Free Music Event

(via UAB)

Meet the Composer and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Music will present “Listen Out Loud,” a concert of newly-composed works for Birmingham cellist Craig Hultgren, Saturday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in UAB’s Mary Culp Hulsey Recital Hall, 950 13th St. South.

A pre-concert discussion is scheduled for 6 p.m. Admission is free for both events. Call 205-934-7376.

The concert is the culmination of a residency that brings together three composers: Connecticut-based Alphonse Izzo, Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn of Washington and Alabama’s Craig Biondi, adjunct faculty member in the UAB Department of Music. Each composer will present a work for solo cello and a work for cello with ensemble. Izzo’s solo cello piece “The Madcap Laughed” is the composer’s surrealist tribute to Syd Barrett, the late founder of Pink Floyd. Hultgren will be joined by Samford University’s Katherine Fouse on piano and UAB’s Associate Professor of Music Denise Gainey, D.M.A., on clarinet for the premiere of Izzo’s “Memory Theater.”

Alabama Symphony Orchestra English horn player Erica Howard and Hultgren will engage in an intimate dialogue in Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn’s “...and I will love the silence... .” The composer will provide a dramatic contrast with the premiere of his light-hearted solo work “Snap! Crackle! Pop!”

Biondi will present his haunting work for solo cello, “Adrift.” Fouse and Hultgren will be joined by soprano Kristine Hurst-Wajszczuk, D.M.A., UAB associate professor of music, and percussionist Gene Fambrough, D.M.A., UAB assistant professor of music, for the premiere of Biondi’s improvisatory “Two Psalms.” Visit his blog for more information on the composers.