Dr. Emily Schaad in rehearsal with the College Symphony in one of the Robert and Marilyn Maytum Music Rehearsal Halls.
The College Symphony Orchestra of Fredonia School of Music will perform on Saturday, March 23 at 8 p.m., in a concert featuring student Concerto Competition winner Ché Dixon.
The concert will be held in King Concert Hall and is free and open to the public.
Dixon, a junior Music Performance major and cello student of Dr. Natasha Farny, will play the final movement from Edvard Elgar's Cello Concerto. A native of New York City, he has played cello since the age of 7. He is a winner of the Mamie and Ira Jordan Scholarship established through the Fredonia College Foundation, and was recently named a finalist in the Jacqueline Avant Concerto Competition at Sewanee Summer Music Festival.
The orchestra will open the program with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's brilliant “Capriccio Espagnol,” a five-movement work based on Spanish dance themes. Its emphasis on solo virtuosity will showcase many members of the orchestra in cadenzas and concerto-like passages. The final work is Margaret Bonds' “Montgomery Variations,” a piece which was written in 1964 as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr., but not published until 2021. The variations are based on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” with the intent of documenting sights and sounds central to the activity of the Civil Rights Movement.
