This Is It! 2.0: The Complete Chamber Music of Neely Bruce - Part IV
Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 3:00pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Free admission.
Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest.
This festive concert, featuring three world premieres of chamber music by Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, starts a year-long celebration of the composer's 80th birthday and 50 years of teaching at Wesleyan.
The concert will include the world premiere of "Fantasy Variations for oboe and three string instruments" based on Interlude No. 3 from Bruce's "The Bill of Rights: Ten Amendments in Eight Motets" and written for written for Stephen Wade. The new work will be performed by Wade on oboe, Deborah Tyler on violin, Gretchen Frazier on viola, and Thomas Hudson on cello. The concert will also feature the world premieres of "A Fugue with Two Subjects for Sam Lowe" and "A Double Fugue for Harvey and Ellen Knell," each with preludes. And baritone Christopher Grundy will sing "A Garland of Sacred Song."
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The original This Is It! series featured seventeen concerts of Bruce’s piano music and concluded in March 2019. The first installment of This Is It! 2.0 was held in February 2022.
Neely Bruce is a composer, performer, and scholar of American music. His compositions include three full-length operas, five one-act operas, works for orchestra, chamber orchestra, and wind ensemble, and much more. While teaching at Wesleyan since 1974, he has also been involved in several major premieres, including "HPSCHD" by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, "Meteor Farm" and other spatial works by Henry Brant, and the 20th-century revival of "Rip Van Winkle" by George Bristow. Bruce is the only pianist to have performed the complete solo vocal music of Charles Ives.
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Patricia Beaman: The Jewel Thief
World Premiere
Friday, December 6 and Saturday, December 7, 2024 at 7pm
CFA Theater
$8 general public; $6 senior citizens, Wesleyan students/faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students, youth under 18.
Choreographed by Patricia Beaman, University Professor of Dance, and composed by Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, The Jewel Thief is an exciting collaboration of Neo-Baroque dance-drama based on Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller To Catch a Thief (1955).
The Jewel Thief is studded with heiresses, thugs, and other underworld outlaws that make up this lavish spectacle. It weaves the past with the present: drawing inspiration from Madame Sévigné’s reminiscences of the fêtes of King Louis XIV’s court, the 1920s Modernist costume parties of the Bauhaus, and Truman Capote’s infamous Black and White Ball of 1966.
Bruce will conduct the live performance of his evocative score, which interlaces Baroque and Modern motifs. The ensemble will include Piano Instructor Carolyn Halsted, Charles Yassky on clarinet, Alex Waterman on cello, Cynthia Knotts on violin, and Nola Campbell on viola.