South Florida Classical Review

Joshua Bell will open the 30th anniversary season of Festival Miami October 4 in Edgar Meyer’s Double Concerto.

The 30th anniversary of Festival Miami this fall will feature major guest artists, contemporary music and rarely heard twentieth-century repertoire.

While in recent years, the festival of the University of Miami Frost School of Music has put a greater emphasis on jazz and pop events, the 2013 event will present a wider variety of classical programs with more guest artists.

Violin superstar Joshua Bell and double bassist Edgar Meyer headline the October 4 opener with the South Florida premiere of Meyer’s Double Concerto, backed by the Frost Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Sleeper. A new concert march by Hollywood composer and Frost alum James McNeely and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 complete the program.

A celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten on October 29 features the first public performance of his early Three Small Songs and the U.S. premiere of Everyone Sang, both featuring tenor Tony Boutte. Britten’s A Time There Was (Suite on Old English Folk Tunes) and Canticle III, Still Falls the Sun, completes the program.

Acclaimed soprano Hila Plitmann, a contemporary music specialist, joins Gary Green and the Frost Wind Ensemble for Michael Daugherty’s Labyrinth of Love, a setting of poems by eight women spanning two thousand years (October 6).

Jose Serebrier, the festival’s founding artistic director, returns to conduct the Costa Rica National Symphony Orchestra in two programs (October 22 and 23) featuring U.S. premieres of works by Costa Rican composers Vinicio Meza and Marvin Camacho, two of Serebrier’s own compositions and Shostakovich’s film score for The Gadfly. Frost Dean Shelly Berg and his jazz trio present their version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and the Frost Chorale under Karen Kennedy joins the Costa Ricans for the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor.

Other Festival offerings include pianist Cecile Licad, a specialist in the romantic repertoire, in an enterprising concert of rarities including the Sonata No. 4 by pioneering American modernist Leo Ornstein and pieces by McDowell, Busoni, Gottschalk, Chaminade and Mason. Miami-based soprano Elizabeth Caballero, who will receive the Frost Distinguished Alumna Award, joins vocal faculty members Robynne Redmon and Kevin Short for an operatic program and the Manhattan Piano Trio and Frost Chamber Players offer diverse chamber programs.

For tickets and information on Festival Miami 2013, go to music.miami.edu.

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