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General admission: $15
Students: Free (ticket required)
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Mead Witter School of Music Guest Artist Series

Duo Cortona
Rachel Calloway, mezzo-soprano
Ari Streisfeld, violin

With a world premiere or Laura Schwendinger’s A Cat’s Cradle and other Catly Musings

Duo Cortona is a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to the creation of works for its unique instrumentation: mezzo-soprano and violin. This ensemble explores new sounds and possibilities for its intimate, expressive, and vital combination. Duo Cortona works to establish a new and thus far unexplored repertoire, pursuing the endless possibilities of this union. They create opportunities for both established and emerging composers through commissions, competitions, educational workshops, university residencies, and major concert performances. Duo Cortona was founded at the Cortona Sessions for New Music by husband and wife team Ari Streisfeld and Rachel Calloway.

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Program

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Rachel Calloway brings versatility and compelling insight to stages worldwide. Her work has been praised by the New York Times for “penetrating clarity” and “considerable depth of expression” and by Opera News for her “adept musicianship and dramatic flair.”

This season’s highlights include Janacek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared at the University of Binghamton, The Castleton Festival, and the University of South Carolina, the music of John Zorn at the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), a world premiere by Robert Xavier Rodriguez with the Amernet Quartet, The Messiah with the Charleston Symphony and the Aiken Symphony, new works with the vocal ensemble Ekmeles in Chicago, Duo Cortona in residence at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and concerts of Jewish art music with Shir Ami in Charleston and Columbia, SC.

She has appeared in concert with the Orlando Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Series, the New York Philharmonic, Berkeley Symphony, Ojai Festival, San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, BAM Next Wave Festival, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Cal Performances, and Lincoln Center Festival. Ms. Calloway made her European operatic debut as Mrs. Grose in The Turn of the Screw at Opéra de Reims, Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jovet (Paris) and Opéra de Lille. She has performed with Lorin Maazel at the Castleton Festival in Virginia, Opera Philadelphia, Tulsa Opera, Central City Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, The PROTOTYPE Festival, and the Glimmerglass Festival.

Ms. Calloway serves on the faculty of the University of South Carolina as Assistant Professor of Voice and Director of Spark: Music Leadership at Carolina. She joined the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy) in 2014 and Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard (Switzerland) in 2016. Ms. Calloway holds degrees from The Juilliard School (BM) and Manhattan School of Music (MM) and can be heard on Albany Records, Tzadik Records, BCMF Records, and Toccata Classics.

Violinist Ari Streisfeld has garnered critical acclaim worldwide for his performances of diverse repertoire and has established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music. Praised for his “dazzling performance” by the New York Times and “scintillating playing” by New York Classical Review, Mr. Streisfeld is a founding member of the world renowned JACK Quartet. Recent season highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall (London), La Salle Pleyel (Paris), Teatro Colon (Argentina), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Carriage Works (Sydney, Australia), Venice Biennale (Italy), Carnegie Hall, The Library of Congress, The Morgan Library (New York), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), and the Salzburg Festival (Austria). He has collaborated with many of today’s most prominent composers including John Luther Adams, Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, Matthias Pintscher, Georg Friedrich Haas, Steve Reich, and Salvatore Sciarrino.

Together with his wife, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway, Mr. Streisfeld formed Duo Cortona, a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to the creation of new works for the unique instrumentation of mezzo-soprano and violin. Recent and upcoming performances include the Resonant Bodies Festival, SONiC Festival, The Stone (NY), Contemporary Undercurrents of Song Project (Princeton, NJ), New Music on the Point (VT), and The Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy). He is also a member of Shir Ami, an ensemble dedicated to the performance and preservation of Jewish art music. Mr. Streisfeld frequently collaborates with some of today’s leading ensembles, including Ensemble Signal, Worldless Music Orchestra, Weekend of Chamber Music, and the Cortona Collective.

Hailed as “imaginative” by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Streisfeld’s arrangements of madrigals and motets for string quartet by Machaut and Gesualdo have been performed to acclaim both at home and abroad. A recipient of the Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Mr. Streisfeld most recently premiered his Machaut arrangements for voice and violin at The Stone (New York).

A passionate and committed music educator, Mr. Streisfeld serves on the faculty of New York’s Special Music School, Face the Music, New Music on the Point and the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy). He will join the faculty of the University of South Carolina School of Music as Assistant Professor of Violin Pedagogy this fall.

Mr. Streisfeld attended the Eastman School of Music (Bachelor of Music), Northwestern University (Master of Music), and Boston University (Doctor of Musical Arts). He has recorded for Mode, Albany, Carrier, Innova, Canteloupe, and New World Records.

Free | Ticket required
Tickets available at the door starting at 4 pm (1 per person)
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Oriol Sans and Mariana Farah, conductors
Elijah Schuh, graduate student conductor

Program: Austin: Incatenatura; Sibelius: Symphony No. 5; Mozart: Requiem

Jean Sibelius’s gorgeous and enigmatic Fifth Symphony was commissioned to celebrate both Finland’s anniversary and his own 50th birthday. While tackling the emotional and compositional complexities of this work, Sibelius famously said, “As if God the Father had thrown down the shards of a mosaic from the floor of heaven and asked me to find out what it had looked like.” Special autobiographical circumstances also surrounded the composition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem, the piece in the second half of this concert. Following an ambiguous and mysterious commission, and suffering through the final stages of the sickness that would take his life, Mozart believed he was writing music for his own funeral.

The performance of this incredible work will feature the Concert and Chorale Choirs and several soloists from the Mead Witter School of Music. The concert will open with the premiere of two movements of Incatenatura by Joachim Austin, winner of the 2023 Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.

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Tenor Trombone
Vali Martinez Cavazos
Ryan Christianson
Matthew Daley
Alli Dotson
Colin Dugan
Nolan Heath
Nick Lehman
Logan Lemmens
Calvin Lisser
Philip Machkovech
Sofia Stutesman
Nicholas Symons
Avi Vanhooreweghe
Maliq Veal

Bass Trombone
Adam Nissenbaum

Euphonium
Andrew Blum
Keegan Brown
Sam Dobson
Kevin Friermood
Sturgeon Moritz
Mark Stanley
Jesse Wolf

Tuba
Emily Behnke
Sam Cai
Jackson Cramer
Andy Goetz
Turner Gray
Adrian Izquierdo Ayala
Eireann Murphy

Purchase tickets
General admission: $15
Students: Free (ticket required)
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Mead Witter School of Music Faculty Ensemble Series

David Perry, violin
Suzanne Beia, violin
Sally Chisholm, viola
Parry Karp, violoncello

With special guest Alicia Lee, clarinet

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The Pro Arte Quartet (PAQ) is one of the world’s most distinguished string quartets. Founded by conservatory students in Brussels in 1912, it became one of the most celebrated ensembles in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and was named Court Quartet to the Queen of Belgium. Its world reputation blossomed in 1919 when the quartet began the first of many tours that enticed notable composers such as Milhaud, Honegger, Martin, and Casella to write new works for the ensemble. In addition, Bartók dedicated his fourth quartet to the PAQ (1927), and in 1936 PAQ premiered Barber’s Op. 11 quartet, with the now-famous “Adagio for Strings” as its slow movement.

The Pro Arte made its New York debut in 1926 and toured the United States frequently under the auspices of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The quartet was performing in Madison, Wisconsin in May 1940 when Nazi forces invaded Belgium. The University of Wisconsin responded to the emergency by offering the quartet a permanent campus home, the first such arrangement at a major American university. The UW Pro Arte residency became a model of artist residencies that is now widely emulated throughout the country.

As the first and only quartet ever to reach its centennial anniversary (2012), the Pro Arte’s 100th birthday was the occasion for a grand multi-year celebration. At its center was the commission of six new works by some of today’s most important composers: William Bolcom, Paul Schoenfield, John Harbison, Walter Mays, and Pierre Jalbert (United States), along with Benoît Mernier from Belgium. Other initiatives included a lecture series, museum exhibits, recordings on the Albany label, a video documentary broadcast on Wisconsin Public Television and available on DVD, a concert tour to Belgium, and an upcoming book on the storied history of this illustrious quartet.

The Pro Arte Quartet performs throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and continues to champion equally both standard repertoire and new music. The group is an ensemble in residence at the Mead Witter School of Music and resident quartet of the Chazen Museum of Art, performing regularly on the concert series of both institutions. The quartet has performed at the White House and, during the centennial celebration, played for the King’s Counselor in Belgium. Recent projects include the complete quartets of Bartók and Shostakovich and, in collaboration with the Orion and Emerson String Quartets, the complete quartets of Beethoven. Regular chamber music collaborators that perform with Pro Arte include Samuel Rhodes, viola; Bonnie Hampton, cello; and Leon Fleischer and Christopher Taylor, piano.

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The purchase of this ticket directly supports off-campus faculty ensemble educational activities in K-12 settings. Our faculty ensembles continue to expand their involvement with Wisconsin communities by providing mentoring, educational leadership, and training opportunities to students of all ages and backgrounds. We thank you for your support.

Free | No ticket required

Daewon Kang & Kelby Schnepel, conductors

Note: There are two All-University Strings concerts on April 21, representing two different ensembles:
All-University Strings #1: 5 pm
All-University Strings #2: 6:30 pm

Free | No ticket required

Daewon Kang & Kelby Schnepel, conductors

Note: There are two All-University Strings concerts on April 21, representing two different ensembles:
All-University Strings #1: 5 pm
All-University Strings #2: 6:30 pm