For the third time in two years, students from the Conservatory will showcase their talents at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The free concert, on Wednesday, May 23, at 6 p.m., features a tenor, two string instrumentalists, a pianist, and a contemporary-music sextet performing in the Terrace Theatre as part of the center’s Conservatory Project series.

Live audio and video of the performances will be streamed (and later archived) on the Kennedy Center's web site at www.kennedy-center.org.

Oberlin’s Wednesday night performance is one in a series of seven nights of concerts presented by different schools. Four sets of musicians, each selected by different departments in the Conservatory, will represent Oberlin:

• Echoi, a contemporary-music sextet, will perform Franco Donatoni’s Arpège. The members of Echoi are flutist Alice Teyssier ’06, MM ’07; clarinetist Curt Miller ’09; violinist Yuncong Zhang ‘07; cellist Gabrielle Athayde ‘08; pianist Solon Gordon ‘07; and Jon Hepfer ‘08, vibraphone.

• Cellist Steuart Pincombe ‘09 will perform Ignatius, an original composition by Marcelle Pierson ’07.

• Violinist Luisa Barroso ‘09 and pianist Tian Lu ‘07 will perform Claude Debussy’s Violin Sonata in G Minor.

• Tenor Alek Shrader ’07 will sing the arias “Vedrò qual sommo incanto”from Gioacchino Rossini’s La Scala di Seta and“Ah! mes amis” from Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Règiment. His musical collaborator is pianist Howard Lubin ’75.

The Conservatory Project is an initiative of Performing Arts for Everyone. The semi-annual event, which takes place in February and May, presents Washington audiences with a chance to hear the best young musical artists in classical music, jazz, musical theater, and opera from the leading undergraduate and graduate conservatories, colleges, and universities in the United States.

Biographical Information About the Musicians