Dance faculty members Janis Brenner and Jerome Begin collaborated for the premiere of Brenner’s The Mind-Stuff Variations, performed by Janis Brenner & Dancers including Chen Zielinski (BFA ’10), Esme Boyce (BFA ’09), and Sumaya Jackson (BFA ’08). It featured original music by Begin. The performance took place at Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City.

On May 3, trombone faculty member Per Brevig (Diploma ’67, Postgraduate Diploma ’67, BM ’68, DMA ’71, trombone) will conduct the New York Concerti Sinfonietta and pianists Noriko Sugiyama and Evening Division faculty member Julie Jordan (MM ’83, piano) at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. The concert is part of the ongoing series Julie Jordan Presents. Brevig also conducted the East Texas Symphony Orchestra on April 30. The program included the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (with Elena Urioste), the David Trombone Concerto with Derek Hawkes, the Brahms Academic Festival Overture, and Respighi’s Pines of Rome. The concert took place at University of Texas Tyler Cowan Center for the Performing Arts. 

This month, dean emeritus and violin faculty member Stephen Clapp (MS ’65, violin) will be awarded an honorary doctorate of music from Oberlin, his undergraduate alma mater.

In March, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation announced that they will, in conjunction with the New York Philharmonic, award a commission to composition faculty member John Corigliano, who will score a new work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra for the Philharmonic.

Prometeo Redux, an opera by graduate studies and Evening Division faculty member Jonathan Dawe (MM ’91, DMA ’95, composition), was presented by the Composers Collaborative at Cornelia Street Cafe’s Serial Underground series in New York City in April. The premiere featured Derek Lee Ragin as Prometheus, Rachel Calloway (BM ’04, voice) as Minerva, Roland Burks as Jupiter, Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie (BS ’54, MS ’55, voice) as Asia, Karim Sulayman as Chiron, and conductor Ryan McAdams (MM ’06, orchestral conducting).

On May 5, Carnegie Hall will celebrate its 120th anniversary with a concert featuring Alan Gilbert (Pre-College ’85; MM ’94) conducting the New York Philharmonic. Pianist Emanuel Ax (Pre-College ’66; Diploma ’70, Postgraduate Diploma ’72), violinist Gil Shaham (Pre-College ’90), and cellist Yo-Yo Ma (Pre-College ’71; ’72) will join the orchestra for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and Audra McDonald (BM ‘93, voice) will perform songs by Duke Ellington. 

Pre-College violin faculty member Shirley Givens was a guest artist at Chapman University’s Conservatory of Music in Orange, Calif., in March. She presented two master classes—one on advanced violin repertoire and one on a method for young violinists that she created. She was invited to the college through the efforts of Chapman faculty members Robert Becker (BM ’73, MM ’76, viola) and William Fitzpatrick (Diploma ’77, violin). 

Dance faculty member Laura Glenn (BS ’67, dance) is the artistic director and founder of the White Mountain Summer Dance Festival, which will take place at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, N.Y., July 9-30. This month, Glenn’s oral history is scheduled to become a part of the permanent collection of the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 

On May 14, guitar faculty member Sharon Isbin will perform works by Boccherini, Vivaldi, Elgar, and Joaquín Rodrigo with the Salomé Chamber Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. 

In February, the San Francisco Symphony released a recording of its performance featuring organ department chair Paul Jacobs playing the Copland Organ Symphony. In March, American Public Media broadcast Jacobs’s Clavier-Übung III performance in November at Alice Tully Hall. Also in March, Jacobs performed at Spivey Hall at Clayton State University in Morrow, Ga.; at First Presbyterian Church in Rochester, Minn.; and at First United Methodist Church in St. Charles, Mo. In April, he performed with the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall, and at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. 

The Juilliard String Quartet, comprising violinists Joseph Lin (Pre-College ’96) and Ronald Copes, cellist Joel Krosnick, and violist Samuel Rhodes, gave two performances at the Raleigh (N.C.) Chamber Music Guild in March. In April, Rhodes played with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet, including David Perry (BM ’89, MM ’90, violin), at the university’s Mills Hall. 

Pre-College faculty member Tali Roth (MM ’93, guitar) gave a recital at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City in April that included an arrangement of Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet in D Major, G. 448, that Roth also played for the soundtrack of Woody Allen’s recent film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. She also performed works by Regondi, Piazzolla, J.S. Bach, Gardel, Barrios, and Albéniz. 

On June 4, Alexander Technique faculty member Lori Schiff will teach a class for performing artists at the American Society for the Alexander Technique’s annual general meeting, to be held at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. In March, Schiff presented classes for young performers at the Kaufman Center’s Special Music School in New York City and was a guest faculty member at the Maryland Opera Studio at the University of Maryland in College Park, where she led master classes, gave private lessons, and coached scenes.

In April, graduate studies faculty member Kent Tritle (BM ’85, MM ’88, organ; MM ’88, choral conducting) and Renée Anne Louprette led the choir and orchestra of New York City’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in a concert featuring Italian Baroque music. 

STUDENT NEWS

Master’s voice student Deanna Breiwick performed with the Met Orchestra in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions Grand Finals concert in March. She was one of eight finalists selected from a pool of almost 1,500. 

In March, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans announced that Master’s Historical Performance student Emi Ferguson and bachelor’s voice student Lilla Heinrich Szasz are among the 30 students—selected from 1,009 applicants—who will receive two-year graduate fellowships. The fellowships are awarded to recent immigrants or children of immigrants and provide cash grants of up to $50,000 and tuition support of up to $40,000.

In March, Pre-College violinist Annika Jenkins, a student of Shirley Givens, performed a Gershwin solo along with other show pieces as concertmaster of the Bay Youth Orchestra. The concert was part of a gala celebration of the Virginia Symphony in honor of the 20 years that that JoAnn Falletta (MM ’83, DMA ’89, orchestral conducting) has been the symphony’s music director. The gala took place at the Sheraton Norfolk (Va.) Waterside Hotel. 

In March, Kelly Liang, a Pre-College cello student of Ann Alton, was a featured soloist with the Island Chamber Symphony in two performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo” Variations, in Glen Cove, N.Y., and Bohemia, N.Y.

Bachelor’s composition student Wlad Marhulets, who studies with John Corigliano, has been commissioned by the Borderland Foundation to write an oratorio commemorating Poland’s assuming the presidency of the European Union and also what would be the 100th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz. Marhulets’s work will premiere on June 30 in Krasnogruda, Poland, before an audience that will include E.U. President Herman van Rompuy, E.U. Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, and Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski. The oratorio is scored for chamber orchestra, choir, and soprano, tenor, and clarinet soloists; David Krakauer (MM ’80, clarinet) will be the clarinetist for the performance. Sarah Choi will film the composition process and performance as part of a documentary about Marhulets to be released this summer. 

Playwrights Program student David West Read’s The Dream of the Burning Boy, directed by Evan Cabnet, is being performed by the Roundabout Theater Company through May 15 at New York City’s Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater. 

Thinner Than Water, written by Playwrights Program student Melissa Ross, was performed by LAByrinth Theater Company at the Cherry Pit in New York City in February and March. The production was directed by Mimi O’Donnell. 

A number of Juilliard students have been featured recently or are scheduled to be included on NPR’s From the Top. In April, Pre-College piano student Yifan Wu, who studies with Yoheved Kaplinsky and also received From the Top’s Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, performed; the week of May 2, bachelor’s violin student Charles Yang will be performing as a From the Top featured alumnus. Other upcoming performers include Pre-College piano student Gideon Broshy, a student of Ernest Barretta (week of May 16) and, in the week of May 30, a Pre-College piano trio comprising violinist Dawn Wang, cellist Xinchi Wang, and pianist Conrad Tao, whose piece Eventide will be performed through the sponsorship of the ASCAP Foundation. Pre-College violinist Annika Jenkins will be featured on the program the week of June 27.