FLUTIST PATRICIA SPENCER AND FRIENDS IN CONCERT AT BARD COLLEGE ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

Bard College Faculty Members Joan Tower, Joan Fuerstman, Mia Wu, Bari Mort, Fred Hammond, and Student Barbara Smith will join Patricia Spencer and Premier a New Work by Richard Teitelbaum

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.-Flutist Patricia Spencer will be joined by several friends on the Bard College music faculty for a potpourri of flute chamber works on Monday, September 27. Composer Joan Tower, pianist Bari Mort, mezzo-soprano Joan Fuerstman, violinist Mia Wu, harpsichordist Frederick Hammond, and flutist and Bard College junior Barbara Smith will perform in the free concert, open to the public, at 8:00 p.m. in Olin Hall on the Bard campus.

The concert, presented by The Bard Center, will feature a world premiere of a work written for Spencer by composer Richard Teitelbaum as well as a flute piece by Joan Tower, and works by François Couperin, J. S. Bach, Otto Luening, Diane Thome, Lili Boulanger, and Sergei Prokofiev.

About the Artists:

Patricia Spencer, flutist and visiting associate professor of music at Bard, is recognized as a major force in the performance of new music. She has received wide acclaim as a soloist and as flutist with the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players. An exciting repertoire of pieces has been written for her, including the title works of her most recent solo CD, Narcissus and Kairos (works by Thea Musgrave and Judith Shatin). Spencer's New York City recitals have been presented by the League of Composers/International Society for Contemporary Music, the SONIC BOOM Festival, and the Washington Square Contemporary Music Series. The National Endowment for the Arts, Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music have awarded grants for her solo recordings and commissioning projects. On her first solo CD for Neuma Records, Spencer and pianist Linda Hall offered classics and newer works (including the Boulez Sonatine). Spencer is a trustee and chair of the New Music Advisory Committee of the National Flute Association and president of the New York Flute Club. She also teaches at Hofstra University. She earned a bachelor of music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, studying with Robert Willoughby, and studied further with Marcel Moyse, John Wummer, and Josef Marx.

Joan Fuerstman, mezzo-soprano, has been on the Bard College music program faculty since 1996 as voice teacher and opera coach. She has performed widely throughout the United States, Canada, and South America. Her credits include solo orchestral appearances with the New York Philharmonic, the Tanglewood Festival orchestra, the Pepsico Summer Festival Orchestra, New York Choral Symphony, Musica Aeterna, and North Carolina Symphony Orchestra. Opera appearances include the New York City Opera, the National Opera Company, and the Turnau Opera. She also toured for three years as soloist with New York ProMusica. She received a bachelor of music from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and a master of music from the Manhattan School of Music. Her teachers have included Richard Cox, Rose Bampton, Anna Hamlin, Arthur Burrows, and Leland Wade.

Frederick Hammond, harpsichordist, is the Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Studies at Bard College. He performs widely in Europe and the United States as solo organist and harpsichordist. Mr. Hammond specializes in Baroque continuo playing and has performed as continuo harpsichordist in more than thirty operas. He was the keyboard continuo player for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and has appeared with such conductors at Christopher Hogwood, Nicholas McGegan, Simon Rattle, Paul Hindemith, and Leon Botstein. In 1986 he founded the E. Nakamichi Festival of Baroque Music in Los Angeles, and since 1995, he has been the music director of the Clarion Music Society of New York. His scholarly work includes three fundamental volumes on seventeenth-century Italian music. He was copresenter of the exhibition Ambiente Barocco at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and coeditor of the accompanying catalogue. The Italian government recognized his service to Italian music as performer and scholar with the knighthood of the Order of Merit of the Republic.

Bari Mort, pianist and piano teacher at Bard since 1997, is currently performing in a series of contemporary Latin American music concerts with flutist Sato Moughalian. Winner of the Artists International Young Musicians Auditions, Mort made her New York recital debut in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. She is a member of the New York Chamber Ensemble and has appeared with the international string quartet Musica de Camera and the Phoenix Chamber Players, among others. She has performed for the Bar Harbor Music Festival, Belleayre Music Festival, Cape May Music Festival, Beethoven Festival, and Music at Caramoor. Her broadcast appearances include Live from Lincoln Center on PBS, Vision Cable Television, and National Public Radio. An enthusiastic performer of twentieth-century music, she has recorded as soloist on a contemporary American music CD for ERM Records and as chamber musician on two releases for Albany Records. She earned a master of music degree at The Juilliard School, working with Gyorgy Sandor, and a B.F.A. degree at the State University of New York at Purchase, studying with German Diez.

Barbara Smith, flutist and saxophonist, is in her junior year at Bard College, where she studies flute with Patricia Spencer and saxophone with Harvey Kaiser. She is the principle flutist in the Bard College Community Orchestra and played saxophone section in the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra, which toured the United States, Russia, and Eastern Europe this summer.

Richard Teitelbaum, composer, is an associate professor of music at Bard College. He received a B.A. degree from Haverford College; M.M. from the School of Music, Yale University; and Ph.D. degree in world music from Wesleyan University. His grants and awards include Fulbright grants to study in Italy and Japan; Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, West Berlin; National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Prix Arts Electronica in Computer Music from Austrian Radio. His compositions have been performed internationally in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, and Venice, as well as nationally in New York City, Chicago, and Minneapolis, among others. His most recent recording is Live at Merkin Hall: Duets with Anthony Braxton.

Joan Tower, composer and pianist, is Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College and one of the most highly regarded composers in the United States today. In 1998 she received the Delaware Symphony's Alfred I. Dupont Award for Distinguished American Composers and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990 was the recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Tower, whose orchestral works have been commissioned and performed around the world, is currently composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's in New York City. She was active as the founder and pianist with the 1973 Naumburg Award-winning ensemble, the Da Capo Chamber Players. She was composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and is currently coartistic director of the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and composer-in-residence at the Institute at Deer Valley in Utah. Her most recent recording (on d-Note Records) includes her Concertos for Clarinet, Flute, Piano, and Violin, featuring David Shifrin, Carol Wincenc, Ursula Oppens, and Elmar Oliveira.

For further information about the concert, call 914-758-7425.

This event was last updated on 03-02-2001

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