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University Orchestra Opens with Tchaikovsky

Sun, Sep 25, 2011

The Colgate University Orchestra, with Marietta Cheng conducting, will begin the new season with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, “Pathetique” on Sunday, Oct. 2, at 3:30 p.m. in the Colgate Memorial Chapel. Also on the program will be the Dvořák's Carnival Overture and the Corigliano Promenade Overture.

A highlight will be the performance of a 2004 work by Colgate’s new composer, Zhou Tian, entitled The Palace of Nine Perfections. This work was inspired by a set of 12 Qing Dynasty hanging scrolls by Yuan Jiang, paintings that depicted the emperor’s palace near Xian. Cheng describes the work as poetry in sound and a rhapsodic flight of imagination.

Zhou earned music degrees from both Curtis and Juilliard, is a first-prize winner of the Washington International Composers Competition and first-prize winner of ASCAP/Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition. His “The Grand Canal Suite” was performed during a nationally televised celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The work was also selected as theme music for the Zhejiang Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Recently Grammy Award-winning Cedille Records released his composition in “The Billy Collins Suite,” a recording devoted to musical settings of poems by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Admission is free.

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