The University Orchestra will present its annual Family Concert on Tuesday, February 25, on the Main Stage at Staller Center at 7:30 pm. The whole family will enjoy this one-hour interactive concert as the University Orchestra, with conductor Susan Deaver, performs “Music from Around the World.” The featured soloist is 17-year-old pianist, Eugene Iovine III, winner of the 2013 Stony Brook University Pre-College Concerto Competition. A senior at Sachem East High School, Iovine will perform the first movement of the Piano Concerto by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg with the University Orchestra. Also included in the concert is British composer Benjamin Britten’s masterpiece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which will be narrated by Peter Winkler, a professor in Stony Brook’s Department of Music. Music from China, performed with traditional Chinese flutist and Stony Brook graduate student Zhedong Zhang, and music from the Americas will complete the program.
Tickets are $5 and are on sale at the Staller Center Box Office (631) 632-ARTS. For more information about the University Orchestra, contact the Stony Brook Department of Music at (631) 632-7330 or visit the website at www.stonybrook.edu/music.
About the Performers
Eugene Iovine III has been participating as a cellist in Stony Brook’s Pre-College Music Program for the past four years, working with chamber music coach Tomoko Fujita. He has been studying the piano since the age of four, currently studying with Daniel Fogel. Iovine won the top prize at the Suffolk Piano Teachers’ Forum’s annual solo competition once in the early advanced category and twice in the late advanced category, and was selected to perform at several Honors Recitals at Staller Center. He has continually scored top marks from his Guild and NYSSMA adjudicators. Iovine is also an accomplished cellist, receiving a score of 100 at level 6 NYSSMA for the past two years and winning his high school’s concerto competition on the cello last year. This year he won his high school’s concerto competition on the piano performing the Grieg Piano Concerto’s first movement. Iovine was selected to perform at NYSSMA’s Allstate Festival in Rochester, both in its prestigious piano showcase and as a cellist with the String Orchestra. He is preparing to audition as a sound technology and piano performance double major at several prestigious music conservatories.
Peter Winkler is Professor of Composition and Theory and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University. He studied with Earl Kim at Princeton and as a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater, and many of his pieces explore connections between popular and classical idioms. In 1978 his Symphony was premiered at the grand opening of the Staller Center. Recent works include A Midsummer Overture for orchestra, commissioned for the 20th anniversary of Midsummer Musical Retreat in Washington; Partita for Baroque ensemble, commissioned and performed by the Stony Brook Baroque Players conducted by Arthur Haas; Requiem Aeternam for chorus, in memory of the victims of September 11, 2001: Out!, a musical for the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus (book and lyrics by Winston Clark); Nine Waltzes, commissioned by the Guild Trio; and Serenade, commissioned by the Kammergild Chamber Orchestra. The history and theory of popular music are a focus of Winkler’s research and teaching; he is one of the founding members of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has published several papers on popular music. As a pianist, he appears with Rhoda Levine’s opera improvisation group, Play It By Ear, and with his wife, violinist Dorothea Cook, in the duo Silken Rags.
Zhedong Zhang began his studies in the performance of Chinese flute when he was 12 years old, supervised by Lin Keyong, one of the most famous and influential flutists in China. As a young player, he showed incredible promise, winning the Outstanding Metal at Chinese flute competition of “Tingyu” in 2005. Since then, he entered Shenzhen University, where he received his Bachelor of Applied Physics in 2009. Specializing in the traditional Chinese flute, Zhang has demonstrated his virtuosity in various important venues, performing at the concert in Shenzhen for welcoming the 2008 Olympic Games, the Army Day Gala in 2006 and the concert for University Orchestra as a soloist in Shenzhen. Since beginning his studies at Stony Brook University in 2011, he has performed Chinese flute at Lincoln Center with Manhattan Symphony Orchestra, invited by Musical Director Gregory Singer in 2013. Zhang is a graduate student at Stony Brook University.
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