Concerts feature Chamber Winds and cellist Hoffman

The Cayuga Chamber Winds, led by Mark Davis Scatterday, performs Saturday, Jan. 22, at 8 p.m. in the Proscenium Theatre of the Center for Theatre Arts. The program features three diverse examples from the wind repertoire -- a Renaissance imitative canzona by Lodocivo Viadana from "La Bergamasca," a piece from Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio" and romantic composer Antonín Dvorák's symphonic Serenade in D Minor, op. 44.

Created to bring important chamber wind music of the past 500 years to the Ithaca community, the Cayuga Chamber Winds was founded by Scatterday in 1998 and features professional area musicians, primarily from the Cornell and Ithaca College campuses. Scatterday is currently the director of wind ensembles, associate professor of music and chair of the Department of Music at Cornell, where he conducts the university's four Wind Ensembles, Festival Chamber Orchestra, and Ensemble X and teaches conducting and music theory.

On Sunday, Jan. 23, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, Heidi Hoffman presents a cello recital of works by Beethoven, Poulenc, Martino and Brahms. For the Beethoven and Poulenc Cello Sonatas, she is assisted by pianist Xak Bjerken. She gives a solo performance of Donald Martino's A Suite of Variations on Medieval Melodies. Clarinetist Richard Faria joins Hoffman and Bjerken to close the program with Brahms's Trio in A Minor.

Hoffman has toured the United States, South America, Europe and Japan with such groups as the American Symphony, Jupiter Symphony, and Tchaikovsky Chamber Orchestra. She has also performed with the Tanglewood Music Center Fellowship Orchestra, Northwest Sinfonietta and Pacific Northwest Ballet as well as popular musicians Jimmy Paige, Robert Plant and Heart. She received her D.M.A. and M.M. degrees from SUNY-Stony Brook, where she studied with Timothy Eddy. She earned a B.M. and Performer's Certificate from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Alan Harris. She has been a member of the Syracuse Symphony since 1995 and of the Grant Park Symphony in Chicago since 1998. She has taught at Ithaca College and Wells College and is now a lecturer in cello at Cornell.

A lecturer in Cornell's Department of Music, Bjerken is the newly named pianist of the prestigious Los Angeles Piano Quartet. Faria, an assistant professor of music at Ithaca College, has performed widely, including with the National Repertory Orchestra, the Syracuse Symphony and the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra.