Forbes Center announces 2012-13 Masterpiece Season
Virginia native and pop music icon Bruce Hornsby will perform as a guest of JMU's Masterpiece Season
Thirty-four
events featuring Grammy Award-winning guest artists, internationally acclaimed
musicians, ensembles and choreographers, and award-winning JMU theater, dance and
music students and faculty are in store for audiences of the 2012-13
Masterpiece Season at James Madison University.
Topping the list
of performers who will take to the stages of the Forbes Center for the
Performing Arts and other campus venues are Virginia native and pop music icon
Bruce Hornsby, JMU alumnus and world-famous guitar virtuoso Mike Rayburn, and
renowned playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith, who is hailed by Newsweek as "the most exciting
individual in American theatre."
The Masterpiece
Season opens Sept. 7-8 with Eisenhower Dance Ensemble headlining the New Dance
Festival. Called "funny and touching" by The New York Times, the company is recognized as one of the Midwest's
foremost performance ensembles. The festival also features new works by JMU
faculty members Suzanne Miller-Corso, Shane O'Hara, Cynthia Thompson and Kate
Trammell.
Other dance
events include "Metaphors in Motion" featuring JMU's Virginia
Repertory Dance Company, "New Voices in Dance" featuring JMU's Contemporary
Dance Ensemble, as well as a performance by West Virginia Dance Company, the
only professional touring dance company in that state. The company will perform
work choreographed by Doug Varone, "one of the few modern dance
choreographers … still able to convey depth of emotion through movement,"
according to The New York Times.
Combining
dance moves, a vibrant stage presence, comic interludes and impeccable timing,
Rockapella takes the stage for two performances during JMU's Family Weekend. The
high-energy quintet has evolved into a worldwide phenomenon with a full-band
sound that is a meld of rock and a
cappella. Other professional music performances include Boston Brass, a
quintet of "spectacular and technical musical wizards …" (Charleston Today); Chanticleer, "the world's reigning male chorus" The New Yorker); and Scotland-based
Julie Fowlis, an esteemed folk singer and multi-instrumentalist featured in
PIXAR's new animated film, "Brave." Seven other guest artists with world-class reputations join this
season's Masterpiece offerings, including multiple Grammy nominee and jazz
pianist Fred Hersch.
Jazz
enthusiasts can also experience Birdland Big Band straight from Manhattan's
Birdland Jazz Club. This dynamic new ensemble features legendary drummer Tommy
Igoe. Jazz 4 Justice, which features the JMU Jazz Ensemble and faculty members,
returns for a second season for a concert in partnership with Virginia State
Bar's Diversity Conference that benefits the Diversity Conference, Blue Ridge
Legal Services Inc. and JMU School of Music scholarships. The JMU Jazz Ensemble
and Jazz Band will also perform a centennial tribute to one of the most
significant arrangers in jazz, Gil Evans.
The
Forbes Center will host composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as part of the
three-day Contemporary Music Festival, as well as the second annual Sing Out! A
sellout last season, this celebration will feature JMU's a cappella groups, an a
cappella group from Harrisonburg High School and a visiting university.
JMU's
music ensembles will perform in concerts of their own including the JMU
Symphony Honors Concert featuring the JMU Symphony Orchestra and Mozart Requiem:
Mass in D Minor (K. 626) featuring the JMU Chamber Orchestra, Madison Singers
and Chorale. The Pops Concert and Marimba Orchestra and Friends return this
year, as does Holidayfest after
selling out the last two seasons.
For
its autumn opera, the JMU Opera Theater will perform Gaetano Donizetti's "The
Elixir of Love," one of opera's most popular and effervescent romantic
comedies. Spring opera performances include songs and scenes from the world's
greatest operas in Opera Spotlight and Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates
of Penzance."
Professional
theater productions include Really Inventive Stuff actor Michael Boudewyns with
JMU's Montpelier Wind Quintet for family friendly presentations of Prokofiev's "Peter
and the Wolf" and Mozart's "Toy Symphony," as well as a national touring production of Alfred Hitchcock's "The
39 Steps." The School of Theatre and Dance presents "subUrbia"
by Eric Bogosian, "For Sale" by Garret Lee Milton, "Anna in the
Tropics" by Nilo Cruz, "Spring
Awakening" with music and lyrics by Stephen Sater and book by Duncan Sheik,
"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare, as well as "Six
Degrees of Andrew Lloyd Webber: A Musical Theatre Revue."
Taste
of the Forbes and JMU Gallery Crawl incorporate the visual arts into the mix of
Masterpiece events. Taste of the Forbes features music, theater/dance and
visual arts presentations, a reception with appetizers and drinks, as well as
dessert. JMU Gallery Crawl includes exhibition tours, curated talks and
receptions in three galleries on JMU's campus. Both events are new this season.
Masterpiece
Season and additional Forbes Center offerings are now available. For tickets and event listings, visit www.jmu.edu/JMUarts or call the Forbes Center Box Office at (540)
568-7000. Contact Jen Kulju, public relations/marketing specialist at the
Forbes Center, at (540) 568-4394 or by e-mail at kuljuja@jmu.edu for further information.
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Aug. 7, 2012
