November 19, 2004—Sir Simon Rattle, music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, will conduct the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music Wednesday, December 1, 2004, at 8 p.m. in Oberlin College's Finney Chapel.

Featured soloist is soprano Alyson Cambridge, a 2002 graduate of the Conservatory and winner of the 2003 Metropolitan Opera competition. Concertmaster is Amanda Grimm '05 of Medina, Ohio, a student of Professor of Violin Gregory Fulkerson.

The concert will be broadcast live on 104.9 FM, WCLV, with the generous support of the Riverside Company, a leading private equity firm investing in premier companies.

"Sir Simon Rattle is one of the great conductors of our time, and an inspiration to all of us as musicians," says Dean of the Conservatory David Stull. "This is an extraordinary opportunity for our students and will surely be a highlight of their Oberlin experience." Seventy-five Conservatory students make up the personnel of the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra for this concert.

General admission tickets, which are $10 for the public, are available in advance by calling Oberlin's Central Ticket Service at 440-775-8169 or by visiting the CTS box office, located in the lobby of Hall Auditorium, 67 N. Main Street and open Monday through Friday from noon until 5 p.m. This concert is free for those with an Oberlin College I.D. (students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and area educators), and OCID holders should arrange to obtain their tickets at the box office rather than by phone.

Finney Chapel is wheelchair accessible and is located on the southwest corner of Route 511 (Lorain Street) and N. Professor Street. Free parking is available throughout the campus.

The composer Nicholas Maw has said: "We are all fortunate to be living through the Rattle era ... [he has] spiritual and intellectual curiosity, appetite, dedication, concentration, and the ability of all great conductors to make musicians give the best of themselves."

The orchestral members of the Berlin Philharmonic voted for Sir Simon Rattle to succeed Claudio Abbado as the chief conductor of their orchestra in June 1999. Simon Rattle conducted his first concert in that post and as the orchestra's new artistic director on September 7, 2002, although he had already worked with the Berlin Philharmonic for 15 years, making his debut on November 14, 1987, with Mahler's Sixth Symphony, and appearing regularly on the conductor's rostrum in the years that followed.

A native of Liverpool, he has worked with many of the leading orchestras in Great Britain: the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta. His American debut was with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1979, and he was their first principal guest conductor from 1981 to 1994. He became principal conductor and artistic advisor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) in 1980, and their musical director from 1990 to 1998. They toured together throughout the world and in 1998 were guests at the Salzburg Festival, where they performed the complete Beethoven Symphonies.

During his tenure with the CBSO, he continued to work with the leading orchestras in the United States and Europe. He has an exclusive recording contract with EMI, and has made more than 60 recordings with the CBSO and other orchestras. His recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic of Liszt's Faust-Symphonie and Mahler's Tenth have received international acclaim and won Grammy Awards.

Alyson Cambridge is a native of Arlington, Virginia, and received a bachelor of music degree in vocal performance from the Conservatory along with a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from the College in 2002. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, pursuing a master of music degree. She joined the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the beginning of the 2003-04 season after being selected as a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2003. She was also awarded first prize in the 2003 Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation Competition and made her Alice Tully Hall debut with the Foundation in November 2003. She is also the 2004 winner of an Encouragement Award from the George London Foundation. That summer marked her main stage debut at the Opera Theater of St. Louis as Frasquita in Carmen, a role she reprised for her Met debut this season. The New York Times praised that performance for her "powerful [and] clear voice." She returns to St. Louis in the summer of 2005 to sing Juiliette in Roméo et Juiliette. Joan Rienthaler of the Washington Post called Cambridge's Adina in Wolf Trap's L'Elisir d'amore , "radiant, vocally assured, dramatically subtle, and compelling and artistically imaginative. Even amid a stage full of singing and dancing, she could sit off to the side reading quietly and be the most interesting person there."

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music , founded in 1865 and situated within the intellectual vitality of Oberlin College since 1867, is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States. It is renowned internationally as a professional music school of the highest caliber, and its alumni have gone on to achieve illustrious careers in all aspects of the serious music world. Numerous Oberlin alumni have attained stature as solo performers, composers, and conductors, among them Jennifer Koh, Steven Isserlis, Denyce Graves, Franco Farina, Lisa Saffer, George Walker, Christopher Rouse, David Zinman, and Robert Spano. All of the members of the contemporary music ensembles eighth blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) are Oberlin graduates, and members of the Miró, Pacifica, Juilliard, and Fry Street quartets, among others, include Oberlin alumni, who can also be found in major orchestras and opera companies throughout the world.