Ithaca College

The Ithaca College Concerts 2003-4 series, "Sounds of Home," will offer three concerts featuring music that is native to the performers' homelands.

The season will begin on Friday, October 3, with a concert by the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. In January, guitarist and two-time Grammy Award winner Sharon Isbin will perform with Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Gaudencio Thiago de Mello. Soprano Sylvia McNair and pianist Ted Taylor will close out the season in March with a program of American musical theater music.

All three concerts will begin at 8:15 p.m. in Ford Hall in the James J. Whalen Center for Music.

Season subscriptions to "Sounds of Home" offer a 20 percent discount off single-ticket prices and are available at the following levels:

• Children, senior citizens, and Ithaca College students -- $24
• Ithaca College alumni, faculty, staff, and administrators; Friends of Ithaca College; other students -- $39.50
• General public -- $48

Season brochures, including a form to order tickets for all three concerts, will be mailed to past subscribers. Those who wish to be added to that mailing list should call 607-274-3171.

The Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra will kick off the season by performing Prokofiev's "Classical" symphony, a Beethoven piano concerto featuring soloist Richard Ormond, and works by Czech native Karel Husa. A former longtime School of Music faculty member and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Husa will attend the performance. Founded in 1977, the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra is renowned for the sonority of its string sound. The orchestra has made extensive recordings that include works by Pergolesi, Dvorak, Martinu, and Mozart.

Sharon Isbin and Gaudencio Thiago de Mello will perform a program laden with Brazilian music on Thursday, January 29. Hailed by Boston magazine as "the preeminent guitarist of our time," Isbin has given sold-out performances in prestigious halls throughout the world. She is also a frequent guest on nationally broadcast radio programs including "St. Paul Sunday," "All Things Considered," and Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." Thiago de Mello was a professional soccer coach in his native Brazil before moving to New York City to study music. His compositions preserve the natural sounds and rhythms unique to Afro-Brazilian roots and Amazonian Indian chants, sometimes blending them with an urban jazz idiom.

Sylvia McNair and Ted Taylor will perform on Thursday, March 25. A regular guest artist with the major opera houses and symphony orchestras of Europe and North America, McNair was the inaugural recipient of the Marian Anderson Award, presented to outstanding American singers. Taylor is equally at home on the stage accompanying some of the world's preeminent vocalists or in the pit conducting a varied repertoire of 40 operas and musicals. He was music director for the New York City Opera national company for two years and for the Mobile Opera for eight seasons.

Contributed by Erik Kibelsbeck