose music they play. The quartet's repertoire features a wide range of work -- including world premieres -- from such composers as Cage, Glass, Nancarrow and Stockhausen. The UB concert will include the piece "Third Face," composed in 1987 by UB faculty member David Felder for the quartet and the North American New Music Festival.

The concert schedule for the month will begin with a performance at 8 p.m. March 9 in Slee Concert Hall by Stephen Manes, professor and chair of the Department of Music, and his wife and longtime collaborator, Frieda, of a program featuring piano music for four hands -- one piano, as well as two pianos.

The Maneses have been performing piano, four-hand music together for almost 40 years, in addition to their separate performance and teaching careers. Their repertoire encompasses the entire spectrum of the four-hand literature from the sonatas of Mozart to works of George Crumb, as well as music for two pianos, which will be the highlight of the March concert.

Tickets for the concert are $5.

A second faculty recital, featuring the Bugallo/Golove/Nelson Trio, will be held at 8 p.m. March 11 in Slee Concert Hall.

Each member of the trio is a strong proponent of new music. Pianist Helena Bugallo, a former UB student and faculty member, performs frequently in Europe and the Americas, and in recent years has premiered more than 50 works at internationally renowned music festivals. Trumpeter Jon Nelson, UB assistant professor of music and director of the Genkin Philharmonic and UB Concert Band, is a founding member of the Meridian Arts Ensemble, for which he was instrumental in commissioning more than 30 new works, often venturing into jazz, rock and experimental idioms. Cellist Jonathan Golove, UB visiting assistant professor of music, maintains an active career as a performer, composer and teacher. In addition to founding and co-directing chamber ensembles dedicated to the performance of new music, he is active in the field of improvised music, and made his debut as an electric cellist last year.

Tickets for the recital are $5.

The UB Opera Workshop will put on the rarely performed opera "Dido and Aeneas" at 8 p.m. March 8 and 2:30 p.m. March 9 in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.

The fully staged production, featuring a cast of student performers and a professional chamber orchestra, will be directed by Dora Ohrenstein, UB visiting assistant professor of music, and conducted by Roland E. Martin, a lecturer in the Department of Music.

The first opera in English, "Dido and Aeneas" is the tale of disappointed love between Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, hero of the Trojan wars. In the Opera Workshop's production, the story is updated to contemporary times: Dido is a movie queen and the chorus is a group of paparazzi who relentlessly invade her privacy.

Ohrenstein will use this approach to underscore one of the work's major themes -- the conflict between public and private duty. This theme is present in the work's original setting in ancient Greece, and is presented in this production through an equivalent modern-day situation.

The concept will be supported with a live video camera on stage, which will shoot selected scenes that then will be projected from video monitors placed around the theater.

Tickets are $5.

The March concert schedule also will feature a performance by the UB Symphony Orchestra and the UB Concert Band at 8 p.m. March 13 in Slee Concert Hall.

The orchestra, conducted by Magnus Märtensson, assistant professor of music, will perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in its entirety before turning the stage over to the concert band, conducted by Jon Nelson.

The concert will be free of charge and open to the public.

Finally, two opera pedagogues each will offer a master class focused on the Bel Canto period of the Italian repertoire. The classes, which will be free of charge and open to the public, will be of interest to vocal students, as well as opera enthusiasts.

Joan Patenaude-Yarnell, who began her teaching career almost 15 years ago after a successful operatic and concert career with the New York City Opera and the San Francisco Opera, will present her master class, entitled "Traditions of Bel Canto," from 2-5 p.m. March 13 on the Slee stage.

The New York City-based Yarnell in 1993 established Centro Studi Italian, a summer course for young American singers in Urbania, Italy, that brings in coaches from the famed Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, Italy, as well as a distinguished American voice and coaching faculty, to prepare the Italian operatic and song literature.

Ubaldo Fabbri, a member of the coaching staff at the Rossini Opera Festival, will teach from noon to 2 p.m. March 14 on the Slee Concert Hall stage. In addition to his post at the Rossini festival, Fabbri heads the coaching faculty at the Accademia Rossiniana and the Centro Studi Italiani.

During his class, he will present a short talk on the history of Bel Canto, focusing on its development and influence on the operatic literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries. He will work through the pronunciation of the Italian language in all aspects of the Italian operatic literature and on the principles of the Bel Canto vocal techniques.

Tickets to music department events may be obtained at the Slee Hall box office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, from the Center for the Arts box office from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and at all Ticketmaster outlets.