UA President Robert C. Robbins will be in the audience this weekend for the 46th annual UA President’s Concert, featuring the Arizona Symphony Orchestra and a handful of standout music students.
He was in the audience last year and it’s a safe bet had he been hired to the top job at the University of Arizona in January of 2017, not April, he would have been in the audience for that performance, too.
Robbins is a big fan of the arts, so much so that he recently created a vice president for the arts to promote performing and visual arts on campus. So we can only imagine how thrilled he will be to see the talent coming out of the Fred Fox School of Music.
The President’s Concert gives the public a chance to see and hear from some of the school’s brightest stars. The soloists are all winners of the school’s annual concerto competition for voice and instruments.
everything you need to know about the President’s Concert:
- When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 1, and Saturday, Feb. 2.
- Where: Crowder Hall, North Park Avenue and East Speedway, at the UA Fred Fox School of Music.
- Cost: $10 general, $7 UA employees and seniors 55 and older, $5 students at the door or online at tickets.arizona.edu
The soloists:
- Flutist Ivo Dae-Seong Shin de Souza — Ivo Shin for short — will perform the first movement of Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major. The Brazilian native, who started playing the flute at age 13, is a second-year master’s student in flute performance and is a member of the Fred Fox Graduate Wind Quintet.
- Soprano Erika Burkhart, a regular with True Concord Voices & Orchestra, will sing the “Poison Aria” from Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.” Burkhart, a master’s student in vocal performance, will sing the role of Le Prince Charmant in the UA’s spring opera, Massenet’s “Cendrillon.”
- Pianist Minjun Dong, a second-year doctoral student in piano performance, will perform the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. Dong, who earned his master’s degree studying with Jon Nakamatsu at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, began studying piano as a 3-year-old growing up in his native China.
- Cellist Diana Yusupov will perform Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Cello Concerto in C major. Yusupov began playing cello when she was 8. She continued lessons with her father, the renowned Uzbeki/Australian cellist Renat Yusupov, when the family immigrated to Australia in 2003. In addition to working toward her doctoral degree, Yusupov is the assistant orchestra director at Tucson High Magnet School and teaches cello for the University of Arizona String Project.
