First to take the Ronald O. Perelman Stage in Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium for the Memorial Day afternoon Ensemble Spotlight Series concert were members of the WSU Symphonic Wind Ensemble led by Victor Markovich, conductor.
The wind ensemble opened its “Music of the Heart from the Heartland” performance with Walter Mays’ Dreamcatcher; followed by Katherine Ann Murdock’s Aria Bel Canto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble, showcasing Suzanne Tirk, WSU associate professor of music, on clarinet; and concluding with Dean Roush’s Allegiances.
The three distinguished composers are all noted WSU School of Music faculty. Mays, who has had two of his works nominated for Pulitzer prizes, is a WSU Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Music. Murdock, who has taught music theory and composition at WSU for some 25 years, is particularly known for her chamber music for woodwinds, and Roush, a professor of music who arrived at WSU in 1988 and since 1996 has served as director of musicology and composition, is the 2002 winner of the Revelli Memorial Band Composition Contest.
After a performance by the Toronto Youth Wind Orchestra, Wichita State’s symphony orchestra, under the baton of conductor Mark Laycock, began with Zurab Nadarejshvili’s Concerto for String Quartet and Chamber Orchestra, with WSU’s quartet-in-residence, the St. Petersburg Quartet (Alla Aranovskaya, first violin; Leonid Shukaev, cello; Boris Vayner, viola; and Evgeny Zvonnikov, second violin), in the spotlight. Nadarejshvili, a professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, wrote the concerto especially for the St. Petersburg Quartet in 2007.
The orchestra ended its time on stage with Kevin Puts’ Millennium Canons. About the work, Puts has explained, “I wrote Millennium Canons to usher in a new millennium with fanfare, celebration and lyricism.”
Puts’ words can be re-employed to describe WSU’s Carnegie Hall concert, which was performed – to the delight of an audience that included WSU President Don Beggs and his wife, Shirley, as well as a number of both Wichita and New York City-area Shocker alumni – with fanfare, celebration and lyricism.
