With its world-class conservatory, Oberlin College offers numerous opportunities to hear significant national and international music stars in concert, as it has for the last 140 years.
Oberlin 2023-2024 concert series opens on Friday September 22, when Emerson String Quartet, formed at Juilliard School nearly 50 years ago, makes its only Ohio appearance during its upcoming series of farewell concerts. Their program includes quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven and Felix Mendelssohn, and the last of Emerson’s commissioned works, Drink the Wild Ayre by contemporary American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider.
On Friday October 13, all-female quintet Seraph Brass will perform classics, original transcriptions and new work by Oberlin faculty member Jeff Scott, commissioned by the ensemble. On Thursday November 30, pianist/author Jeremy Denk (Oberlin ’90) will perform pieces by a host of women composers from the 19th-21st centuries including Louise Farrenc, Clara Schumann, Cécile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Tania León, Meredith Monk, Phyllis Chen and Missy Mazzoli, setting them alongside works by Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann.
The series opens 2024 on Saturday February 10 with Trey McLauglin & the Sounds of Zamar, a gospel choir that putting pop, R&B and musical theater tunes through a gospel filter, performing them along with gospel and spiritual classics. Artemis, a collective of women jazz composers and bandleaders, performs on Wednesday March 13. And the season closes with the well-known and popular Silkroad Project presenting a new program called Uplifted Voices on Friday April 26. Six musicians from diverse cultures will share music inspired by indigenous native Americans an international cultures from Japan, Armenia, China, Ireland and the Hebrides.
All concerts take place at Oberlin’s acoustically acclaimed Finney Chapel. Go here for tickets.
There’s also a bonus free concert with Imani Winds, founded at Oberlin, at the Warner Concert Hall on Thursday, March 7. They’ll be joined by cellist Seth Parker Woods, pianist Cory Smythe, and actor Justin Emeka to perform Jeff Scott’s Fallen Petals of Nameless Flowers, based on the stories of four Michigan boys sentenced to life without parole as juveniles.