The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: Don’t overlook the many FREE and varied student recitals at the UW-Madison School of Music as the semester comes to an end. Plus, this week’s concert of new music is POSTPONED and the Fall Opera Scenes Workshop takes place on Thursday night.

ALERTS: The concert by the UW-Madison Contemporary Chamber Ensemble that was scheduled for this Wednesday night has been POSTPONED. No word yet about the new date.

The fall edition of University Opera’s Opera Scenes will offer its latest production on this Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. in Music Hall. The FREE event features work by students in the Fall Opera Workshop class at the UW-Madison. Students direct, stage and sing the scenes. Piano accompaniment is again the norm,  but this time a small Baroque orchestra of strings and winds will also be there.

The program will include scenes from “Der Freischütz” by Carl Maria von Weber; “Arabella” by Richard Strauss; “La Clemenza di Tito” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and “Orlando” by George Frideric Handel. Also, violist, conductor, singer and critic-blogger Mikko Rankin Utevsky will make his opera conducting debut in the half-hour excerpt of Handel, which includes a mad scene. For more information, including a list of the singers, here is a link: http://www.music.wisc.edu/event/opera-workshop-fall/

By Jacob Stockinger

There are still quite a few big, important and appealing concerts left as the semester and the year wind down, with just over six weeks remaining until 2016.

At the UW-Madison, there are several major choral concerts, several of them with holiday music and holiday themes, just as many other music organizations — including the Madison Symphony Orchestra, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the Wisconsin Union Theater, the Madison Bach Musicians  among them — do as the holidays approach.

There are probably some noteworthy student recitals at Edgewood College too, but The Ear generally doesn’t hear about those.

So The Ear wants to direct your attention to the many student degree recitals – both undergraduate and graduate – that begin to pile up as the semester comes to a close.

All are free and usually take place at 6:30 or 8:30 p.m. in Morphy Hall.

The variety is stupendous. There are piano and chamber music recitals of all sorts. There are voice recitals. You can hear music for the flute, horn, violin, viola, saxophone, clarinet and percussion. (Below is student Sara Giusti in a recent piano recital.)

Here is a link to the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music online calendar of events and concerts for November and December (click forward to advance the schedule of events):

http://www.music.wisc.edu/events/

Click on the event you are interested in for details. Some of the listings have specific programs; others don’t. But almost all are good bets, given the caliber of the teaching and performing at the UW-Madison music school.

Happy Listening!

And please use the COMMENT section to let The Ear and his readers know about outstanding results when you hear them.

Let us now praise students too!