The Well-Tempered Ear
Middleton Community Orchestra performs the second of four FREE outdoor summer concerts at Firemen’s Park this Sunday at 11:30 a.m.
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By Jacob Stockinger
This Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Firemen’s Park, the mostly amateur but critically acclaimed Middleton Community Orchestra (MCO) will give the second of its FREE four summer outdoors concerts.
Besides the fact that the day is Father’s Day holiday, weather predictions also call for a good chance of rain or even thunderstorms.
Updates on whether the concert will take place, be cancelled or postponed to a later date, can be found by checking the MCO’s website at 10 a.m.: https://middletoncommunityorchestra.org
Meanwhile, here are the programs, conductors and soloists for the remaining three concerts. All concerts take place in Firemen’s Park in Middleton close to Middleton High School:
CONCERT – SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. (revised program)
Sergei Pavlov (below), conductor and professor at Edgewood College
George Walker – “Lyric for Strings”
Ralph Vaughan Williams – “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” (heard in the YouTube video at the bottom)
Giacomo Puccini – Lauretta’s aria from “Gianni Schicchi”; Mimi’s aria in Act 3 and Musetta’s aria in Act 2 from “La Boheme” with soprano Yanzel Rivera (below).
Selections from the Pixar movie COCO (piano and strings)
CONCERT – SUNDAY, JULY 25, 11:30 – a.m.-1 p.m.
Chris Ramaekers (below), conductor and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky – “March Slav”
Carl Maria von Weber — Clarinet Concerto No. 2 with soloist and Madison Symphony Orchestra principal clarinetist JJ Koh (below)
Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 2 “Little Russian”
CONCERT 4 – SUNDAY, AUG. 15, 11:30-1 p.m.
Sergei Pavlov, conductor
Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist and UW-Madison graduate Thomas Kasdorf (below)
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Classical music: The Wisconsin Union Theater announces its new season featuring Renée Fleming’s postponed concert on Oct. 24
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By Jacob Stockinger
The Ear has received the following announcement with the lineup for next season’s concerts at the Wisconsin Union Theater (below top, with a photo of Shannon Hall below bottom), which he calls “The Carnegie Hall of Madison.”
The upcoming season of the Wisconsin Union Theater features eight performances, including a rescheduled performance on Oct. 24 by world-renowned vocalist Renée Fleming (below), who was previously scheduled to perform May 2, 2020, as part of the 100th Concert Series but had to cancel because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fleming recorded a special message for Wisconsin Union Theater patrons: https://youtu.be/V1B4L2KFUls.
During the 101st Concert Series, patrons will have the opportunity to attend performances by the following artists. Click on the links and names to find out more:
- Oct. 3, 2020 – Room Full of Teeth (below in a photo by Bonica Ayala)
- Oct. 24, 2020 – Soprano Renée Fleming
- Nov. 7, 2020 – Cellist Camille Thomas (below in a photo by Dan Carabas)
- Dec. 11, 2020 – Pianist Jeremy Denk (below, in a photo by Shervin Lainez)
- Jan. 29, 2021 – Verona Quartet (below in a photo by Dario Acosta)
- Feb. 28, 2021 – Meccore Quartet (below in a photo by Arkadiusz Berbecki)
- April 15, 2021 – Brentano Quartet (below in a photo by Juergen Frank)
- May 1, 2021 – Sō Percussion with Caroline Shaw (below in photos by Stefan Cohen, top, and Kait Moreno)
All programs are subject to change. The WUT team will announce when subscriptions and single-event tickets, along with prices, will become available for purchase at a later date.
The Wisconsin Union Theater’s Concert Series is one of the oldest uninterrupted series of its kind in the United States and has brought such talented artists as pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, violinists Fritz Kreisler and Itzhak Perlman, and pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Claudio Arrau to Madison.
The Wisconsin Union Theater holds numerous arts events throughout the year and has provided cultural experiences for community members and visitors for more than 75 years.
The student-led Wisconsin Union Directorate (WUD) Performing Arts Committee plans many of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s events, including the Concert Series.
More information — including ticket prices and programs — about the Concert Series and other 2020-21 Wisconsin Union Theater events will be made available soon at uniontheater.wisc.edu and on the Wisconsin Union Theater Facebook page.
Tickets purchased for Fleming’s May 2, 2020, performance are valid for the Oct. 24, 2020, performance.
Violinist Gil Shaham (below), who was to perform March 28, 2020, as part of the 100th Concert Series season will instead perform as part of the 2021-22 Wisconsin Union Theater season. Ticket holders for Shaham’s previously scheduled performance date are receiving refunds.
The upcoming year of programming will undoubtedly bring new challenges, and the Wisconsin Union team will continue to make decisions with the health and safety of team members and patrons in mind while providing experiences for a lifetime.
While Memorial Union and Union South remain closed to the public until further notice, the Wisconsin Union continues to provide support services, such as Meals To-Go, and online events and activities.
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Classical music: The Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020 festival ends today. Here’s how to catch up on the 10 days of making Baroque music
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By Jacob Stockinger
If you recall, this year’s 12-hour Bach Around the Clock festival – a platform for students, amateurs and professional musicians to celebrate the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach (below) — was scheduled to take place at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Saturday, March 28.
Faced with cancellation of the annual free event because of the public health dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing, the organizers decided to try going virtual and hold the festival online by asking performers to send in short videos made at home.
And it worked.
“From what we have heard, it has been a very rewarding experience for both the performers who sent in videos and for the people who watched and listened to them,” says violist and BATC artistic director Marika Fischer Hoyt (below).
The cost of going virtual was not great, but it took lot of time and hard work, admits Fischer Hoyt, who says she spent between 7 and 10 hours a day to post each day’s Bach video.
It was hard especially at the beginning, she notes, when she had to learn how to use software programs, such as iMovie, to make and then upload and post the videos.
She didn’t just organize the online festival. She also performed and provided gracious introductions to the program for each day.
Lately, the videos average about 20 minutes – your Daily Minimum Requirement of Bach, as the witty Wisconsin Public Radio host Anders Yocom would say. But they were longer at the beginning when more videos were sent in. Towards the end, the festival even used some photos and audio recordings from past years to round out programs.
But the reach of the virtual festival, intended to be local, was wider than Fischer Hoyt had expected. Musicians replied and participated from Florida, Minnesota and – as you can hear today – from Costa Rica.
All the effort worked.
In one of the major victories against all the coronavirus cancellations and postponements in the Madison music scene, the Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020 brought the public beautiful Baroque music by voices, strings, keyboards and winds in cantatas, partitas, preludes and fugues, sonatas and suites.
Listening to just one a day would be a good way to spread out and savor the joy of the festival for 10 days while you self-isolate and shelter in place at home.
You can find the videos on YouTube. In the search bar, just type in Virtual Bach Around the Clock 2020, Madison, Wisconsin.
But a much easier and more organized way can be found here on the festival’s home website, which lists the videos in chronological order and links to them: https://bachclock.com/audience-listening-viewing
Try listening to them and tell us what you think about the individual videos and performances — do you have a favorite? — and about mounting the virtual festival.
And, if you like, leave a note of thanks in the Comment section.
The Ear wants to hear.
Here is Day 5:
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